Around nine o’clock each morning, she would go to her office at the top of the house, on a back extension, which was like being on a ship, looking out over all the gardens. She would sit there for one and half hours each morning, writing. She had no phone in her office, no computer, no mobile, just blank sheets of paper and her Waterman fountain pen. She never read what she had done the day before, just started each day at the top of a blank page. She never numbered the pages, but each day she would find she had written precisely ten pages.
When she had finished the novel, she would then read it through to see she had not changed the heroine’s name or hair colour, numbered all the pages and send it to Gertrude, her typist for so many years. I would scream at her when I found she had posted the only manuscript, without making a copy. What if it gets lost in the post, destroyed or burned? Your year’s work will be ruined. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ she would say, ‘I am only playing.’
For each of her twenty-six published novels, she would make no notes, never talk about it, either before, during or after. If the publisher had queries or worries, she would not be too upset. Doing it was the thing. She was not interested in a book after she had written the last page, and saw no reason to help with promotion. She had an agreement with her publisher that she would not be required to do literary festivals, of which there are now over 500 in the UK, give talks or do signing sessions.
I am sure our three children, when growing up, had no idea their mother wrote books. If they came into her room, she would hide the current manuscript, drop everything and attend to whatever they wanted. She never ever talked about the novel she was working on.
Non-fiction was a bit different. She did do research, wrote lots of notes, and would talk about the person she was working on all the time, given any excuse. Daphne du Maurier or Elizabeth Barrett Browning would constantly come into her conversation.
The first book that she published after the cancer returned, while she was being treated, was a novel called Over, which came out in 2007. It seemed spooky, that she had chosen such a title. She did not know when she was writing it that the cancer was back. But then at home she did begin to talk about it as being her last novel.
However, the medications and drugs and radiotherapy kept her going and she continued writing. In 2010, she published Isa and May and in 2013 The Unknown Bridesmaid.
She did one final non-fiction book, My Life in Houses, published in 2014. I was allowed to read it in proof, not knowing what it was about, apart from the title, which I presumed gave it all away. It is indeed about the houses she lived in, from being a little girl, but as the book progresses, it is about something else – the history and treatment of her cancer. It comes up almost incidentally, in passing, so that you can miss it at first. I was in tears when I had finished the book.
But still she kept going, and somehow managed to complete another novel, despite being racked with pain and vomiting. How to Measure a Cow came out in April 2016.
The title was mine. I had bought a load of local memorabilia, part of the estate of a local farmer in Loweswater, containing bills and accounts and notes going back to the 1770s. Among them were handwritten notes on sheep dipping, sheep shearing, what medications he had used. One section was called How to Measure a Cow. (Apparently it is the height times the diagonal of the body, or at least that was how in nineteenth-century Loweswater they compared one cow with another.)
The wording amused Margaret, so she worked it into the book. It is only referred to once. As with Catcher in the Rye, the title has nothing to do with the book, being only mentioned in passing.
Margaret’s heroine, who has run away, assuming a new identity for reasons which emerge, is befriended by an old lady, the widow of a farmer, who takes her in her car round the Lakes. On the way, the old woman is moaning about her life, that she has done nothing, achieved nothing. All she has learned, so she says, is How to Measure a Cow.
When the book came out, the title proved not as amusing or as memorable as we had thought. Booksellers were endlessly being asked for How to Milk A Cow or How to Measure a Couch.
Every summer, from 2007 to 2015, despite all the awful drugs Margaret was taking, and beginning to feel the side-effects of, we did manage to go up to Loweswater every year. We went in May for Margaret’s birthday, when all the rhododendrons were coming out in our garden. But the time we could spend there got shorter and shorter. It had been at least five months in the old days but this became reduced to five weeks. She had to come back for scans and tests, which always exhausted her, so was unable to return.
One scan revealed some sort of new dark cloud, which they diagnosed as being a blood clot on the lung. It could burst into life at any moment and finish her off.
From then on, she had to inject herself with yet another new daily drug. She kept a long list of all her various drugs, and the time she had to take each one. She would panic if she forgot and was half an hour late. She would then put her own meal back half an hour, as she had been told to take the drug after a meal. I said it was silly. Doctors just say anything, the timings are approximate. Drugs don’t know when they are taken. But she always did what she was told.
From time to time the tests and scans would be quite reassuring – the most cheerful news was ‘stable’, i.e. the cancer was still lurking, but not doing much, just hanging about, resting or sleeping, not bothering anybody.
But then more and more of the dreaded shadows were appearing on the scans, spots near the lungs and elsewhere were identified, contents unclear, missions not stated, but it was obvious the cancer was active again, expanding into areas where it had not been invited.
In September 2015, it was decided she should go back on chemotherapy – taken orally, as pills. The side-effects started almost at once, making her tired all the time, with no energy, making her sick. For five days, she was projectile vomiting for several hours at a time. Nothing was in her stomach, for nothing would stay there, but still the vomiting would start. Her whole body was shaken and shattered by the intensity of the vomiting. It was almost like joke vomiting, exaggerated and over the top, the sort the two lay-deez did at the mention of homosexuality on TV in Little Britain, done for laughs.
