All that detracted from the general impressiveness of what had been done to my father’s dead body was the strange garment he’d been dressed in. It was a ridiculous black silk affair, vaguely Chinese in style. Where was his good suit, the handkerchief peeping out of the pocket, and the sparkling white shirt? He would have been outraged to be so garbed, but this garment had been put on him without Pauline knowing and it had seemed silly to make a fuss and insist on the robe being changed for his suit. His hands were lying on his stomach, not quite touching each other. I suddenly had a desire to hold one, not out of any surge of emotion or sentiment, but in a woefully clear-headed spirit of scientific enquiry. Would it be cold and stiff? No, it was warm and quite pliable, more evidence of the undertaker’s work, or was this normal? There was so much I didn’t know about these things called corpses. He hadn’t approved of hand-holding. The last time he’d held my hand had been when I was a child and we were crossing the road. The moment we were safely over he always dropped it quickly. He had such big hands but they were never clumsy. His hands had worked well for him, proving adroit and nimble in the handling of his precious tools. I laid his hand carefully back on his stomach, just as it had been placed, all neat and tidy, just as he liked things.
I couldn’t go on standing there much longer. Daft, as he would have said. Time to leave. I stared at his face, quite noble in appearance. He had never approved of kissing either but I decided to kiss his forehead. I did it. I didn’t feel remotely distressed, but on the other hand I did feel something unexpected – a certain tenderness and sadness that there had not been between us what there might have been. Then I left, knowing his body would now be put into the coffin. I noticed as I left the funeral parlour and began the walk to the crematorium that I felt calm. The agitation had ceased and the relief I’d looked for had at last arrived. Seeing the body had reassured me; touching it had proved a strange release from tension. I stepped out smartly, enjoying the cold, and when I met someone I knew coming down Wigton Road I beamed at them, as they offered their commiserations, in a manner they clearly considered inappropriate. Yes, I said happily, he’s dead, it’s all over, it’s all over. The funeral? Oh, today, but it’s private.
We were, of course, going to carry out his instructions – ‘Straight to the crem. No parsons …’ It was in fact odd, his insistence that there should not be, in the accepted sense, a proper funeral such as my mother’s had been. Then, he had been most anxious that every attention should be paid to detail – he’d wanted ‘the lot’ for her: the best wood with brass handles for the coffin, a hearse and several posh cars, and most important of all a funeral tea for the family mourners. He had been deeply satisfied that St James’s Church was packed, that the hymns had been sung lustily (though not by him) and that the vicar had waxed most eloquent about his wife’s sterling qualities. It had been ‘a good turnout’ and this had mattered. The church he hated had done her proud; the religion he despised had provided a framework for grief, which had helped. But he hadn’t wanted what he called ‘that kind of daft carry-on’ for himself. His respect for convention and tradition was not as strong as his contempt for the church. Funerals involving ‘the lot’ were only for the faithful and he would not pretend to be one of them. His was to be absolutely simple and, most important of all, was to be paid for by himself.
The cost of my mother’s funeral had shocked him. It came (in 1981) to £455.12 and he hadn’t been able to pay it. They had both been in a Death Club since the 1930s, paying a penny a week at first and then their contribution rising gradually to sixpence, but when this was cashed in the sum total, by some miracle of arithmetic I didn’t understand and couldn’t begin to explain, came to only £88. His distress was dreadful and only partially relieved by my suggestion that since she was our mother as well as his wife we should split the bill equally and all pay a quarter. Agreeing to this was a bitter moment for him – ‘Can’t even pay for my own wife’s funeral!’ Clearly, he saw it as an indictment of his failure in life that he didn’t, at the age of eighty, possess £455.12. He saw himself as disgraced and humiliated and resolved to make sure this would never happen again: he would pay for his own funeral and need help from no one.
I took care, when I reached the cemetery, to go round by the grave of my great-grandfather (the one my father was called after, the one who died at ninety) and then to visit, in strict order, all the other family graves. The last one, my grandparents’, was right at the top on an exposed hillside from which there are magnificent views of the northern fells. These had snow on the tops and all along the skyline thick grey clouds pressed down hard, though the sky above was a brilliant blue. I stood looking not at the ugly black marble stone with its flashy gilt lettering, but beyond, to that view. My father, even though he never put it into any words beyond ‘grand’ or ‘champion’, loved such scenes. ‘Look at that!’ he would say, confronted with some vista of glorious landscape, and then no more. Words were daft. Words were inadequate. Eyes and ears were all that mattered. In his head, he knew what he felt and that was enough.
