8.4 My Father

This is an instalment of an autobiographical series. For more information and a full list of instalments, see right.

My father was now 82 and he wasn’t well. His kidneys were failing. I was surprised about that. Given the number of cigarettes he’d once smoked and the amount of whisky he’d drunk all his adult life, I’d have expected his lungs and liver to go first.

    Because of his kidneys, he ended up in the critical care unit of a London hospital and, after a panicked phone call from my mother, I took a train. I got lost on the way from the tube station to the hospital and was wearing new (pink) sandals which rubbed my feet. I was carrying my overnight bag in case I needed to stay and it was heavy. It was a hot day. Once in the hospital, I got lost again, until a harassed doctor stumbled over me crying in a deserted corridor and directed me to the right place.

    I found my father alone and asleep in the unit. Bodies lay around in beds, attached to a plethora of machines. as was my father. Nurses swathed in plastic protective gear attended to them. No one spoke.

    I didn’t know what to do so I sat and waited, watching the hands on the wall clock above the nurses’ station. They didn’t move. I’d never known time pass so slowly.

    Eventually my mother arrived, looking as glamorous as ever in white trousers and a navy-blue and white t-shirt. The anger towards my parents, which was always there inside me, now fought with a mixture of other emotions, mostly pity. I kissed her hello.

    A meal arrived and my father woke. He looked at his watch which he was wearing upside-down. He must have liked what he saw there however as he asked my mother to pour him a whisky, alcohol intake in my family being regulated not by quantity but by time - by pub opening hours as they were then. My mother reached for a bottle and glass on the windowsill. I was shocked.

    ‘You’re in hospital,’ I said. You can’t have alcohol.’

    My father looked puzzled. Whyever not, I could see him thinking. Whisky was as essential to his life as sleep and food.

    My mother poured him a tot and then cut up his food for him. Her hands were shaking.

    After an hour or so of polite conversation with the two of them, I couldn’t bear it any longer. My stomach was knotted with the stress of pretending to be normal.

    ‘I think I’ll go home,’ I said, grabbing my monstrous overnight bag.

    My mother looked surprised and maybe hurt.

    ‘I’ll be back,’ I said, kissing them both goodbye and fleeing.

 A few days later my brother Jo rang.

    ‘Dad’s decided he wants to come home. He doesn’t want to stay hooked up to a machine in London for the rest of his life,’ he explained.

    ‘So that means . . .’ I said.

    ‘Yes,’ said Jo. ‘They’re transferring him to a small cottage hospital near Mum and Dad’s where they can keep him comfortable.’

    I was impressed by my father’s courage. He’d always had a spiritual streak, helping with services in the village church, and spending hours staring into the bonfires he sometimes built at the weekend. His elder sister Susan, my godmother and beloved aunt, was deeply religious and told me how she’d once had a profound experience of God’s presence which had saved her after their mother died (of pneumonia when Aunt Susan was eight and my father six). She’d still suffered from bouts of depression all her life however.

    A day or two later, my mother rang. 

    ‘You have to come now,’ she said.

    Frog, Penny and I leapt into the car.

We were all there, all my brothers and sisters, staying at my parents’ house, and my mother was still organising meals for all of us, putting on a bright cheerful face. I wished she’d stop and be herself for a change.

    Frog and I drove to the hospital. My father was conscious but only just and he kept talking about the Mini Metro that he’d passed on to us after my mother acquired a new car.

    We nodded, enthusiastically, not quite sure where he was going with this.

    Like our animals, our cars came and went, and at one stage Frog had built a six-wheeled Mini kit car which looked like a giant greenhouse on wheels and had no seats in the back. Even though its top speed was only 40mph, it was perfect for carrying DIY materials as well as nieces, nephews and dogs who could all sprawl together. One day the roof had blown off in a storm on Salisbury Plain as we drove back to Devon from Kent, and we travelled the rest of the way (another two hours) with me clutching a wire to hold it back on again till we got home and Frog could do a proper repair. The Metro therefore had been something of a godsend.

    ‘It’s still going,’ we said. ‘We use it all the time. We’ve got it with us now.’

    That didn’t seem to be the right answer.

    I wondered if he was reassuring himself that he'd been a good father, that he'd always attended to our material needs. I wished he'd said that, instead of talking in code. (I wished later that I'd said something.)

It turned out that Frog and I were the last people to talk to my father. Later that evening the hospital rang.

    ‘You need to come now,’ they said.

    We all piled into cars and then sat round my father’s bed, talking desultorily and holding glasses of sherry, while the nurses fed him morphine. He was unconscious.

    Eventually the nurses ushered us children out.

    ‘You need to leave your mother alone with your father,’ they said.

    Cass and Danny elected to stay at the hospital, sleeping on the padded bench outside my father’s room, while Jo, Amelia, Frog and I went back to the house.

    In the morning it was all over. We four returned to the hospital and I was allowed into my father’s room to take a last look at him. I’d never seen a dead human before. I was uncomfortable seeing him so vulnerable. It felt voyeuristic. But then it wasn’t really him. It was like a waxwork.

    Back home, we all went upstairs for a lie down. My mother and I stood on the landing together and suddenly she reached out and kissed me. She’d never ever done anything like that before. Affection was always shown at specific times, like bedtime or hellos and goodbyes. It was never spontaneous. I had no idea what she meant by it.

To be continued