I took to sleeping upstairs in Jake’s old bedroom when the vomiting was especially violent during the night. She didn’t want me to be there, when she was in agony, to witness what she was going through.
Another side-effect of the chemo was constipation, which she found humiliating, never having had trouble of that sort in her whole life.
She did not want me to ring the doctor. She said the chemo had to be taken, it was all for her good, so the side-effects had to be suffered. But in the end I rang our GP’s surgery and to my amazement the chief partner, Dr Stuart, arrived on his bike. He was on his way home, after a long day. Never had our doctor actually come to the house in about fifty years, not since the days of Micky Day, our first GP whom we joined in 1960. He took blood tests which I then took over next day to the Royal Free to be analysed.
Eventually, she was put on even more drugs, to counter the side-effects of the existing drugs, mainly of course the chemo pills. And there was a minor improvement or at least abatement in the downward spiral.
She still managed a short walk round the edge of the Heath after lunch, using her walking stick, the one her father had used. She usually wore her orange coat and black trousers, tucked into her boots, going very slowly, but usually getting as far as the first pond.
Later, on my own walk, for since I was fifty I have always had a siesta after lunch, I would catch up with her, or more often catch sight of her from the flanks of Parliament Hill. I would glimpse a flash of orange, recognise the walking stick, realise who it was, and then notice how small she had become. I had always looked upon her as taller than me, because she held herself so well, walked tall and erect, but during the last few years she had lost two inches and had become very slow and slightly bent.
It got harder each day for her to ge
t up out of bed, get dressed, go downstairs, bring in the milk, fill our two bowls with her homemade muesli, make herself her one and only cup of coffee of the day. She insisted on struggling to do all this, otherwise what is the point. Then she would drag herself back to bed. She would just lie there, with her clothes on for the rest of the day, with no strength left to get up again.
She did not want to discuss what was happening, or would possibly next be happening. If I mentioned food, what can I make her, or for myself, she would groan. The thought of food made her sick.
I started asking her to give me some notes, dictate to me how to cook certain favourite things, the sauces she made, the quiches she created. The very words made her sick. I had never cooked in all my life, except Hunter’s Special when she first had cancer in 1975, which I fed to the children every evening. At least there was just the two of us to feed this time.
I did not know how to use the washing machine, or how to put on the dishwasher, which orifices needed filling with which potions. Appalling that in fifty-five years of married life I had learned so little. Not even how to make a salad dressing.
But by now she did not want or did not have the energy to tell me, or direct me, or dictate instructions to me. She did not want to think about anything like that anyway.
She eventually gave up attempting to go on the Heath and restricted her ambitions to the garden, dragging herself round it, again and again, taking forever each time, with lots of stops and sits, leaning and staring, pretending she was examining the flowers and bushes.
Earlier in the year, I had arranged for the decking in our back yard to be ripped up. It had been laid at great expense ten years earlier, when decking was all the fashion, but had proved a great mistake. The wood had started to rot, so it was dangerous to walk on it, and rats were breeding underneath. Poisons usually worked in the end, but the smell was appalling. So we had decided some months earlier to have it all up and York stone slabs put down.
Should we cancel having it done? Was it worth it at this stage in her condition? She had already vetoed my idea for a summer house at the bottom of the garden. I thought it would give a focal point, a staging post in her morning meander round the garden, somewhere to sit and stare and rest. She said certainly not, she did not want a summer house, over her dead body.
But she agreed that getting rid of the rotten decking would be worth doing, save her falling if she ever ventured out or being bitten by rats.
We got an excellent gardening man to lay the York stones. He was called Mick and was Irish, probably the first Irishman to work in the house for about fifty years. In the sixties, when we first moved in, we seemed for a while to be occupied by the Irish.
The only problem was he worked on his own and it took him five weeks. He also started very early in the morning, which upset Margaret as he worked just outside the back door, a few feet away from where she was sitting having her morning coffee. But he was kind and careful and brought with him his little dog Joey which amused us all. In the end, she was grateful the work had been done. It gave us such pleasure when the terrace was completed. The York stones were so attractive, turning different shades of colours in sun or rain. And were also easy to walk on.
In October, Margaret’s hair started to fall out. After her bath there were great strands of it floating on top of the water. She rarely now had the strength to walk in the garden. There were more scans and more scans as her white blood cells had suddenly become low. Whatever that meant, for I didn’t know, except that it increased the risk of infection. She therefore had to stop any of the family coming to visit if they might have the slightest cold. Yet she still insisted on trying to cook, despite her hands shaking and being unsteady on her feet. I was terrified she would fall, but she would not let me anywhere near her in her kitchen. The solution was to have very simple meals, with the minimum of preparation.