Pauline and David, and Gordon and Shirley, and the faithful Nixons, his old neighbours, were waiting beside their cars outside the crematorium. Others would have come but we had explained this was not to be a funeral in the sense they might expect and that they shouldn’t feel obliged to attend so basic a ceremony. There were to be no hymns, readings, psalms or addresses by vicars. Straight in, straight out, no messing – embarrassing, really, for the average mourner. We’d been asked if we wanted any music played and had decided to have a couple of carols (hoping this did not exceed our brief) – ‘Silent Night’ on the way in, ‘In the Bleak Midwinter’ on the way out. Very seasonal. The coffin, when it came, had a wreath of red roses and holly upon it, and a pretty posy of freesias, the wreath from us, his children, and the posy from his youngest grandchild. We walked behind the coffin into the chapel, the smallest available and yet still seeming much too large, and sat down in the front row. The coffin was now resting in front of the curtains behind which it would soon slide.
Silence. A cough from the undertaker. What now? No messing indeed, but there had to be something before the coffin disappeared. I got up and stood in front of the other five mourners and spoke for a few minutes about my father. It was an attempt at summing up a life, that was all. I said we, his children, were regretfully aware that we had not loved our father, but that still we had admired his good qualities and especially his particular kind of courage during his last years. We had, finally, been proud of his lack of self-pity and his determination to do his best. It was easy to go over his life, and remind myself, and them, of how hard he had worked for little reward, and without achieving the material comfort we had all achieved, but more difficult to find some note to end on. I said, something more than duty had probably bound us to him, but maybe we shouldn’t try too hard, as I myself had tried, to divine what it was. He was dead. A long life had ended, and we should be glad because the last two years had put our father through a process he should never have had to endure, making, as it did, a mockery of all that had been precious about it.
We went to the Crown Hotel at Wetheral for the funeral tea, one of our father’s favourite places for a bar lunch. The hotel stands above the river Eden in a lovely village five miles from Carlisle. He used to bring us out here to walk through the woods when we were children. Since it was only five days before Christmas there were several office lunch parties just ending when we arrived, but we found a relatively quiet corner in the lounge, and tucked in to sandwiches and cakes and tea. It was not at all like a funeral tea and we were relieved. We thought we should all really have whisky to toast our father in the manner he liked, but it was four o’clock and everyone except me had a long drive ahead of them. We swapped anecdotes about him, all well known to us, and repeated some of his more famously outrageous sayings and doings. By the time we were ready to part, we were all surprisingly cheerful. The job had been done, with ‘no messing’ as instructed.
The following day, I went back on the train to London. Plenty of time to think, and what I thought about, obviously, was my father’s death. I stared out of the window at the snow-covered tops of the Lake District fells on the right-hand side and wondered what my father would have thought of his own death, of the way he died. ‘Pity,’ he would have said, for sure, and, ‘Can’t be helped.’ He’d have shrugged, and if I’d said maybe it should have been helped, what would have been his response? ‘Don’t talk so daft.’
I couldn’t decide whether he was right. He’d suffered much longer than he need have done, than he would have done if everything possible had not been tried to extend time for him. His life, at ninety-six, had been considered so precious that it was fought for by others to the bitter end. Splendid? He may have thought so. Nobody asked him. Nobody knew his views on dying.
Suddenly, as the train left the fells behind, I found myself thinking of a boat trip when I was aged ten. It was the time when I’d had jaundice badly and was convalescing. My father thought I needed some sea air ‘to perk me up’, as he put it, before going back to school and he proposed taking me to Silloth. My mother was not at all sure that this was a sensible idea – it was only February – but the weather that week was unseasonably (for Carlisle) mild and even sunny, and she weakened. I was wrapped up in layers and layers of clothes, and off we went, my father and I.
I know it was a weekday but I can’t remember how on earth my father managed to get the day off. At any rate, because it was a weekday, and because it was February (and Carlisle folk did not normally start thinking about going to Silloth until, at the earliest, April), the train was empty. We had a whole compartment to ourselves and it felt odd. My father read the racing pages in the Daily Express, pencil in hand, marking the runners he fancied, and I read the Girls’ Crystal which he had kindly bought me. ‘Here’s a book for you,’ he’d said, and I’d managed not to show off and point out it was a magazine and not a book. Illness had definitely softened me. Neither of us spoke to the other on the journey, of course.
When we got to Silloth we didn’t, as we would usually do, go straight to the sea-wall across the Green. We turned left outside the station and went into the docks. We walked right round them to where a boat smaller than all the others was tied up at the quayside. My father told me to wait, and he went ahead and entered into negotiations with the boatman, who was sitting smoking above his boat. I didn’t hear what was said but I saw money change hands and then he turned to me, positively triumphant, and told me to get into the boat with him. ‘Grand,’ he said, when we’d clambered down. ‘This is just what you need.’
It wasn’t a very tidy boat. There seemed to be a lot of clutter in it, ropes and nets and waterproofs and fishing tackle everywhere. We were the only passengers and sat close together on a slippery plank seat without a back. The boatman started the engine, which made a tremendous noise, and we spluttered our way out of the docks and began chugging along the coast, until we were roughly parallel with Skinburness, where we changed direction and began to veer out into the open estuary towards Annan on the Scottish side. Our progress was slow but it was impossible for it to be slow enough for my father, who was relishing every minute and wanted our voyage prolonged. The sun was shining obligingly and, apart from a few clouds, the sky was mostly a weak blue. The breeze was stiff, though, and my face was soon stinging. ‘Doing you good!’ my father yelled above the noise of the engine.
