Waiting for the Last Bus

by Richard Holloway

  Perhaps the important divide is less between the religious and the irreligious as between those who fear death and those who don’t. We fall thereby into four categories, and it’s clear which two regard themselves as superior: those who do not fear death because they have faith, and those who do not fear death despite having no faith. These groups take the moral high ground. In third place come those who, despite having faith, cannot rid themselves of the old, visceral, rational fear. And then, out of the medals, below the salt, up shit creek, come those of us who fear death and have no faith.58

  What is it that prompts what Barnes calls the ‘old, visceral, rational fear’ of death? What is he afraid of ? If what awaits us after death is not samsara and its endless wandering through other lives; if it is not hell and its endless torment; if it is not even heaven and its endless joy; if it is no-thing, no-where, no-anything, why fear it? Sadness at leaving: of course. Wistfulness at missing the future, particularly the future of those we love: of course. But fear – of nothing?

  If we are fortunate enough not to have that fear, maybe we should listen to Julian Barnes again. For him the fear of death is just there. It is intrinsic to death. Death carries it, comes with it. Timor mortis conturbat me, as an old litany has it. The fear of death disturbs me, deranges me. Even though there’s nothing on the other side of it; even though death is the end, the full stop, the absolute cessation; the very thought of it scares us. It is as if because being and the matter that clothed it once exploded into existence out of nothing, it now carries within itself the dread of returning to the void from which it escaped. Being dreads Un-being. It is the instinctive reflex of the little blind puppy again.

  But why doesn’t it scare all of us? Is our hold on life less strong? I belong to one of the two categories Julian Barnes accuses of feeling superior because they do not fear death. The prospect of death saddens but does not frighten me, though I neither desire nor expect life after death. But it doesn’t make me feel superior. People play the hand they are dealt in life. I was dealt several cards marked THINGS TO BE AFRAID OF, but NOTHINGNESS was not one of them. Of course, I cannot be certain that as I feel it approaching I won’t experience the ‘old, visceral, rational fear’ of death Barnes describes. After all, I have seen it happen to others. But if it does hit me, I hope I’ll be brave enough to endure it. If I lie in fear on my deathbed, I hope someone will say to me: Courage! There are times when we just have to summon the courage to take what’s coming. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, we have to endure our going hence even as our coming hither.59

  If courage is the wise person’s response to the fear of going, what is the wise person’s answer to those who insist on staying and lust for yet more life, either here on earth in a secular eternity or there in heaven in the supernatural version? In a word, it is gratitude. The opposite of gratitude for life is greed for more of it. It is the inability to enjoy what we have now because we are already lusting after the next edition. The Buddha was right: craving is our curse, the desire for more our scourge. It has made us unhappy, as well as ungrateful, and it might soon make our planet uninhabitable. So be brave in the face of death; be sad at leaving. But don’t let those be your final emotions. Let it be gratitude for the life you had. And even if you think there’s no one there to hear you, say ‘Thank you’. That’s what the best poets do. And if you can’t find the words yourself, read them instead. Here’s how Clive James does it . . .

  A pause to grieve,

  Burned by the starlight of our lives laid bare,

  And then no sound, no sight, no thought. Nowhere.

  What is it worth, then, this insane last phase

  When everything about you goes downhill?

  This much: you get to see the cosmic blaze

  And feel its grandeur, even against your will,

  As it reminds you, just by being there,

  That it is here we live or else nowhere.60

  V

  DEFYING DEATH

  My father was born in 1904, and at the end of the Great War, when he was fourteen, he started serving his time as an apprentice block printer at the famous United Turkey Red Factory on the banks of the river Leven in Alexandria. Block printers were the elite of the textile factories that ran along that swift-flowing river. They even had the right to wear bowler hats to work, as a symbol of their status at the top of the journeyman tree. But while he was still a young man, changes in technology rendered his trade obsolete, and for the rest of his life he had to settle for any work he could get. He carried coal for years, but when the Second World War started he was reemployed by the United Turkey Red, dyeing cloth. And when they made him redundant again aged sixty, he ended his working days as a porter in the Vale of Leven Hospital.

  He was the kind of man who endured hardship without complaining, but I often wondered how he felt about the way his life had played out. One day I discovered a clue. We lived in a classic Scottish two-roomed cottage known as a room and kitchen, with a recess in the kitchen for a bed. I was rummaging under the bed there when I came across a heavy bundle wrapped in old cloth. I pulled it out and found two heavy lead mallets with short wooden handles. They were your father’s mells when he was a tradesman, my mother told me, for the block printing. I was a heedless child, but something about those symbols of his former status quietened and saddened me. Why had he kept them? A sense of betrayal and disappointment clung to them. Time and change have always robbed the poor of their occupations, and of the pride and purpose they gave them. In human history, the buffeting of the poor seems to operate like a law as impersonal as karma. As befits a clever, revolutionary species who can’t leave anything alone for long, we are constantly inventing new ways of doing things; and just as constantly discarding those who had mastered the old ways, like my father with his treasured mells.