She was assigned a palliative care team, who worked at the Royal Free. Two of their nurses came to see her, a senior one and a trainee. All the trainee could say was, ‘Goodness you do look well, goodness we expected you to look far worse than you are, goodness you look wonderful . . .’
That would have cheered me up, even if I had scoffed, but Margaret always hated any personal comments, of any sort, with people telling her either she looked well or she did not look well. In this case, it was of course meaningless. This trainee nurse had never seen her before and did not know how absolutely shitty Margaret was now feeling. Perhaps the hospital notes had led her to think Margaret was on her last legs. Margaret moved the conversation on smartly, asking pointedly if that was all they wanted.
Mentally she was still totally alert, though she refused to discuss the future, refusing to discuss anything more than one day ahead.
The proofs of my memoir The Co-op’s Got Bananas! arrived, which takes our life together up to 1960 (the previous volume of the book you are now reading). She said she would like to read it.
She made a few pungent observations, pointed out I had not described how she looked and dressed when we first met as teenagers, which I added. She said that in the book, all she seemed to do was criticise me, so I altered that a bit. She asked if the scene where I describe her getting fitted with a diaphragm was really necessary. I said of course. It’s social history, my darling.
On 11 November 2015 I went with her for her regular appointment at the Royal Free where she saw her oncologist, Dr Newby, whom she always liked. Alison Jones, the Royal Free oncologist she first saw in 2007, had now retired.
Dr Newby had the entire scan in front of her, and went through the usual stuff about black spots and shadows and stuff, looking suitably grim and serious.
In Dr Newby’s last official letter, recording the previous meeting, she had used a strange phrase about Margaret, saying she ‘had not asked any questions’.
We took this to mean that Margaret had not asked how long she had to live. So I said I would ask it straight out this time, but she said don’t you dare. It is up to her. She decided she would do it elliptically, asking what ‘stage’ she was at. This was what one of the palliative care nurses had recently asked her.
‘We don’t talk in stages or in figures,’ replied Dr Newby, ‘but if you are asking how long might you have to live, I can give you an estimate. If you would like that?’
We both nodded.
‘You can never be sure. It is only an estimate, but I would say it is months not years. Asked to guess how many months, I would say between three months and nine months.’
We both sat, silent.
She said some more radiotherapy might possibly help, and she called in the consultant radiologist, another doctor whom Margaret liked, who was brisk, no-nonsense, but efficient and cheerful. She looked at all the latest scans. A bit of radiotherapy might help the pain in her shoulders, but not much. Really, it had now got to the stage where no amount of radiotherapy would help. Then she left the room.
Before that meeting with Dr Newby, Margaret had decided that whatever happened, she was giving up the chemo.
She had been on the heavy-duty cancer drugs for eight months, and chemo full time for a year. The side-effects were now unbearable. The quality of her life had so diminished that she did not want to take them any more.
At the end of the meeting, Margaret told Dr Newby she had decided to take no more chemo pills. Dr Newby nodded and said yes. She was going to say that herself.
So we left, got in the car and went home. Without talking. The only thing she did say was that she did not want the children or anyone to be told the exact prediction, about possibly having only three months to live. Say nothing about that, she said. If asked, just tell them the white blood cells were now stable. She did not want them getting more depressed and worried.
So that was it. After forty-three years of treatment for cancer, it was all over. No more treatment of any sort or any forms of cancer drugs. There was no point. They had run out of treatments.
I thought about the future, the fut
ure of medicine, the future of the world. Obviously there will be even more advances, perhaps proper cures, or at least decent cancer treatments which don’t have awful side-effects. How fortunate for those in the years ahead who will benefit.
On the other hand, I also looked back into the past. Having the double mastectomy in the seventies did work, when I was convinced each time that she was a goner. Again, in 2007, I was sure it was the end. And yet once again she survived, and had had these extra nine years. So we had been lucky, living when we did, in these times, compared with those who had suffered in the distant past.
The next evening, over supper, I started crying. I have gone through life not crying or showing emotion.
‘Oh help,’ she said, a joke phrase in our family, mocking my mother, who always said it when someone got emotional or sentimental.
‘I was just thinking,’ I said. ‘When I die, I will meet you again.’
‘You are not going to turn soppy and religious, are you, in your old age?’
‘Yeh I know, it is corny. It’s what people always say. But it just came into my head. I couldn’t stop it. While I live on, it will be a comfort to think we will meet again. Even though it is a stupid thing to say and of course we won’t.’
‘Oh help,’ she said.
In bed that night, I leaned over and gave her a kiss, being careful not to touch her.
‘I love you so much,’ I said.
‘And I love you. Now go to sleep . . .’
In fifty-five years of marriage I don’t think either of us has said we loved each other, not since our pre-marriage courting days. We always mock people saying ‘love you soooo much’ or ‘love you too’ even when it is a ten-second mundane phone call.
23
THE THREE HURDLES
A Life in the Day Page 25