by David Lodge
I spent the night at the house in Lime Avenue. I knew where to find a spare set of keys, buried in a tin box under the lavender bush near the front door for just such contingencies. The house seemed more than usually cheerless as I let myself in: gloomy, chilly, fusty. I turned up the central heating, and switched on a transistor radio in the grease-coated kitchen to relieve the tomb-like silence, as I made myself supper with some bacon and a tin of baked beans. I called Fred to tell her how Dad was, and then Anne, in her hospital, to give her an edited version of the same report and to congratulate her on the safe arrival of the baby. She was of course very sorry to hear about Dad, and sorry not to be able to help, but I could tell that what most concerned her in the whole world at the moment was getting the baby to take the breast.
I made up the bed in the back bedroom which I had occupied as a child and teenager, and as a university student in the vacations. After I left home for good Dad had taken it over for his various hobbies, evidence of which was displayed or stored around the room: an easel, oil paintings of rural scenes carefully copied from post-cards, and still lifes assembled by himself; ‘antique’ ceramic vases and bowls, one or two of them cracked or chipped; a heap of old golfing magazines; books on calligraphy, a paperback How To Make Money on the Stock Exchange, and a picture of himself on West Pier at Brighton, grinning and holding up a large sea bass, the biggest fish he ever caught. Above the picture rail over the mantelpiece and the boarded-up fireplace there was still a trace of my own occupancy - a kind of mural of the red-and-white shield of Charlton Athletic, the football team I supported as a boy, against a green football-pitch background, executed in poster paints from the top of a step ladder when I was aged fourteen. Dad was rather fond of it and could never bring himself to obliterate it under a fresh coat of white emulsion when he redecorated the room. It was the last thing my eyes fell on before I turned out the bedside lamp. The mattress of the single divan bed felt soft and lumpy, but I had warmed it up with a hot water bottle and, exhausted as I was, I had no difficulty in falling asleep.
I returned to the hospital the next day, taking the things I had been asked to bring. Dad was sitting up in the chair next to his bed, wearing a faded towelling robe someone had found for him, and wedged in behind a movable tray-table that had been jammed under his bed.The ward sister told me this was to prevent him from trying to get up and walk, which he had showed signs of attempting. Also he had caused some disturbance in the night by pulling out his drip and trying to hit the nurse who replaced it. He was still staring fixedly at the tube bandaged to his wrist, and turning his hand from side to side. He seemed to recognise me, but looked with much more interest at the tea trolley when it approached his bed. He was allowed to have drinks with supervision, and I held a non-spill cup of tepid tea to his lips. He sucked thirstily, but much of the liquid dribbled from his mouth and down the front of his hospital pyjamas. He said very little, and that was unintelligible.
I met Dr Kannangara, the geriatric consultant responsible for Dad: a short, plump Asian with rimless spectacles and a round, impassive face, who confirmed the diagnosis of stroke. He said they would keep Dad in the ward for a few weeks and then he would be moved into a local geriatric unit with nursing care. There was a procedure for this which the hospital’s welfare department would explain to me. I asked if he could be moved by ambulance to a private nursing home near us, if I found one, and he looked surprised but said he thought it was feasible. I asked if Dad would recover his speech, and he said probably not to any great extent. He has some paralysis down his right side, indicating that the stroke affected the left lobe of the brain which controls language functions.