  This is a theme deeply embedded in Scottish literature, the sorrow of it caught by our best writers. At the end of Scotland’s favourite novel, Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, the people of Kinraddie go up Blawearie Brae to dedicate the Memorial to the four men of the town who fell in the Great War. And the minister preaches a short, powerful sermon.

  With them we may say there died a thing older than themselves – these were the Last of the Peasants, the last of the Old Scots folk. A new generation comes up that will know them not, except as a memory in a song . . .

  The last of the peasants – those four that you knew – took that with them to the darkness and the quietness of the places where they sleep. And the land changes – their parks and their steadings are a desolation where the sheep are pastured – we are told that great machines come soon to till the land, and the great herds come to feed on it – the crofter has gone, the man with the house and the steading of his own and the land closer to his heart than the flesh of his own body. Nothing, it has been said, is true but change, nothing abides . . . 61

  Nothing is true but change, nothing abides. And I think of that sad wee bundle under the bed in Random Street, Alexandria.

  In Cloud Howe, the second volume in Gibbon’s trilogy, we hear his main character Chris meditating on time and the change it brings:

  In a ten years’ time what things might have been? She might stand on this hill, she might rot in a grave, it would matter nothing, the world would go on, young Ewan dead as his father was dead, or hither and borne, far from Kinraddie: oh, once she had seen in these parks, she remembered, the truth, and the only truth that there was, that only the sky and the seasons endured, slow in their change, the cry of the rain, the whistle of the whins on a winter night under the sailing edge of the moon . . . It was Time himself she had seen, haunting their tracks with unstaying feet.62

  As an old man I am very conscious of time’s unstaying feet, knowing how rapidly they are catching up on me. But I realise now I’ve been obsessed by time’s rush my whole life long. I would pester my mother to tell me about ‘the olden days’, a phrase that haunted me. And the obsession was increased by my love of the movie
s. I was fascinated by the devices film-makers used to signify the passage of time. They would show the pages of a calendar blowing away in the wind. Or a street scene would dissolve into an older version of the same view, with horses and carts instead of automobiles. But it was the flashback that always got me, as it replayed shots from the movie I had just seen.

  I have a clear memory of the flashback from a movie I saw in 1945 when I was eleven. The film was The Sullivans, the true story of a large Irish American family of sons, five of whom were killed in the Second World War. I was captivated by the glimpses of the dead brothers at the end of the movie and was stabbed by the sorrow of time’s passing. Michael Cimino used the same technique in the sequence at the end of The Deerhunter, where the surviving friends sit in a bar and sing ‘God Bless America’ as the screen flashes images of pre-Vietnam War innocence. The flashback at the end of Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part II is even more poignant, recalling Michael’s innocence before the inevitable assumption of authority corrupted him. I realise now I’ve been using this technique when speaking about dead friends at their funerals, such as this address I gave not long ago:

  The movie industry’s best artistic invention was the flashback: those sequences at the end of a film when they run clips of the lives of the characters featured in the plot. But the flashback is not an invention of the cinema. It is art imitating life. It is what we all do as we re-run the movie of the life of one we have loved and lost.

  I’ve been seeing flashbacks of Dougie since the moment a couple of weeks ago when Rena phoned to tell me he had died. And they’re all funny, usually terrible jokes he told me, most of them unrepeatable here. It was the way he did it, I remember. I wouldn’t have seen him for months, maybe even years, and he’d slope over to me with that gliding, slightly stooped walk he had, a smile playing round his lips. No ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello’, just: ‘An Angus farmer goes to London on business . . .’ I won’t repeat that joke, except to say it involved the farmer receiving an unwanted enema at three in the morning in a dodgy hotel near King’s Cross.

  Here’s another clip. I’ve come to Dundee for an event at the Cathedral where he is now working in his retirement years. At the bun fight in the hall after the service, he approaches me. Again there’s no ‘Hi’ or ‘Hello’. I notice he’s put on weight. He comes over in that sliding, slightly stooped walk, a smile flickering round his lips, shoves his belly towards me, strokes it sensuously with his right hand and croons, ‘solid muscle’. This was the man who told his grandchildren he’d used his braces to bungee-jump from the Eiffel Tower, and that in the olden days he’d fought and won a duel by ramming a stick of rhubarb down his adversary’s throat.

  So what I remember most about Dougie was his sense of humour. It was Glasgow humour, and it was what bonded us. But it sat alongside a deep religious seriousness. Dougie was loyal to a traditional kind of Scottish Episcopalianism that has disappeared. The old Scottish Church had nurtured him through tough times in his boyhood, and it had bred in him a passionate conservatism with a small ‘c’. Conservatives play an important role in the human community. We are a dynamic and restless species, constantly discarding the old and lusting after the new. And much of what we throw away is good and beautiful. Conservatives mourn this prodigal waste of the past and try to hold on to as much of it as they can. Old buildings, old words, old values, old courtesies and old trades are thoughtlessly abandoned by us in our rush through history. Careful conservatives try to hold back the flood of time and rescue what they can from its ruthlessness.