There was not a great deal to do in Annan when we got there. The boatman said we had an hour, so we followed the usual routine for family outings: my father found a pub and brought me out some lemonade and crisps, then he went back in and had a pie and a pint. After that we walked up and down Annan’s main street until it was time. The clouds were growing by then and I could sense my father was a little anxious about the return trip. But the boatman was punctual leaving, which was a relief, and in fact we made quicker progress this time. When Grune Point, the tip of Skinburness marsh, was visible, my father said, ‘Good. Nearly there.’ The sun had vanished by then. Thick, grey clouds covered the sky and the wind had strengthened. The sea, which had been as calm as the Solway Firth ever is, was becoming rougher and there were white tops to the waves. We were just edging our way past the Skinburness itself when the engine stopped. It gave what sounded like a little cough and then another and then it stopped. The boatman tried to restart it and failed. He tried again, failed again, and then sat back on his haunches, saying it would be best to wait a while, this engine often played up. He seemed quite unconcerned, and indeed we were so close to the shore there seemed no real reason to worry.
But I could tell that my father was worried, though he said nothing. He was worried about me. The waves were slapping against the rocking boat quite violently and spray was coming over the side occasionally. It was suddenly bitterly cold and we were sitting unprotected. A few drops of rain fell, which at first we thought was spray, and my father swore (though only a ‘damn!’) and took his own coat off to put round me. Then the boatman tried again and this time the engine caught and we began moving safely towards Silloth and the docks before the rain became heavy. My legs felt quite wobbly when I was lifted onto the quayside. I was glad to get to the warmth of the train. ‘It’s done you good,’ my father said firmly, once we were settled.
Had it? All I knew was that I’d been frightened. I could see we were not far from land, and I was a good swimmer, but still I’d been frightened. I’d imagined the boat drifting the other way, out into the open sea. I’d imagined a storm hitting us – the sky looked full of storm clouds – and the boat capsizing. I’d imagined drowning however hard I tried to stay afloat. And in the middle of all this imagining I’d felt the strangest tremor of a fear I’d never experienced before, the fear of dying. I’d thought about death and the dead often enough, with my morbid preoccupation with the subject, but never of the actual process of dying. It was the first time.
All those years later, sitting in another train, speeding south, I could only assume this little memory had surfaced because I’d been wondering whether my father ever felt that tremor himself. I don’t think he did until the last few months of his long life. That was his strength: his lack of fear, his acceptance of whatever was going to happen happening. He might not be religious, or even like Marion ‘spiritual’, but he had confidence in the natural order of things. And he didn’t necessarily even see that this natural order was being interfered with, that in fact for him it had become highly unnatural. Was that good, or bad?
I wished he could have had the option of escaping the worst part of dying, the apprehension, the absolute certainty that his life, once so precious to him, had been devalued because he was no longer living it, he was living death. But few people can do that. It’s all a matter of luck, how the dying will go. That’s the part which dismays me; the part that comforts me is witnessing how the human spirit in perfectly ordinary people adapts to it.
These have been two stories not of life but of dying. They have been about two people for whom life was precious in quite different ways and who approached death with quite different attitudes. Both died bravely, in that neither made those around them suffer. They had no self-pity and made it as easy as possible for their loved ones to witness their decline. One, my sister-in-law Marion, was, in effect, given the means to end her own life whenever she chose. She could have overdosed on liquid morphine and shortened the time she had left. But she did not choose to do so. Under no circumstances would euthanasia have been acceptable either to her or to anyone involved with her. If she wanted to go on living no matter what state she was in, then we wanted it too. She had made her choice and it was absolutely respected. But my father was never given the choice. He was the one who had come finally to regard his own life as no longer in the least valuable. He was tired of it. But he was obliged to go on. There was to be no cutting short of his dying, inevitable though it had become. It is as though we take a pride in seeing how long we can prolong a life w
hich is clearly over.
It seems odd. It seems wrong.
Arthur Forster in his teens, serious and posed for a Carlisle photographer.
The roaring twenties – Arthur in his wilder days, on holiday on the Isle of Man.
Arthur with his wife Lilian, and friends.
At work (right) in the Metal Box factory, Carlisle.
Arthur fishing at Silloth, his weekend hobby.
Arthur, years later, holding forth on a picnic at Skinburness, 1983.
Twins, Marion and Annabel (5), with their brothers, Hunter (8) struggling with asthma, and Johnny (4).
Marion (centre) loved having her picture taken: in carefree times with Flora, Jake, Margaret and Hunter Davies.
Precious Lives Page 24