It was depressing to reflect that I would probably never have a proper conversation with my father again, but it was a consolation that when I had called on him two weeks earlier on my way to Poland he had been calmer and much more lucid than of late, and surprised me with feats of long-term memory, like sunbursts through cloud suddenly illuminating small patches of a dark and obscure landscape. I asked him what his earliest memory was, and he said it was being carried on his father’s shoulder to the tobacconist to buy cigarettes. ‘He asked the man in the shop for twenty Wills’ Gold Flake and the man took them down off the shelf and gave them to him. Well, my father was called Will, remember, so I thought the cigarettes were made specially for him. That made him laugh. And he had a brother called Alf, who had a real boozer’s nose, you know, all broken veins, and I called him “the uncle with the writing on his nose”. That made them all laugh too.’ He even dredged up some stories about his early musical career that I hadn’t heard before. ‘For a time I used to do two jobs of an evening - the band at the 53 Club off Regent Street, which opened at about nine o’clock, and before that, on my way to the West End, I used to do a session at a dance school at the Elephant and Castle - they called it a dance school, it was really a way of running a dance hall without paying entertainment tax. It was just a three-piece band, piano, drums and me on sax and clarinet, strict tempo stuff, quick quick slow, I could play the tunes in my sleep, in fact I used to read a book while I was blowing, had it propped up on the music stand, nobody on the floor could see . . . but the money was useful. I was saving up to get married. Not that I was in a hurry, but your mother was. One day, she said to me, “When are we going to get married? Mum and Dad want to know.” So I named a date, and then I had to think about putting a few quid in the bank. But I gave up the dance school when we got married. I wasn’t seeing enough of Norma.’ The thought seemed to make him melancholy. ‘I suppose she never had much of a life, being married to a musician, out at work every evening, and Jewish weddings most Sundays. Especially after you came along. But she never complained.’ I remembered how sorry for my mother Maisie had been when she was introduced to our nuclear family and realised what a limited, home-bound existence Mum had led for most of her life, living vicariously on the anecdotes her musician husband and scholarly son brought back from the wider world. ‘She made herself a slave to you two men,’ Maisie used to say, and in retrospect I think she was right, but it was much too late in the day to say as much to Dad, and I didn’t want to strike a discordant note in what was the best conversation I had had with him for a long time.
I stayed on at the house, uncomfortable and depressing as it was, for a few more days, in order to visit Dad regularly at the hospital. It is a pretty typical NHS hospital in an underprivileged bit of London: overcrowded, in need of refurbishment, and not as clean as it should be. The medics and senior nurses seemed harassed and anxious, the other staff stoical and slow-moving. You could sense the fear of MRSA and the latest super-bug, C. difficile, in the overheated air of the wards. Petty pilfering is rife. Dad’s lambswool cardigan, which I gave him as a Christmas present, disappeared two days after I brought it in, and I found him wearing some horrible acrylic garment with two buttons missing, probably left behind by a deceased patient, which the staff had found him as a substitute. The ward sister apologised and said she would make a search for the lambswool one but wasn’t hopeful of recovering it. I wanted to get him out of there as soon as possible, and decided to go home and look for a suitable nursing home near us.
Returning to Rectory Road after spending several days shuttling by bus between Dad’s dingy domicile and the geriatric ward of Tideway Hospital seemed more than ever like entering a haven of civilised comfort. Fred was out, but the house did not seem empty: the pale light-reflecting walls, the familiar pictures, the surfaces and textures and artfully blended colours of the floors and furnishings, the carpeted staircase with its brass stair-rods and polished wood banister, were welcoming presences, like a team of mute, discreetly smiling servants welcoming the master home. I unpacked, tipped a load of soiled clothing into the laundry basket, took a long hot bath in a warm, spotlessly clean bathroom, and dressed in fresh clean clothes. When Fred came in we hugged and kissed speechlessly for a minute or two. There was much to talk about, and we did that over a supper she had prepared in advanc
e. We went to bed early and made ardent love. Driven by desire and long abstinence, I had no difficulty performing the act. We both slept deeply afterwards.
The petty offences and recriminations of the Christmas and New Year holidays, and the chilly relations between us up to the time when I left for Poland, were all forgiven and forgotten. Fred was sympathetic and supportive of what I had done and planned to do about Dad, quickly drew up a list of possible nursing homes from the Yellow Pages, and made appointments to view three of them. We arranged to visit Anne, who was already back home with her baby, at the weekend. I responded gratefully to Fred’s help and empathy with these family concerns, but there was another contributory element in our reconciliation, though I wasn’t fully conscious of it at the time, and Fred not at all. When I told her about my visit to Auschwitz, she listened attentively, shuddered at my descriptions, and said she admired me for facing such a harrowing experience; but she seemed relieved when I finished my tale, and glad to move on to another topic. I realised that I could never convey to her in words the impression the place, especially Birkenau, had left on me.
