This was an experiment, 6 line verses, rhyme is a/d, b/e and c/f with syllables a / d /12, b/e 10 and c/f 8.  I think it’s too complicated and time-consuming, but the idea aint bad.  Anyway, here it is.   

His Twin

The Devil swept open wide the doorway to Hell, 

Admission allowed to those fiends who bore  

The vile number of the beast. 

The fallen Dark Angels elected there to dwell, 

Upon the endless ocean’s dark sands shore, 

Where the bloodshot light shone the least. 

They all entered within, a mighty, wicked throng, 

As it was what their cruel Master had bid, 

And roared in unison his praise, 

Before a desperate and harshly shrieking song,

Except one there among them, who silent hid,   

Touched not he by their foul malaise.  

Lilith’s dread spawn the lilin ran to welcome them, 

The triumphant returning evil horde, 

And a wild orgy then ensued, 

With dire screams, howls, lusting grunts and total mayhem,    

Testament to their most Satanic Lord, 

Of the labours of Lilith’s brood. 

The stranger’s righteous glamour totally concealed 

His actions as his great, white wings unfurled, 

And to the sky he powerful leapt, 

Where shortly it was he made height and sharply wheeled 

Over the damned and dreadful netherworld  

And as he flew he sorely wept. 

For all he saw below was dark, dark but deepest red, 

And harsh shrieks and pleading from ripped-raw throats,  

As onward he relentless flew, 

And at the last he still sobbing spied far ahead, 

That which he sought, a tower with a moat, 

Bathed in light of different hue. 

As nearer still he flew, his heart filled with cold dread, 

He saw clear, she to whom his path had led, 

A woman who with love shone bright,  

Though the stigmata upon her hands and feet bled, 

And a crown of thorns lay upon her head, 

A lance wound completed her plight. 

Rage fell upon him, as dark as a demon’s soul, 

As he stood and stared into sightless eyes 

Empty, bleeding sockets stared back. 

He roared with anger, to such cruelty behold, 

Took her in his arms, swift, leapt to the skies, 

And prayed somehow he’d make it back.

A ghastly clamour rose, winged demons all about, 

Forked tongues and barbed tails, sharp poisonous stings, 

Striking too his precious charge,   

Slower he injured flew but then a mighty shout, 

And there the Fallen Angels with black wings, 

Protecting, their crimes discharged! 

Thus a great phalanx flew above the Devil’s roar, 

Around their Brother, he fearing he might fall. 

She poured forth into them her Love, 

And strengthened they made at the last the open door. 

Flew they through and at the wondrous woman’s call, 

They followed were by countless doves. 

The Dark Angels, forgiven, turned she they to Light, 

And with a kiss she her saviour saved, 

As they settled to the pure ground. 

Her grim wounds vanished and once more she had her sight. 

She swift the door sealed firm on the depraved, 

And then looked she slow all around. 

And where ere her new, sad and tender, loving eyes espied, 

Humanity lay down their guns and knives, 

And war and violence did cease. 

The beasts, too, so the lamb lay at the lion’s side, 

A rainbow her Papa sent filled the skies, 

And the world lived in perfect peace. 

Question to self:  Why am I here?

That’s not a Darwin orientated question.  I used to know why I was here.  I used to be confident in my purpose.  I knew how I was of service.  I knew my duty.  I was an educator, and for over half my career a headmaster, sometimes of more than one school at once. My purpose was to provide and engender in young folk, and often older ones, curiousity, knowledge, a moral code, a feeling of self-worth and a ‘can do’ attitude, without fear of failure, and if the result was to fail, to learn why they failed and get on and do it right or do it different.  And the curiousity must be of the thirsty type, and broad, with the ability to look at things objectively, with a critical eye, and appreciate both truth and beauty. 

I tried to encourage and engender friendships which give and don’t just take, and focused on stamping out ‘isms’ and ‘phobias – racism, sexism, Islamophobia and most, xenophobia - and especially in the last 10 years give children and teachers direction and, by God, hope where little or none had been before!

I could go on forever, but that’s not my point.  The point is that my purpose which made Monday my favourite day and contributed to the breakup of several relationships and a couple of marriages isn’t there anymore.  So, why am I still here?  How do I serve?  What is my purpose?

I had contemplated retirement with absolute horror, but in the end I was lucky in a peculiar way.  I stayed an extra term to fight off Gormless Gove who had decided to personally intervene in my last school’s status.  It’s too complicated and irrelevant to detail here but I won.  It was hard though, and I had already wrecked myself  by a couple of years earlier not having an operation until much later than recommended because the particular school I was mostly with was in a bad place, as was the other one I was also working with. As they improved, I got to be great at wielding a crutch!  And then the time came when they were secure.  I was operated on. I was meant to have 7 weeks off, I went back after a week. 

Stupid, I know, but it was my duty because I was defined by what I did. I was a headmaster, and headmasters don’t duck their duty, or at least they shouldn’t.  Anyway, this meant by the time I left I had started to believe doctors who had told me for several years that I needed to quit because I was killing myself.  I knew I wasn’t.  Not quite, but as I left my last school, and stopped being a headmaster, I was too tired to care.  Like I said, I was lucky.

It was like a holiday at first, and old friends from time to time asked for help.  I also worked on analysing complex data for schools … I was a whiz at teasing info from spread sheets the size of football fields and turning what I found into action points.  How sad is that!  And I did a bit of leadership training, way outside of my old stomping ground, and it was satisfying, and new.  And increasingly I was writing.  And we came to Kerlanguet.  And I’ve been here five years.  And I’ve kept on writing.  And reading and thinking.  And I’m paid for doing whatever I want.  And I don’t know my purpose!

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not depressed.  I’m not unhappy.  I know that I am extraordinarily lucky.  I used to get up at 5.30 or earlier.  Now the alarm is set for 7.00.  I deliberately don’t set it on Monday to let it be my favourite day in another way – partly because I partake of the grape on Sundays!

Being paid for not working means every day is mine, to do with as I wish, as long as I am not absurdly extravagant.  I live in a lovely area, in a cracking country, in a lovely house, with a lovely and loving wife.  I have my beasties around me and a book lined study to call my own.  I have time to think the long thoughts of an oak tree, to write at my leisure and pleasure … But I don’t know my purpose!  What am I contributing?  Who am I helping?  How do I serve?  What is my duty?

I’m an ex-headmaster.  What’s the use in that?  I still got cries for help and such like when I came here and eventually I cut out of my life all those folk, and they were wonderful folk, nearly all of them, who’d followed me and then worked beside me as they grew.  I stopped answering emails.  I unfriended 10 years of my life on Facebook, the 10 most challenging, most satisfying, nearly killed me years.

It wasn’t because I didn’t care, it was because I cared too much and could no longer fulfil the duty of headmaster, Consultant, School Improvement Partner or Ofsted Inspector.  Nor could I fulfil my central duty of Care.  Care has a big C because that’s what it was.  If you’re a headmaster, at least like I was, you have not only up to 1000 kids in your care, you have a couple of hundred adults or so.  In some ways the numbers don’t matter.  The situation does.

Your prime task is the teaching and learning. You’d hope that you’d spend the majority of your time helping to improve the former, to give better quality for the latter.  Hope!  A happy school is generally a good school, though there are, of course exceptions.  Basically headmastering is about people, large, small, young, old, your school community.  Headmasters set the direction and the weather in the school.

As headmaster you may need to make sure staff have secure rooms in their homes in case there is a gas or chemical attack, because maybe lots of wise people knew that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction but we didn’t, and the British and American Embassy staff and Ambassadors didn’t either, and as a Warden I was briefed on this by military personnel who apparently knew their stuff.

You have to find a secure room within a school which will be safe for hundreds of children and all the staff, and you need to make sure the latter all have flights before the war kicks off.  You have to juggle millions of dollars or pounds, to get the best deal for kids and staff.  (You need a good bursar!)  You need to get the SAS in for advice on securing the school compound because it has become a named terrorist target.

You have to fire people, which stinks, and you become a bit of an ‘Agony Aunt’.  My colleagues and quite often parents, would come to me about marital problems, (Yep, I told them I wasn’t very good at it!)  How to get divorced; how to organise a funeral – I had to attend an Hindu, open casket funeral as the ‘patriarch’ in the life of one teaching assistant whose husband had died and she had no family elders in the country.  Remarkably he looked very well!

There were problems between staff, people who needed help with monetary difficulties and, cliché though it is, often mother-in-law interfering problems.  They came needing all sorts of legal advice -  I had a hot-line to the Citizens Advice Bureau!  (Well, I didn’t, but I should have.  And I did always have a lawyer’s number handy.)  There were problems with their kids; there were problems with access to health care, broken cars, breaking relationships, forced marriage – managed to stop two - marrying across religious divides … and on and on.

And there were the kids.  Front and centre.  Where to begin?  Okay, I took over a new school, the previous head having left after he had a nervous breakdown after one too many of the parents gave him a smacking and then bit him through his shirt and nearly ripped a nipple off!  I kept a rounders bat by my desk, but never needed it, though I did quite often have to go in the playgrounds at the end of the day and stop fights …involving parents.

I’d only been there a couple of days when a little Somali girl was brought to my attention.  She was 9 and kept attacking the oldest boys and beating the crap out of them.  Really savage.  She also wouldn’t talk to any male teachers.  I asked what her problem was and nobody knew so I had her Mum in and a translator.  She’d seen her father and brother hacked to death, her mother raped, and older sister gang raped, and then she’d been raped, at that time aged 7.  She had a bit of a down on men – obviously.

(As an aside, don’t talk to me about “bloody immigrants should go back to their own countries.”)

There have been kids who have wealthy, well-educated parents committing emotional abuse by being over-controlling, and parents who were money rich but time poor, who tried to buy their kids affection.  There have been kids who were with a single parent who was racist as hell but had three other kids, all of different colours!  No colour in bed apparently!  Kids whose Mums are hookers and dads in jail.  Kids with both parents drug addicts, alcoholics, you name it … 

There were 2 young girls whose father told how he kept watching TV shows late at night which were the government interfering and telling him to do obscene things to his children.  I had to threaten to take the Local Authority to court before they intervened.  They did but what a ghastly business.

There were father and son housebreakers, (2) the son going through a small window and letting his dad in.  In the schools I was headmaster in during the last 10 years there was a violent death of a member of the school community at least once a year, and suicides.  My learning how to make a school compound secure in Kuwait came in handy so there was no problem, for instance, putting the school in lockdown when a violent husband and his gang traced his wife and child to a Refuge and knew they would be coming to school.

In that school I had a senior member of staff who did no teaching or anything to do with what you’d normally consider a teacher’s role.  He spent all the time dealing with Social Services, and a group of colleague heads and I got together and employed 6 full-time psychologists between us because the Local Authority was broke and couldn’t provide these much needed folk for our kids.   

In a lovely leafy-laned school where I was head many years ago, we had a little girl who died of AIDS at the age of 7.  She’d been born with it.  Well-to-do parents who were also intravenous drugs users.  Later in my career I used to employ local bouncers at school fetes to get rid of the undesirables, especially the drug dealers.

There were kids who were regularly in trouble with the police and had the odd habit of throwing furniture at teachers.  All staff there were trained in methods of restraint, working in pairs.  There were kids whose clothes we washed and who we gave a free breakfast too in school.  We fed a fair few during the holidays too.  There were also kids whose parents were travellers, who would not claim anything from the state, so got no free school meals and when they were broke I used to pay for their lunches until we took over our own kitchens and factored in to the price.  Hungry, smelly kids don’t make good learners.  I could go on with this forever, but you get the picture.  I could make a difference.  I could serve.  I had a purpose.

So, yep, there were lots of problems, and I was hugely privileged that the parents and kids, one way or another brought them to me, and I did my damnedest to help them, and get them the support they needed.  I don’t do that anymore.  I can’t.  It’s odd.  When you’re a suited and booted headmaster you can open doors to support much more than you’d think.  And if you’re a suited and booted headmaster in a deprived area, and, ridiculously, you have a certain kind of accent, you can get, generally hugely overworked in such areas, Social Services folk, Doctors, Policemen, Parole Officers and Magistrates to lend an ear with regard to the kids and their parents, many of whom were troubled.  I can’t do any of that now.  So … just what is my bloody purpose?

How do I justify my existence now?  Am I just an old man, some sort of decadent sybarite,

duty-less and purposeless, slowly drifting into further physical decline before partaking in the next, exciting journey?  Nowadays I take but give nothing back.  I am of service to no one.  I contribute nothing.  I improve nobody’s life chances.  What’s more I am now unemployable as a headmaster except in certain niche or elite circumstance.  Too old.

I could do consultancy work, and with a bit of catch-up training do Ofsteds’ but I’d have no credibility as far as I’m concerned because I’m no longer a headmaster, walking the walk.  There are loads – probably the majority – of consultants and inspectors who aren’t heads but I wouldn’t really have the brass neck to stand in judgement of a school if I didn’t have one of my own.  The bits of work I did after I first retired was for friends.  Now I’m no longer in touch with them.  My choice.  So, I say again, what’s my purpose?

I do write, it’s true, and occasionally I please a few folk on FB with my latest and random scribblings, and that is truly gratifying and affirming, but the truth is that anything that could be described as even vaguely purposeful, approximately at least half a million words of it, (Some them actually making sense!)  I don’t really try to get published probably because I’m frightened of rejection.  It’s a kind of Catch 22.

I can write purposefully, and what I write is meant to entertain but also, in different ways, teach, but the more I feel purposeless, the more I don’t believe my work - and it is work, requiring significant time, effort and commitment - has what it takes to do what it is meant to do, be read, enjoyed and learned from by – Hell, let’s think big – countless millions of people.  But a journey of a thousand miles starts with the first step, and not only have I been chicken but it is possible nobody will want my work, and that would negate any raggle-arse purpose I have left!

I did dip my toe in the water a while ago, but hadn’t realised that things had changed since my last foray, long ago, into the publishing world.  They seem to do one of three things with a manuscript. One, they tell you it’s no good.  I haven’t had that.  Two, they tell you they’ll put in, let’s say, 20k if you put in, say 2k and they’ll publish a certain amount and see how it goes – hedging their bets.  I’ve had several of those.  The other is, they’ll publish.  I’ve had none of those and those are the only terms I would accept. That would be / is my Condition One.  Condition Two is that I can use a pseudonym.

I’ve also learned that it is probably a good idea to get yourself an agent who specialises in your genre and knows the ropes … so I have just sent off one manuscript to two publishers and one agent.  Sometimes – though rarely – they say that it could be a year before you hear anything!  They advise that in the interim you keep writing.  Well, it’s a start, anyway, and I will.

Also, here’s a strange thing, though it has no possibility of service or doing one’s duty, at least to others, I do feel a sense of (selfish) purpose in learning.  I don’t mean learning, as in the MOOCs I do about anything I fancy, or learning about the world politically, as I do somewhat obsessively at times, I mean learning for, I suppose, enlightenment.

I’m not sure it is spiritual enlightenment.  Maybe though.  Up to a point my broader spiritual needs and curiousity are served by the First Unitarian Universalist Church in Dallas where I attend regularly, on-line, and particularly enjoy the intellectual content of the sermons which are as likely to refer to the Buddha, Shakespeare or the wonderfully named, Hosea Ballou as the prophet Jesus, and where many of the community, like me, don’t know anything about God other than it is loving, and don’t presume to know more, being more interested in making ‘heaven’ on Earth, getting on out there and trying to make the world a better place, be it through their work, on protest marches, writing – whatever skills they can use to help make a positive difference.  As I used to.

So, going back to my (selfishly) purposeful learning for enlightenment, I have been hugely interested in reincarnation, reading research from places as far apart as Harvard, Stanford, Edinburgh and the University of Adelaide in, and have really ‘bought in’ to the reincarnation work and evidence base of Dr. Ian Stevenson and the  University of Virginia’s School Of Medicine.  I am convinced.

What has also gripped me is trying to understand consciousness, and the more I learn of quantum mechanics, quantum physics, superpositioning, and especially entangled particles, the more I feel I may be onto something.  This instant communication between entangled particles, no matter how far apart they are, is not only extraordinary but it also disproves Einstein’s theory of relativity, since they do move faster than the speed of light. 

The relativity of time, even within the amalgam of space/time, knocks on the head one of the 4 dimensions, and really since the time of Ancient Greek philosophers the other three have been ‘suspect’ and relative.  So there is in many ways a tabula rasa when one seeks meaning within our marvelous universe and the possibility that consciousness/soul is not just within our heads but may be everywhere, linked through entangled particles to trees, alien beings, the heart of stars, the poor, the dying, those being born, and may too be spread across time.  And then there’s the seductive ‘logic’ of Robert Lanza’s biocentrism!

It is fascinating and it is most assuredly purposeful learning …but it is selfish and serves nobody, and even if I made some real breakthrough in understanding, it is most likely that a) people wouldn’t be interested or that b) people with partial understanding, prejudices or even greater knowledge would only want to shoot it down, and therefore c) in the ‘fog’ nobody would believe it!  Except me. 

And perhaps an enlightened me would find other ways to have purpose, to serve, to be useful, to help make ‘heaven on Earth’ or whatever.  I guess with all of it, I’ll have to wait, and seek, and learn and throw away preconceptions, and then we’ll see. Or not, as the case may be. 

Watch this space.

A Portrait Of (A) Death

I’ve seen quite a lot of dead people in my time and been with a few when they died.  Two were peaceful, the others weren’t, and the worst was the Squire.  When I got the call from Mama about the diagnosis – they were in Herefordshire and I was in Newbury - I didn’t know how to process it, to be honest.  He’d been a giant in my life, a sort of living hero as well as in adulthood a friend.  All of us, including Mama, assumed Mama would go first.  This wasn’t meant to happen!

Anyway, he had cancer of the oesophagus, pretty advanced, and though they were going to operate they didn’t reckon much to his chances.  I’m not sure when this all was now, sometime in the early 80s, anyway, and the call was during a school holiday, I had just had a new partner move in with me, and I couldn’t quite get my head around things.  Essentially I didn’t eat, just drank Holsten Pils lager for a week and played pool at my ‘local’ pub.  I wasn’t that great at pool but that week nobody beat me.  They weren’t being kind – they didn’t know – but I just put all of myself into it so I didn’t have to think about the Squire.  An interesting lesson, in retrospect, on what can be achieved with sheer concentration.

I guess my subconscious maybe needed that space to chug along, and so it was at the week’s end I suddenly knew what to do.  Then it was just down to logistics.  Valda, Rex’ Mum was the new partner.   I’ve got to give her her due; she hadn’t been moved in for long and I said I was selling the house, quitting my job and going down to Herefordshire.  She said that was fine and quit hers too.  The head was very kind and offered to keep the job open but I didn’t think it was fair on the kids or the staff since I didn’t know how long I’d be away so I turned the offer down. 

I was fortunate.  I’d bought a little terraced house after leaving my first wife, dear Magee and then living with Annie for a while in a rented farmhouse and then leaving her.  Valda moved in after I’d been there for quite a bit.  Property prices had shot up and I lived next door to an estate agent which wanted to expand, so I flogged it off to them.  At the same time I got in touch with folk in Herefordshire and rented a little black and white that was about a mile, max, from my parents.

The Squire had his operation and it went much better than expected and they even reckoned there was a chance there would be no recurrence.  Judas, that was a bloody Hallelujah time.  I drank Pol Roger and Bollinger with great, relaxed and joyous enthusiasm, and a fair few bottles of Remy to celebrate.  I was gloriously happy for the Squire and Mama, but also a bloody dark demon had been ripped from my back too.  I have to wonder if that was selfish?  Maybe it was.  Anyway, in that great cloud of bubbles and happiness I also asked Valda to marry me and she consented.  Everything was groovy!

Obviously I was living off capital and that wasn’t going to last for ever.  Luck was with me though, and I got a job straight away, there being an immediate vacancy, teaching English to mostly top ‘O’ level sets – the easiest money I’ve ever made! – and Valda and I got married in a quiet ceremony with the Squire and Mama in attendance.  The Squire looked good, strong and relaxed, and it was a grand day.  Little did I know how much it was going to cost me to untangle the end results of that moment in time, but that’s another story!

Everything did seem great.  Valda and I decided – well, truth be told, I decided but Valda was happy enough with the decision – to get a job abroad and there was a post came up in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia wanting a couple, with the post to commence in around 9 months.  It was a large British School and the contracts were guaranteed by the British Council.  The salaries and conditions were more than acceptable, there was a promoted post which they gave to me, so that was us sorted.  So we thought.

Then the Squire started to show symptoms that the cancer had returned, and this was the first time I’d seen him ducking the truth, because he did not face up to the fact that this was the case for as long as he possibly could.  Maybe I would have done the same.  I don’t know.  I guess some day I might find out.  Anyway, in the end the biopsy showed that it was back and after further tests it was decided that this time it was inoperable.  I remember, I’d taken him to Hereford County Hospital to get the results.  He came out into the rain and got into the car, telling me that he was going to have to give Mama some bad news.  Mama knew.  We all knew … and now the Squire knew, whether he wanted to or not.  I told him that I thought she wouldn’t be surprised and we drove home in silence.

You know that thing about no man being an island?  It’s bollocks.  Sure, we were there for him.  When you get a death sentence, though, that, in the final analysis, makes you an island.  Your death is personal, obviously, but you really do have to do the dying.  Nobody can do it for you, no matter how much they love you.  In some ways, too, everybody who loves the person who is dying is an island also.  Yes, again we’re all there for each other but in the end you’re in a place you can’t really share.  I couldn’t go on about my feelings, for instance, to my mother.  Hell, she was his wife and I was one of the people on the scene who was meant to be helping hold it all together.  We were all islands, in truth, with temporary bridges joining us in this particular event.

I’m not saying any of the above for a ‘poor me’ moment.  It was as it was.  I’m just writing of a great learning experience in life.  Your death’s your own, and in the finals analysis, so is everybody else’s grief their own.  Hanging together through the whole experience is to be highly recommended though, and we hung together well, including Valda who was obviously new on the scene.  Remarkably, actually, we all had some good times after that, after all accepting what was really happening and our roles in that ‘play’.

The Squire’s health deteriorated pretty quickly after this.  I quit my job again and Valda and I moved in with the folks.  A sort of pattern was fairly quickly established.  You know that thing where you think about 4 o’clock in the morning as the darkest hour before dawn and all that?  Well, I think we felt, without discussing it (and erroneously, it transpired) that that was when the Squire would die.  He very quickly lost weight because his throat was wrecked, so he drank some slosh that was apparently full of goodness but wasn’t, and eventually his strength really failed and he spent a lot of time in bed.

On the theory that 4 in the morning was the big danger – bloody daft in retrospect – and the fact that the Squire now didn’t sleep in long stretches but dozed off and on, which became increasingly the case when the morphine was essential more often, it was necessary to rethink how we dealt with the days and nights so he always had company.  We didn’t want a nurse. Too impersonal.  So, during the day I’d snatch bits of sleep and Mama and Valda spent time with him and then I’d sit up with the Squire all night.  We’d talk about this and that; anything from Einstein’s theory of relativity and my difficulties with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason to times he’d had as a child, times we’d had together when we shared a house in Wiltshire and Mama was in Herefordshire, politics, philosophy, favourite places, authors, plays, music – hell, we talked about everything.  It was great!  And then when the light started to change and we could make out the hedge from his bedroom window there was a little moment of unvocalized triumph.  We’d made it to another day!

I’ve written before about his confession about cheating at Pooh Sticks for all those years, about watching Noggin the Nog together, his taking up the fags again, and enjoying the whiskey.  We had some good times, and, yep, some pretty low ones, but the good way outweighed the bad until pretty close to his death.  Of course, he didn’t die at 4 in the morning, more like 11.00 ish, but I happened to be with him.  It suddenly became pretty shitty.  He managed to tell me I’d better get Mama and I gave her a yell.  She cuddled him as everything went to hell in a handcart and told him to let go, and I injected him with a huge dose of morphine so he didn’t really have any choice other than to do what she said.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I reckon when somebody dies it is obvious pretty much immediately that they’ve left the building, so to speak.  That has been my experience, anyway.  When, years later Mama died, very peacefully, I was sitting ‘vigil’ with my brother-in-law, a doctor, and though her breathing slowly became shallower and sometimes stopped, when she died it was obvious. Thus it was with the Squire, but Mama needed to do all the old stuff with his pulse and then a mirror, which was fair enough.  Her island had just had the most important bridge blown-up.  I’ve got to say, during all of this my Mama was incredibly good, selfless and strong, right from the first diagnosis.  T’was not always thus, but this was her finest hour, as they say, or year really.  Anyway, Valda phoned the doctor who was a family friend, while I put the Squire’s teeth back in – I remembered when his father died and we went to view the body he was really upset that his teeth weren’t in, so this was a duty I felt I had to undertake.  It was somewhat uncomfortable, in truth, but there you go; it needed to be done and was.

As I was doing my stuff and we waited for the doctor, Mama went down the garden and sat in the summer house.  She was calm.  It was a relief, in truth.  Valda made some coffee and I finished the rest of the glass of whiskey the Squire had been drinking earlier and sat quietly and looked at his body, sharing that last drink together, sort of, and toasting his freedom and journey.  My solitude was broken with the arrival of Brian, the doctor, who checked to confirm the obvious and then asked where Mama was.  I told him and he went down stairs to go to the summer house.  Moments later I heard an almighty crash.  I shot down stairs and found him unconscious on the floor.  He’d whacked his head on a low beam.

Now, dearhearts, I don’t know if you’ve ever had to put your dead father’s teeth in while you mother grieves in the summer house, but somehow Brian’s timing for knocking himself out wasn’t really all that great!  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry and briefly, to my shame, thought of kicking him!  He came round quickly however, staggered to his feet and somehow had the ability to realise that everything was teetering on the edge of becoming a farce.  He looked at the beam, apologised profusely and tottered off down the garden rubbing his creased head while Valda waved me to a chair in front of the Rayburn and put a coffee in front of me.  Suddenly everything was so normal it was bizarre!

Anyway, the normal stuff then had to be done, and it was blessedly busy, busy for a while.  Of course the church and crem were packed, everybody sang up  (It was odd somebody else, a friend of the family, being up in the organ loft playing, since the Squire had normally been the organist)  and everything went off very well, in terms of there being no further fiascos!  With the singing, though, there was a little part of me hoping that he’d play an extra verse, as the Squire did if he thought people hadn’t sung very well, or sometimes dropped a verse because he’d lost count and everybody sort of blurted without music and then ground to a halt.  Naturally it didn’t happen.  Those days were over, for ever.

That was it, sort of, but of course it wasn’t.  As well as learning about being an island I learned something else, something which is extremely selfish and makes me really a somewhat tacky human being.  For months, if not years, my abiding memory of the Squire was of the way his body looked when he left it, sans dents.  It was the image that came to mind whenever I thought of him, not all the fun things we’d done over the years.  Not him as a tall, charismatic, handsome, smiling man.  His life was defined by his death, which was ridiculous but it was really hard, and required a conscious effort, to shake off.

When my Mama was dying it was obviously my filial duty to be there to the end, and her end was a different ball-game altogether, and I wanted, of course, to offer whatever comfort one could.  Because, I think, her death was so ‘comfortable’ and she looked pretty much as she had for some years, it somehow didn’t define her life when I thought about her.  Other deaths, unfortunately, tended to do to me what the Squire’s did, in terms of remembering them.  This cumulative bit of experience made me do what was tacky, but before that I had to go and visit my most beloved sister Carol as she was dying, at 49 which still has the illogical power to make me angry at the ‘injustice’ of the event.  She’d had MS for yonks, but her death was caused by an aneurism in the brain.  Whether that was something to do with the MS I don’t know, but anyway it wasn’t a bad death.  She sort of hovered in a kind of surreal, betweeny world for a bit and we had conversations about a Plantagenet man, of all things, and weird stuff which made no sense but seemed quite smooth at the time, oddly requiring no effort on my part to stay in the groove with her.  Anyway, it wasn’t bad, just far, far too early, but didn’t really define her life too much in my memory.

As a total aside, before I reveal the tacky thing, a little amusing event.  Carol and I had had a deal for years that the first one of us to die, the other one had to go to the funeral in a yellow Rolls Royce.  My brother-in-law Ian who sat with me some years later while Mama died, knew of this deal and he was happy enough for me to go for it, but also kindly said that I didn’t have to if I didn’t now want to or couldn’t.  I don’t when you last tried to hire a yellow Rolls Royce for a funeral but if you ever have to, you’ll find they’re not as common as you might think!  Patti, my partner at that time, was relentless, however, and managed to get one.  The last funeral it had been to was Freddy Mercury’s.  Anyway, my dear Mama had been going on fairly relentlessly about how incredibly vulgar it was but when it pulled up at the house she apparently had a change of mind.  She looked at it, in all its beautiful canary yellowness, and said, “I think I’ll come with you Christopher” to which I replied, “Fat too vulgar for you Mama” and Patti and I got in and off we went.  End of story other than to say that when we got to the crem we thought we must be hitting the end of another funeral because of the crowds of folk outside the doors.  We weren’t.  These were people who had come for Carol’s funeral but couldn’t get in because it was packed inside apart from seats reserved for the family.  A whole lot of people, rightly, loved my big sister!

So, that bit of light (ish) relief aside, on to the tacky and selfish thing that I have learned from various experiences.  When it looks like somebody is dying, don’t go to see them.  Oh, I would if I felt I could make a serious difference to them somehow, or their family.  I don’t however, if I know they are supported by friends and family and I’d just be going to say goodbye, essentially.  If relevant I write to them, sometimes daily, as was recently the case, but I don’t go to see them and, hugely selfishly and importantly for selfish old me, their final decline and death does not define them for me.  I remember them pretty much hale and hearty.  I can celebrate a life, not remember a death. 

Now, it’s wonderful, though tacky.  These folk remain ‘untainted’ by dying in my memory. There can be odd, somewhat bizarre spin-offs from this but in a strange way they’re quite pleasant.  As an example, I met somebody here in France who had once lived in Kerlanguet with her now dead husband,  and loved it as I do.  She was in her 80s, tech savvy, artistic, into dowsing, hypnosis, flower essences etc – a real broad character – and we became firm friends.  She’d come every week and we’d paint together, eat cakes and natter.  (Actually Ali and Barbara would paint and I’d sort of colour in!)  Anyway, we really hit it off and in the 4 years or whatever, we knew her, we really became friends, the sort of friendship which usually only happens when you’ve known somebody for years.

So, what happened was she started presenting with the symptoms the Squire had.  She had all sorts of bits and pieces wrong with her wee body – nothing wrong with her mind though – so she was used to odd physical things happening to her.  Now, I’m not a doctor but it did seem similar, and of course I Googled it.  I didn’t feel I should say, ‘I think you’ve got cancer of the oesophagus’ – in retrospect I wish I had - but I did nag her constantly to see a doctor.  When at last she did, it was confirmed. 

Off to hospital she went but being frail it was difficult for anybody to do anything.  She had with her her very dear friend, a constant and most loyal and dutiful companion, during her decline and eventual move to a hospice to die.  Family came and lots of friends visited.  I didn’t.  I wrote often long letters to her just about every day and they pleased her and cheered her.  She knew I wasn’t keen on hospitals, not having had a ball in such establishments myself, and perhaps knew more, but anyway, it was as it was so I didn’t see her ‘decline and fall’.

Now I drive past her house which has the shutters closed and my mind plays foolish tricks, seeing her in there, listening to loud music and painting, the whole death thing being a ‘mistake’ or hoax.  I still see her alive, as I do another less close but none-the-less real friend who I didn’t go to see in his final days, knowing his family and friends were supporting him, and now I see him in my mind’s eye as big, bluff, laughing and taking the piss out of me about Brexit!  It’s selfish, I know, and if everybody did it, which is a question one needs to ask oneself if one is truly exploring one’s responsibilities in life, it would be a disaster.  In my defence, if there weren’t sufficient family and friends about and somebody I knew well was dying I’d do my damnedest to be there for them.  Otherwise, though, I won’t, and my life is much better for it!

As for my own death, I’m most certainly not ready now.  I don’t fear death; I do however, fear a death that is lingering, painful or, most of all, includes dementia, for it is my mind that most matters to me.  I don’t fear the personally big event, and am very curious and quite excited to understand the more relevant existence that will be clearer to me when my clogs have popped, though I do not want to leave loved ones and beasties.  I know I’ll see them again but the circumstances will be different and anyway, they matter very much to my daily / general existence and it is hard to imagine that not being the case, or not ‘hurting’ because of their absence.  On the other hand I’m looking forward to seeing family and friends again, or at least those who are still doing whatever it is we do in between incarnations. 

Looking worldwide, 151,600 people die each day; that’s 151,600 personal and family griefs and, in relative terms, often tragedies.   Almost double the amount are born each day, 360,000; that’s potentially 360,000 joyous celebrations.  Personally I find the numbers staggering and am unable to get my head round so much grief and so much joy.  Also, if you believe in reincarnation, as I do, one has to wonder where the 208,400 additional souls come from!  Maybe one is being somewhat parochial, assuming that they come from the dominant species of this planet.  Maybe they come from an inferior species on another one.  I don’t know and, in the final analysis, I accept that there are certain things which are inevitably unknowable.  I find it a curious conceit that different kinds of Mosques, Churches, Temples and Gurdwaras etc contain billions of people who apparently know what the plan is, what God is thinking and what his – it’s generally a him, though not for Hindus – rules of play for the game of life are.  Me, I think what I think based on personal experience, talking with loads of people, thinking and reading.  I have no desire to encourage people to my truth since I don’t for a moment think I, or anybody else, is capable of understanding the creator of the whole kit and caboodle.  The idea is absurd!  From my own experience I know there is an immeasurably large amount of love involved and as for the rest, whatever else is going on, I’m sure it will all work out okay. Relative to my belief systems, logically, new life is worthy of celebration, each an individual, unique and to be treasured, but death should be celebrated also as, at times relief from pain etc. but more importantly because the ‘soul’ / consciousness or whatever is going on into the next phase of development.  Our grief is a ‘selfish’ thing, in a sort of unselfish way, because we’re going to miss whoever it is who has died.  Logic, however, doesn’t take the pain of loss away, nor the anger when the death is that of a child, or happens too soon to a very good person like my sister Carol, who was the pick of the litter! And that’s about it, dearhearts.  That’s my portrait of (a) death.  C.S. Lewis said, ‘We do not have souls; we are souls’, or something to that effect.  I agree, and life as we define it normally is not the most precious thing there is, souls are, whatever they are, souls and love. Love to you all.

Letters To My Eldest Niece to Answer Queries About Her Mum’s Childhood

Hi Lyndis,

This is Dartan Hall where your Mum, your Aunty Lyndis and I grew up in - where I was born, indeed - when we lived in Ireland. They were different times, less complicated, less money conscious. Your Mum used to practise her cello under the bows of an oak that was near the house and I used to drive my pedal car round the kitchen, much to the annoyance of cook. I remember once your Aunt Lyndis had done something to annoy your Mama and we were all woken by screams of pain and horror. Your Mama had put a hedgehog - Tiggy by name - in Lyndis' bed. Probably the world is a better place now, but it was a joyous childhood

Hello again Lyndis. 

Okay, you asked, what happened next and how did we end up in England.  I know this is public but it’ll make it easier for your siblings and my cousins to read and chip into if interested.  Also, remember that it was long ago and the memory does strange things! That said, here goes! 

Okay, I’m guessing we moved because we all missed your Mum.   This meant the Squire, never motivated by money or power, moved up the greasy pole in education anyway and took a job in, of all places, London, but of course that was logical, since that was where your Mum attended Sadlers Wells.  It was a hell of change but it did mean your Mum could live at home a lot of the weekends.  I wasn’t happy because it meant I left my Nanny, Pam, (who I was far too old to need!) in Ireland, but I was pleased that I could see your Mum, though in those days we would often fight like hell at every opportunity!   (She being older and stronger, when it all got physical I developed the strategy of lying in a corner of a room and kicking outwards.  Great defence if you ever need it!)

We moved into a Victorian house in Teddington.  It was okay, but very different from Dartan.  It did have Teddington Lock to go and look at though, and unremarkably there were a lot more people around!   There was a little Prep school near there which I attended as a day boy.  I’m not sure what happened to Lyndis, school-wise.  Anyway, we didn’t stay there long because your Mum’s knee started moving out of joint which meant the end to her aspirations to be a ballet dancer.   I don’t know it, but I think the folks weren’t really enamoured with living in a city, even though in those days Teddington was very sleepy. 

Anyway, the Squire got a Headship in Carlisle and we upped sticks and moved to Copper Hall in a village about 15 miles away.  (Cous Ginnie, do you remember swapping houses for a holiday, you going there and us going to your Manse in Swindon?)   There your Mum ended up attending an Art College, Aunt Lyndis went to a Convent and after a wee while in a local school, when I was 10 I went back to Ireland to the boarding school the Squire had been teaching in, and ‘my’ beloved Pam used to come and visit me with sweets and comics. 

It was fairly soon after this that your Mama had an accident, throwing her arms in the air in a comical gesture and catching her hand on a meat hook which was fixed into a beam.  (You probably know, but just in case, people used to hang salted meat on them to keep them through the winter.  They were big and sharp!  Copper Hall had them in the kitchens but your Mum was visiting a friend and they had a smaller house and therefore the (obviously unused) meat hooks were in their sitting room.)  Anyhow, she ripped her large finger to buggery and was hospitalised and her fingers, muscles, tendons, whatever were sewn back together as well as possible, but as you will know, a particular finger never quite returned to its original mobility.  

After a while when she came home – I was told about this by the Squire and Mama, as I was away in Ireland – the hospital proved to have extraordinarily good post-operative care systems and a handsome young Scottish doctor who had performed the operation visited the house several times to ensure she was healing properly.   This, of course, was your Dad.  The rest, as they say, is history with regard to that story.  They started courting and then got married.  I remember the wedding well.   They made a handsome couple. 

Your Mama remembered her first sight of your father’s naked body well also.  In those days everything was a bit more ‘innocent’.  Also, then stag night’s weren’t a weekend away on the lash in Amsterdam, they were the night before, and your father’s friends had got him ridiculously pissed – your folks told me this story in your house (was it Lonsdale/Langley Avenue?)  anyway, they told it to me in the sitting room there, and said ‘friends’ thought it a merry jape to take him back to Carlisle Hospital and put him in a bath of some kind of green dye.  When he woke up he managed to use a pumice stone to remove it from his face and hands so he was fine for the wedding and festivities but when he stripped down, the first time your Mama saw him in all his naked glory, the rest of him was like the Jolly Green Giant!   

After that, as you know, I guess, nobody talked to them about contraception – at least I assume this is the case, since it certainly wasn’t for religious reasons - and they had the 5 of you.  I seem to remember that by the time Morag was born you were only 7 or 8?  I also seem to remember you all being Christened by Uncle Peter, the Squire’s brother, and at least 4 of you were ambulatory.

Backing up a bit, your Papa, as was good form in those days, had asked the Squire if he could have your Mum’s hand in marriage.  It was obvious to the folks and even to a small boy like me, that he was a man of good character and they were madly in love, so he said yes.  As a little joke the Squire also said she was a little immature but like a good wine she’d mature well with age and if she hadn’t reached full maturity by the age of 30 he’d have her back.  Talk about a hostage to fortune! 

On her 30^th birthday apparently your father turned up on your grandparent’s door step with your Mum and the 5 of you and handed her back!   You know how serious your Dad could look if he wanted to?   Well, apparently he managed to look that serious and then some and the Squire and Mama thought for a minute or two he was serious!  

When they were first married they were really poor in the early days.  Junior Housemen, as they were called in those days, were appallingly paid and worked ludicrously long hours.  Your Papa sometimes, as a surgeon, worked up to 40 hours on the trot with little or no sleep.  He had remarkable stamina and dedication to duty.  Anyway, they had an account in a garage – people used to do that a lot in those days, indeed even I did for a few years when I started working – which was paid monthly, so if they had been to see my parents several times already in a given month and eaten them out of house and home they used to fill up the car and drive to Paisley and eat your Dad’s parents out of house and home and drive back the same evening.  There being no motorways in those days it was a fair old trip! 

I remember that they had a flat in Carlisle and when I was back from Ireland one holiday I went to stay with them for the first time.  It was winter and when we got to the flat there was a power cut.  I think I’d only just got back from school, literally, that day, and the crossing hadn’t been great and I was knackered (and it was bloody cold!) so by torchlight they showed me to my bed and I crashed out.

Next morning I woke early in the half light, a bit disorientated about where I was, and, I must be truthful, I yelled wildly, madly, extremely loudly and your parents bundled in to see what the problem was, and I pointed a trembling finger, unable to speak – Imagine that! - at the full sized skeleton which was standing at the end of my bed, looming over me.  Your Mum said something like, “Oh, that’s Fred.  He’s Ian’s” and once they’d got me calmed down they went off back to bed.  I felt a bit of a fool and somewhat a coward, but I got up, dressed and sat quietly in the sitting room, alone with my thoughts, until they got up. 

I think it / he was called Fred.  Do you remember him from your childhood?  Was he? I can’t remember seeing him when your folks moved to Glasgow.  Anyway, from here on I guess you know the story, and I hope I haven’t bored you, but you did ask. 

To finish I’ll just say something of my relationship with your Mum and, a bit, your Dad.  As said earlier, your Mum and I used to fight, but after I started living in the Royal, somehow when I went ‘home’ for hols I often ended up staying with your folks.  Your Dad and I had a slightly prickly relationship.  I was a boy, growing into teenager, grunt mode and knowing all the answers.  In retrospect he was very patient, forgiving and always, always welcoming. 

As I got older, however, he still treated me as a boy until, to my shame, and perhaps they told you about this, on one occasion, most extraordinarily, whilst we were having a row standing in your sitting room, he pushed me physically. I’m afraid, though I eschew violence whenever possible, if violence is called for I go from nought to a hundred in a nanosecond.  So … I picked up the coffee table, whacked him with it and then unsheathed the sword by the fire which was used for poking the coals and chased him upstairs where he locked himself in the bathroom and you Mama persuaded me to stop hacking at the door and yelling at him.  Did she say, “Think of the children?”  I’m not sure, but probably not.  After that I think I behaved a bit more cautiously and your Dad no longer treated me as a boy, and for all those many years afterword I’d like to think we were good friends. 

I said, however, I wanted to tell you about my relationship with your Mama.  We became great friends in a way that I think only siblings can.  When you were in Glasgow you may remember I visited often, coming straight from school at the end of terms, and for extended periods – though not as often or for such extended periods, I sincerely hope, as my Mama!   That continued through Uni and on through times of working in the UK.

As later I wandered the world, when ‘home’ on leave I would see her and you all as much as possible.  We had a strange bond.  We ‘clicked’.  We made each other laugh hysterically, easily.  We knew what each other was thinking, a great deal, without a word.  In retrospect I think even more highly of your father, for a lesser man might have been irrationally jealous. 

Your Mum (and sometimes Dad) took me to the theatre, museums and galleries and helped to educate me about art.  She ‘infected’ my eyes so that I looked at art and in some ways the world differently.  I started seeing people differently, also. We were ‘easy’ together, always.  When she phoned me in, say Jakarta, I’d pick up the phone and say, “Hi Carol”.  No, I didn’t say “Hi Carol” to everybody when I answered the phone!  It was only your Mum, and though nothing was planned for a phone call, I always knew it was her and answered without thinking. 

I still dream of her quite often, and often the dreams are so vivid about the absurd things we talked about that it is hard to make myself believe when I wake that somehow, in some incomprehensible way, it didn’t really happen.  She was, of course, my sister but your Mum, and she loved you all dearly, fiercely and proudly.  I was never jealous of that and loved you all also, because she loved you and because you were (are) all lovely children and then adults. 

I see your Mum in all of you and though it has been ‘forever’ since we’ve all seen each other, what I know of you now gives me no cause to change my mind.  As you know, she was a remarkable human being in so many extraordinary ways, she was a remarkable mother and she remains my remarkable sister and friend. 

Love to you all.

‘Unc’

(As Nicky likes to say)