What
they would have wanted
When Julian Barnes buried his mother, he thought it would
be less upsetting than losing his father. But it was not - her death was their
death. In an exclusive extract from his new book, the author reflects on
memory, mortality and final goodbyes
Saturday February 23 2008
Albert Leonard Barnes and Kathleen Mabel Barnes
I don't believe in
God, but I miss Him. That's what I say when the question is put. I asked my
brother, who has taught philosophy at
The
person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock, née Machin. She was a
teacher in
The
change from teeth to dentures struck my brother and me as both grave and
ribald. But my grandmother's life had contained another enormous change, never
alluded to in her presence. Nellie Louisa Machin,
daughter of a labourer in a chemical works, had been
brought up a Methodist, while the Scoltocks were
Church of England. At some point in her young adulthood, my grandmother had
suddenly lost her faith and, in the smooth narration of family lore, found a
replacement: socialism. I have no idea how strong her religious faith had been,
or what her family's politics were; all I know is that she once stood for the
local council as a socialist and was defeated. By the time I knew her, in the
1950s, she had progressed to being a communist. She must have been one of the
few old-age pensioners in suburban Buckinghamshire who took the Daily Worker
and - so my brother and I insisted to one another - fiddled the housekeeping to
send donations to the newspaper's Fighting Fund.
In
the late 1950s, the Sino-Soviet schism took place, and communists worldwide
were obliged to choose between
My
brother did not compete for such offerings, because some years previously there
had been a Stamp-Collecting Schism in our home. He had decided to specialise in the
My
grandfather was a Brylcreem man, and the antimacassar
on his Parker Knoll armchair - a high-backed number with wings for him to
snooze against - was not merely decorative. His hair had whitened sooner than
Grandma's; he had a clipped, military moustache, a metal-stemmed pipe and a
tobacco pouch that distended his cardigan pocket. He also wore a chunky hearing
aid, another aspect of the adult world - or rather, the world on the farther
side of adulthood - which my brother and I liked to mock. "Beg
pardon?" we would shout satirically at one another, cupping hands to ears.
Both of us used to look forward to the prized moment when our grandmother's
stomach would rumble loudly enough for Grandpa to be roused from his deafness
into the enquiry, "Telephone, Ma?" An embarrassed
grunt later, they would go back to their newspapers. Grandpa,
in his male armchair, deaf aid occasionally whistling and pipe making a
hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over the Daily
Express, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly
imperilled by the Communist Threat. In her
softer, female armchair - in the red corner - Grandma would tut-tut away over
the Daily Worker, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in
their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by
Capitalism and Imperialism.
Grandpa,
by this time, had reduced his religious observance to watching Songs of Praise
on television. He did woodwork and gardened; he grew his own tobacco and dried
it in the garage loft, where he also stored dahlia tubers and old copies of the
Daily Express bound with hairy string. He favoured my
brother, taught him how to sharpen a chisel, and left him his chest of
carpentry tools. I can't remember him teaching (or leaving) me anything, though
I was once allowed to watch while he killed a chicken in his garden shed. He
took the bird under his arm, stroked it into calmness, then
laid its neck on a green metal wringing machine screwed to the door jamb. As he
brought the handle down, he gripped the bird's body ever more tightly against
its final convulsions.
My
brother was allowed not just to watch, but also participate. Several times he
got to pull the lever while Grandpa held the bird. But our memories of the
slaughter in the shed diverge into incompatibility. For me, the machine merely
wrung the chicken's neck; for him, it was a junior guillotine. "I have a
clear picture of a small basket underneath the blade. I have a (less clear)
picture of the head dropping, some (not much) blood, Grandpa putting the
headless bird on the ground, its running around for a few moments ..." Is
my memory sanitised, or his infected by films about
the French revolution? In either case, Grandpa introduced my brother to death -
and its messiness - better than he did me. "Do you remember how Grandpa
killed the geese before Christmas?" (I do not.) "He used to chase the
destined goose round its pen, flailing at it with a crowbar. When he finally
got it, he would, for good measure, lay it on the ground, put the crowbar
across its neck, and tug on its head."
My
brother remembers a ritual - never witnessed by me - which he called the
My
brother also remembers that once, when he was very small, he went into
Grandpa's garden and pulled up all the onions. Grandpa beat him until he
howled, then turned uncharacteristically white, confessed everything to our
mother, and swore he would never again raise his hand to a child. Actually, my
brother doesn't remember any of this - neither the onions, nor the beating. He
was just told the story repeatedly by our mother. And indeed, were he to
remember it, he might well be wary. As a philosopher, he believes that memories
are often false, "so much so that, on the Cartesian principle of the
rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some external support".
I am more trusting, or self-deluding, so shall continue as if all my memories
are true.
Our
mother was christened Kathleen Mabel. She hated the Mabel, and complained about
it to Grandpa, whose explanation was that he "had once known a very nice
girl called Mabel". I have no idea about the progress or regress of her
religious beliefs, though I own her prayer book, bound together with Hymns
Ancient and Modern in soft brown suede, each volume signed in surprising green
ink with her name and the date: "Dec: 25t.h 1932." I admire her
punctuation: two full stops and a colon, with the stop beneath the "th" placed exactly between the two letters. You don't
get punctuation like that nowadays.
In
my childhood, the three unmentionable subjects were the traditional ones:
religion, politics and sex. By the time my mother and I came to discuss these
matters - the first two, that is, the third being permanently off the agenda -
she was "true blue" in politics, as I would guess she always had
been. As for religion, she told me firmly that she didn't want "any of
that mumbo-jumbo" at her funeral. So when the undertaker asked if I wanted
the "religious symbols" removed from the crematorium wall, I told him
I thought that this is what she would have wanted.
The
past conditional, by the way, is a tense of which my brother is highly
suspicious. Waiting for the funeral to start, we had, not an argument - this
would have been against all family tradition - but an exchange which
demonstrated that if I am a rationalist by my own standards, I am a fairly
feeble one by his. When our mother was first incapacitated by a stroke, she
happily agreed that her granddaughter C. should have the use of her car: the
last of a long sequence of Renaults, the marque to
which she had maintained a Francophiliac loyalty over
four decades. Standing with my brother in the crematorium car park, I was
looking out for the familiar French silhouette when my niece arrived at the
wheel of her boyfriend R.'s car. I observed - mildly,
I am sure - "I think Ma would have wanted C. to come in her car." My
brother, just as mildly, took logical exception to this. He pointed out that
there are the wants of the dead, ie things which
people now dead once wanted; and there are hypothetical wants, ie things which people would or might have wanted.
"What Mother would have wanted" was a combination of the two: a
hypothetical want of the dead, and therefore doubly questionable. "We can
only do what we want," he explained; to indulge the maternal hypothetical
was as irrational as if he were now to pay attention to his own past desires. I
proposed in reply that we should try to do what she would have wanted, a)
because we have to do something, and that something (unless we simply left her
body to rot in the back garden) involves choices; and b) because we hope that
when we die, others will do what we in our turn would have wanted.
I
see my brother infrequently, and so am often startled by the way in which his
mind works; but he is quite genuine in what he says. As I drove him back to
"It's
irrelevant," my brother replied, "whether or not I approve of
R." "No, it's not. C. might want you to approve of him."
"On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him." "But
either way, it's not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or
disapprove." He thought this over for a moment. "You're right,"
he said. You can perhaps tell from these exchanges that he is the elder
brother.
My
mother had expressed no views about the music she wanted at her funeral. I
chose the first movement of Mozart's piano sonata in E flat major K282 - one of
those long, stately unwindings and rewindings, grave even when turning sprightly. It seemed to
last about 15 minutes instead of the sleeve-noted 7, and I found myself wondering
at times if this was another Mozartian repeat or the
crematorium's CD player skipping backwards. The previous year I had appeared on
Desert Island Discs, where the Mozart I had chosen was the Requiem. Afterwards,
my mother telephoned and picked up on the fact that I had described myself as
an agnostic. She told me that this was how Dad used to describe himself -
whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic was a
wishy-washy liberal position, as opposed to the truth-and-market-forces reality
of atheism. "What's all this about death, by the way?" she continued.
I explained that I didn't like the idea of it. "You're just like your
father," she replied. "Maybe it's your age. When you get to my age
you won't mind so much. I've seen the best of life anyway. And think about the
Middle Ages - then their life expectancy was really short. Nowadays we live 70,
80, 90 years ... People only believe in religion because they're afraid of
death." This was a typical statement from my mother: lucid, opinionated, explicitly impatient of opposing views. Her dominance of the
family, and her certainties about the world, made
things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly
repetitive in adulthood.
After
her cremation, I retrieved my Mozart CD from the "organist" who, I
found myself reflecting, must nowadays get his full fee for putting on and
taking off a single CD track. My father had been despatched,
five years earlier, at a different crematorium, by a working organist earning
his money honestly from Bach. Was this "what he would have wanted"? I
don't think he would have objected; he was a gentle, liberal-minded man who
wasn't much interested in music. In this, as in most things, he deferred -
though not without many a quietly ironical aside - to his wife. His clothes,
the house they lived in, the car they drove: such deci-sions
were hers. When I was an unforgiving adolescent, I judged him weak. Later, I
thought him compliant. Later still, autonomous in his views but disinclined to
argue for them.
The
first time I went to church with my family - for a cousin's wedding - I watched
in amazement as Dad dropped to his knees in the pew, then covered his forehead
and eyes with one hand. Where did that come from, I asked myself, before making
some half-heartedly imitative gesture of piety, attended by furtive squinting
through the fingers. It was one of those moments when
your parents surprise you - not because you've learnt something new about them,
but because you've discovered a further area of ignorance. Was my father merely
being polite? Did he think that if he simply plonked
himself down he would be taken for a Shelleyan
atheist? I have no idea.
He
died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final minutes
by a nurse, months - indeed, years - after medical science had prolonged his
life to a point where the terms on which it was being offered were
unimpressive. My mother had seen him a few days previously, but then suffered
an attack of shingles. On that final visit, he had been very confused. She had
asked him, characteristically, "Do you know who I am? Because the last
time I was here, you didn't know what I was." My father had replied, just
as characteristically, "I think you're my wife."
I
drove my mother to the hospital, where we were given a black plastic bag and a
creamy holdall. She sorted through both very quickly,
knowing exactly what she wanted and what was to be left for - or at least with
- the hospital. It was a shame, she said, that he never got to wear the big
brown slippers with the easy Velcro fastenings that she'd bought him a few
weeks earlier; unaccountably, to me, she took these home with her. She
expressed a horror of being asked if she wanted to see Dad's body. She told me
that when Grandpa died, Grandma had been "useless" and had left her
to do everything. Except that at the hospital, some wifely or atavistic need
had kicked in, and Grandma had insisted on seeing her husband's body. My mother
tried to dissuade her, but she was unbudgeable. They
were taken to some mortuary viewing space, and Grandpa's corpse was displayed
to them. Grandma turned to her daughter and said, "Doesn't he look
awful?"
When
my mother died, the undertaker from a nearby village asked if the family wanted
to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, his reply - when I
telephoned through the question - was, "Good God, no. I agree with Plato
on that one." I didn't have the text he was referring to immediately in
mind. "What did Plato say?" I asked. "That he didn't believe in
seeing dead bodies." When I turned up alone at the undertaker's - which was merely the rear extension to a local haulage business -
the funeral director said apologetically, "I'm afraid she's only in the
back room at the moment." I looked at him questioningly, and he
elaborated: "She's on a trolley." I found myself replying, "Oh,
she didn't stand on ceremony", though couldn't claim to guess what she
would, or wouldn't, have wanted in the circumstances.
She
lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a
trolley, with the back of her head towards me as I went in, thus avoiding an
instant face-to-face. She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly
open, and more so on the left side than the right, which was just like her -
she used to hang a cigarette from the right corner of her mouth and talk out of
the opposite side until the ash grew precarious. I tried to imagine her
awareness, such as it might have been, at the moment of extinction. This had occurred a couple of weeks after she was moved from hospital
into a residential home. She was quite demented by this time, a dementia of
alternating kinds: one in which she still believed herself in charge of things,
constantly ticking off the nurses for imaginary mistakes; the other,
acknowledging that she had lost control, in which she became a child again,
with all her dead relatives still alive, and what her mother or grandmother had
just said of pressing importance. Before her dementia, I frequently found myself
switching off during her solipsistic monologues; suddenly, she had become
painfully interesting. I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from,
and how the brain was manufacturing this counterfeit reality. Nor could I now
feel any resentment that she only wanted to talk about herself.
I
was told that two nurses had been with her at the moment of death, and were
engaged in turning her over, when she had just "slipped away". I like
to imagine - because it would have been characteristic, and people should die
as they have lived - that her last thought was addressed to herself and was
something like, Oh, get on with it then. But this is sentimentalism - what she
would have wanted (or rather, what I would have wanted for her) - and perhaps,
if she was thinking anything, she was imagining herself a child again, being
turned in a fretful fever by a pair of long-dead relatives.
At
the undertaker's, I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the
hairline. Was she that cold because she'd been in the freezer, or because the
dead are naturally so cold? And no, she didn't look awful. There was nothing overpainted about her, and she would have been pleased to
know that her hair was plausibly arranged ("Of course I never dye
it," she once boasted to my brother's wife, "it's all natural").
Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly
curiosity than filial feeling; but there was a bidding farewell to be done, for
all my long exasperation with her. "Well done, Ma," I told her
quietly. She had, indeed, done the dying "better" than my father. He
had endured a series of strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had
gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily. When
I picked up her bag of clothes from the residential home (a phrase which used
to make me wonder what an "unresidential
home" might be), it felt heavier than I expected. First I discovered a
full bottle of
My
father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the
harder death, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be
irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the
other way round: what I had expected to be the lesser death proved more
complicated, more hazardous. His death was just his death; her death was their
death. And the subsequent house-clearing turned into an exhumation of what we had
been as a family - not that we really were one after the first 13 or 14 years
of my life. Now, for the first time, I went through my mother's handbag. Apart
from the usual stuff, it contained a cutting from the Guardian listing the 25
greatest postwar English batsmen (though she never read the Guardian); and a
photo of our childhood dog Max, a golden retriever. This was inscribed on the
back in an unfamiliar hand "Maxim: le chien",
and must have been taken, or at least annotated, in the early 1950s by P., one
of my father's French assistants.
P.
was from
As
for Max, he had either run away or - since we could not imagine him wishing to
abandon us - been stolen, shortly after the photo was taken; and wherever he
had gone, must have been dead himself for more than 40 years. Though my father
would have liked one, my mother would never have another dog after that.
©
Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
URL: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/feb/23/biography.julianbarnes
Articles
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Biography
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