When I returned to London on the following Monday I bought a paperback about Auschwitz and the Final Solution at the station bookstall, and read it on my journey and over the following days, filling out my sketchy knowledge of the history of the place, and acquiring some sense of the individuality of its victims and their experiences. Many of them, knowing they would never survive, left letters to their loved ones buried in jars or canteens in the camp, hoping these documents might one day be discovered and delivered, or at least read by somebody. The most moving of those cited in the book was a letter from Chaim Hermann, a Sonderkommando, to his wife, which was written in November 1944 and dug up from a pile of human ashes near one of the crematoria at Birkenau in 1945. The Sonderkommandos were able-bodied prisoners who were compelled to work in the extermination process itself, ushering the unwitting victims towards the gas chambers, removing their corpses afterwards and burning them in the ovens of the crematoria. To refuse the work was to invite instant execution; to perform it brought better living conditions - for a finite period. In a way the Sonderkommandos were the most unfortunate of all the victims of Auschwitz. The great majority of those who died there went unsuspectingly to the gas chambers. The Sonderkommandos lived for months with the certain knowledge that sooner or later they too would be killed, because the Nazis could not risk allowing them to survive as witnesses, and in fact their first duty was likely to be disposing of the corpses of their predecessors on the ghastly production line of death. Chaim Hermann described Auschwitz as ‘simply hell, but Dante’s hell is incomparably ridiculous in comparison with this real one here, and we are its eye-witnesses, and we cannot leave it alive’. He also said that he intended to die ‘calmly, perhaps heroically (this will depend on circumstances) ’, hinting at a final act of resistance, but it is not known whether he achieved that. He himself had no way of knowing whether his wife would ever receive his letter, but in the midst of all this diabolical evil he asked her forgiveness for not sufficiently appreciating their life together, and this was the sentence in his letter that most affected me: ‘If there have been, at various times, trifling misunderstandings in our life, now I see how one was unable to value the passing time.’
We looked at three private nursing homes.The only one that didn’t smell of urine nauseatingly mixed with air-freshener, and was in other respects acceptable, was horrendously expensive, but I decided that Dad’s life expectancy must now be limited, and that what time was left to him should be made as comfortable as possible. They had a vacancy, and were prepared to keep it open for a week or two, but when I went back to the hospital after the weekend the news was not good. Dad’s condition had not improved over the previous few days, in fact it had deteriorated. Dr Kannangara was not available, but I spoke to a young doctor, a houseman I suppose, who was his chief assistant, and asked him if Dad was likely to be fit to make the journey north by ambulance in the next week or two, and he shook his head doubtfully. Dad was still having difficulty swallowing, and losing weight through lack of real sustenance. He continued to require an IV drip, and was plucking at it feebly again with his weak right hand, sitting in his wedged-in chair beside the bed, when I greeted him. I showed him the brochure of the nursing home and talked in a cheerful tone about moving him there soon, and he stroked the glossy paper with its coloured photos of the bedrooms and the conservatory, but I had no way of knowing how much, if anything, he understood. Even sadder was that he clearly didn’t understand when I told him what a thrill it had been to hold my grandson, his great-grandson, in my arms the previous Sunday, when we visited Anne and Jim. I was nervous of doing so, the baby seemed so tiny and fragile, but Anne gently insisted on placing him in my cradled arms, and having just been fed he looked up placidly at me with unfocused eyes, drunk with breast milk, until a bubble of indigestion moved his mouth into the semblance of a smile. ‘There, he smiled at you!’ Anne exclaimed, and I accepted the fiction. ‘He has Maisie’s mouth, like you,’ I said. ‘And your nose,’ she said. ‘I suppose I get the ears,’ said Jim. ‘They seem to stick out like mine.’ I relayed all this to my indifferent auditor because it was better than sitting in silence, and anyway I enjoyed recalling this happy visit.
Dad seemed drowsy as well as inattentive, and when I commented on this to a nurse she said, ‘That’s because he fought us this morning when we got him up.’ They used an ingenious kind of crane with a canvas cradle to lift him off the bed and into the chair and back again. I began to develop a great respect for the nurses in this crowded ward, who do a difficult job with patients whose minds are going and whose bodies are collapsing, and many of whom seem, like Dad, ungrateful for their care.
There were no set visiting hours in the ward: visitors were allowed to come and go at almost any time, presumably in the hope that they would keep the patients stimulated and help with tasks like feeding and giving drinks. I got used to holding a non-spill cup of the kind used by infants to Dad’s lips, and occasionally spooned a little fruit yogurt between them, reflecting that sixty-odd years ago he would have been doing the same for me (or, on reflection, perhaps not; male/female roles were more differentiated then). One morning that week I happened to be sitting with him when the ward nurse, Caroline, came up with an Afro-Caribbean auxiliary in tow and began drawing the curtains round the bed. I asked if I should get out of their way. Caroline looked at me in a slightly challenging way and said: ‘No, I’d like you to help Delphine wash your father.’ I was taken completely by surprise. Inwardly I recoiled from the idea, but I could think of no way to refuse that wouldn’t discredit me in their eyes.‘All right,’ I said.‘What do I do?’‘Delphine will show you,’ Caroline said, and left us to it. Delphine put on a waterproof apron and a pair of latex gloves taken from a sealed pack, and looked at me sceptically. ‘Better take off that nice jacket,’ she said.
It was an extraordinary experience, which took the reversal of the infant-parent relationship through the taboo barrier. Basically I was helping to change a nappy on an eighty-nine-year-old man, but he happened to be my father. First we had to take off his pyjamas and vest, which entailed helping him to sit up, and rocking him from side to side. His body looked painfully thin and wasted, but being a tall man and big-boned he was still a heavy dead weight to support. He was wearing a diaper under plastic pants. Delphine covered his loins with a towel while she washed his upper body, and I dried it; then she removed the pants and the paper diaper. He had passed a small bowel movement, but it did not smell too bad, perhaps because of his bland diet. She washed and powdered his private parts, in a respectful but matter-of-fact way, then attached a tube to his penis and strapped a reservoir for the urine to his leg. Then we put the pyjama trousers back on him, and a vest, and the pyjama jacket. What a relief it was to see the bare forked animal clothed again. My arm ached from the effort of supporting him. Throughout the operation Dad was mostly passive and obedient, though once or
twice I had to take his hand when he tried to push Delphine’s away. ‘He normally give us more trouble,’ Delphine said laconically. ‘Must be ’cause you’re here.’
When we were finished, and Dad was lying back against the pillows, she stripped off the latex gloves and tossed them in a pedal bin. ‘Thanks for your help,’ she said. ‘I’ve never done anything like that before,’ I said. Even when she was very ill Maisie was never as helpless as Dad, and she was always able to get to the bathroom with my help or the nurse’s. ‘I don’t think I will ever forget it,’ I added. When Caroline came to check that everything was OK, Delphine repeated my remark to her. ‘Now you know what we do every day,’ Caroline said. At the time I assumed that she was just seizing the opportunity to off-load a routine chore and attend to something more important, but I wondered later whether she wasn’t deliberately giving me a lesson in what would be entailed in Dad’s long-term care. When I told Fred on the phone that evening (I was staying in the Lime Avenue house again) that I had helped to wash Dad, she said, ‘I don’t believe it.’ I said that I could hardly believe it myself. I was glad to have done it, but I wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience, and my dominant emotion was a fervent hope that I would never require such a service myself, from anyone.