  Dougie hated what he saw as the shallow modernising of his beloved Church. Though I was one of the modernisers, our disagreements never came between us. This was partly because I respected the genuine conservative’s hatred of the carelessness of many progressives. But it was mainly because we were determined that nothing should ever be allowed to damage the love we had for each other. Dougie also understood that the trouble with holding too tightly on to the past is that you preserve the bad as well as the good: ugly prejudices as well as beautiful virtues. Change can bring gain as well as loss. But we should never ignore the cost to those who cherish the memory of what has been lost.

  It was typical of Dougie that he weathered the changes and learned to celebrate the best of them. He recognised that it was the role of the thinking conservative to test and challenge change, but once the community had decided upon it to embrace it too. In the end, Dougie would allow nothing to separate him from the Church he had loved since he was a boy. And even though our hearts are breaking, because all we are left with is a film in our heads playing images of his laughter and his love, nothing will separate us from that love either.

  Films may have made remembrance of the past and those it has taken from us potently visual, flickering flashbacks, but poets and other writers were doing it long before movies were invented. One of the time-haunted poets I’ve been reading for years has already appeared several times in these pages, Philip Larkin. He believed that art was essentially the impulse to preserve, the desire to stay those unstaying feet, if only for a moment. In this poem, he is lacerated by time as he looks at an old photograph of a girlfriend:

  Those flowers, that gate,

  These misty parks and motors, lacerate

  Simply by being over; you

  Contract my heart by looking out of date.63

  But poets are not the only writers waving the train out of the station. Novelists do it as well. And so do playwrights. One of the best of them is Alan Bennett, the champion valedictorian of my generation. And like me he’s been doing it all his life. Here’s a passage from a recent diary:

  That so much of what I’ve written has been in the valedictory mode ought to make these latter days seem nothing new. I was saying farewell to the world virtually in my teens and my first play (when I was aged 34) was a lament for an England that has gone. My last play (aged 79) was still waving the same handkerchief.64

  While it is true that artists possess the capacity for recovering and reliving the past to an unusual degree, it is something most of us do. Even if we don’t hunt for antiques or collect old books, the chances are that we’ve held on to a lot of detritus from our own past. I still have my School Certificate from 1950 – only a pass in Greek, I notice – and photographs from my two years’ National Service in the Army. Photographs! Larkin was right: nothing lacerates the heart more than poring by lamplight over old photograph albums. And we turn up at reunions, amazed at the changes time has wrought in people we haven’t seen for decades – thickened waists and vanished hairlines. Then we attend memorial services to hear dead friends summoned to life for an hour before the church door closes on them forever. We mourn the way time steals everything from us. It takes away our youth. Then those we love. Last of all it comes for us. So it is hardly surprising that it is the main subject of all human art.

  It is also religion’s great passion. After a life spent wrestling with it, I have learned to understand and use religion also as a human art, the work of an imagination obsessed with time and death. But a big difference between religion and the other arts is that it not only observes and mourns the passing of time, it challenges and defies it in two ways. It defies the finality of individual death and it refuses the idea that the universe itself may in time die back into emptiness. Let me remember my way back into both of these claims.

  ***

  I found the lines pasted on to the fridge door of a recently widowed friend and have loved them ever since and thought about them often. It was obvious what they meant to her. She longed for the front door to open, and for her husband to come in from the school he taught in, drop his bag on the floor and go to the fridge. What a day! I need a beer. Sometimes she imagined it had happened, and she’d look up eagerly expecting his entrance. Once or twice she thought she’d seen him on the street ahead of her, but as he turned at her call it was a stranger. She knew there was no way back, but she could not stop scenes from the dear, dead past spooling in her mind.
No wonder she’d stuck that fragment of verse on to the fridge door.

  If I could turn upon my finger

  The bright ring of time

  The now of then

  I would bring back again.65

  But for some who mourn a death, it is not a question of bringing back the now of then. For them it has never gone away. That’s when the clocks stopped and time stood still. I had a parishioner who kept the easy chair exactly where it was when her husband died in it. He’d been smoking his pipe when he began to feel unwell. So he put it half-smoked into the ash tray on the table beside the chair and died. And twenty years later it was still there, a dried-up plug of old tobacco in it, just as he had left it. That was when the hands on the clock stopped moving for her. She wasn’t morbid or weepy about it, but nothing had mattered to her since her husband’s death. I doubt if she knew it, but she might have been reciting from one of W.H. Auden’s poems:

  He was my North, my South, my East and West,

  My working week and my Sunday rest,

  My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

  I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

  The stars are not wanted now; put out every one;

  Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

  Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

  For nothing now can ever come to any good.66

  If losing the man you’ve been married to for a lifetime is devastating, the death of a child you’ve had for only a few years can be worse. Every instinct protests against carrying our own children to the grave. It’s a rent in the fabric, a break in the order, a terrible contradiction. No wonder the parent longs to change places with the child in the grave. That’s how King David of Israel felt when he heard his rebellious son Absalom had been killed: