My flight next day was at 1430 hours, so I had some free time in the morning to do some shopping. I bought an amber necklace for Anne and an antique silver brooch for Fred and some cute wooden toys from a stall in the market square for Daniel and Lena - an articulated camel that waddled down a ramp by its own momentum particularly took my fancy. I returned to the hotel pleased with these purchases and went to reception to tell them I would be checking out soon. The man on duty gave me a message slip: ‘
Please call your wif as soon as possible. Urgenty.
’
My first thought was like a blow to the heart:
something wrong with Anne’s baby
. I’m afraid I uttered a silent petitionary prayer as I hurried up to my room, and I suppose one could say that it was answered - but not in a way that brought relief from anxiety. It wasn’t Anne’s baby - it was Dad. ‘Your father’s in hospital - they think it’s a stroke,’ Fred said when I got through to her. I didn’t catch everything she said through the wretched hotel telephone, but I got the gist. Richard had gone to Lime Avenue that morning by arrangement, banged on the door, got no answer, enquired of the Barkers, who knew nothing, climbed over the back gate of the house and looked through the French windows into the dining room and saw Dad lying on the floor next to the television, which was on. Richard got a heavy chisel from the toolshed in the garden and levered the windows open, found Dad unconscious and called an ambulance. The paramedics thought it was a stroke rather than a heart attack. Richard had called Fred to tell her he was going with Dad in the ambulance to the local hospital and she had called me immediately. She didn’t know any more. ‘Thank goodness I caught you, darling. You’ll be able to go straight to the hospital from Heathrow.’ I had already had the same thought.
It was evening by the time I got to the Tideway Hospital, sweating inside my heavy winter overcoat in London’s unseasonably warm weather, and dragging my wheeled suitcase.The reception desk said regretfully that they couldn’t look after it, for security reasons, so I had to lug it with me up to the geriatric ward where Dad had been placed. The old people propped up in their beds in various states of debility and dementia regarded me with alarm as I passed them in my black overcoat, my suitcase rumbling on the vinyl-tiled floor behind me, as if they feared I was an undertaker come to measure them up. Richard, who was sitting beside Dad, said that he had only been in the ward for an hour or so, and that they had had to wait for hours in A&E before he was examined by a doctor. Dad was a pathetic sight: his face was bruised down one side where he had banged it against the sideboard when he collapsed, and he had a dressing on his forehead. He looked haggard and dazed, and his false teeth had been removed. A drip was attached to the back of his hand, and a notice at the foot of the bed said, ‘
Nil by mouth
’. Apparently stroke victims have difficulty swallowing and can swallow their tongues. He seemed to recognise me, and mumbled a few words. I thought I heard ‘bloody bad’, or perhaps it was ‘bloody sad’.
Richard gave me a more detailed account of the story I had already heard from Fred, and then said he had better be on his way back to Cambridge. I thanked him warmly for all he had done. I had never thought of Richard as a man of action, who would clamber over a back gate and jemmy his way into a house, but he had coped splendidly with the emergency. There was no way of knowing how long Dad had been lying on the floor of the dining room, though the fact that the TV was on suggested that he collapsed in the evening. Fred had last spoken to him by phone on Thursday evening and the Barkers next door had seen nothing of him on Friday, so he could have collapsed on Thursday after Fred’s phone call, or on Friday evening. But he might have lain there for another day if it hadn’t been for Richard’s visit. ‘Goodbye, Granddad,’ Richard said, taking Dad’s unencumbered hand, and received an answering squeeze and mumbled words, perhaps of thanks. I stayed for a while with Dad, reminding him that I had been away in Poland, and telling him about Anne’s baby, but he paid no attention, not even responding to the phrase, ‘You’re a great-grandfather now.’ Instead he stared fixedly at the tube bandaged to his wrist, turning his hand back and forth in puzzlement, as if wondering how the tube got there. There was no doctor available for me to speak to, so I told the ward sister that I would come back in the morning. She asked me if I would bring some toiletries, a dressing gown, cardigan and slippers for Dad.
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 advance. 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.