This Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood (25 page)

Yvonne introduced me to her parents as if I was some raving intellectual because my nose was constantly in a book. Yvonne’s mother loved poetry and had read all the classics. She felt I was a young man with whom she could share this passion. On my second or third visit, she gave me a battered paperback copy of Dante’s
Inferno
, which she insisted I take away with me to read. While I loved reading, fourteenth-century epic poetry was somewhat beyond me; still, I did my best. On each subsequent visit, I was asked to discuss Dante’s opus – its inferences and undercurrents, its use of metaphor. I couldn’t bring myself to tell her that I found it turgid and unfathomable. It served me right. I had become a victim of my own pretentiousness.

The date was set for Lily’s operation: 26 February 1964. I didn’t appreciate at the time how petrified Lily must have been. She was hundreds of miles away from her family in Liverpool, worried sick about us and facing major heart surgery at the very age her mother and grandmother had died. She never discussed her feelings or fears with me. Linda was her confidante. Already carrying a huge weight of responsibility on her young shoulders, she was well aware of Lily’s anguish.

When Linda, Mike and I trooped into the hospital ward the night before the operation, we found Lily in tears. Mike went for a walk at Linda’s suggestion. I stayed where I was, rooted to the spot by the unprecedented spectacle of Lily crying in
public. I had heard her weeping in her room during the night many times, but never like this, and never in front of other people. I was as embarrassed as I was concerned. Lily pulled me to her and hugged me. She never did that, either. She’d always insisted that I kiss her cheek when saying goodnight and she was forever tidying my hair and smoothing my clothes, but that’s as tactile as it got. We never hugged. It just wasn’t our way. The only time I could remember her cuddling me was on that disastrous Christmas afternoon at Ron’s, and on that occasion I’d been well aware that she was making a point.

‘I haven’t signed the papers yet,’ she sobbed to Linda. ‘What if I die? What will happen to you?’ Her words cut me like the surgeon’s scalpel. In the space of a few minutes I’d had three new and thoroughly unwelcome experiences. I’d seen Lily cry openly, she’d hugged me for practically the first time and now she was talking about dying. This was getting dark and dangerous.

Lily still insisted that nobody in Liverpool was to be informed, not that it was possible now to notify any of her relatives in advance, with the operation only hours away, assuming she finally signed the consent form. Linda tried to soothe her by repeating what the consultant had said about the operation adding years to her life. She reminded Lily that she was in the care of some of the finest heart specialists in the world and of what the alternative would be. She pointed out how ill she’d been and would be again. ‘You’re not well and this operation will save your life,’ she summarized succintly.

Lily seemed to have calmed down by the time we were asked to leave. She hugged me again and gave me a radiant smile as I looked back at her from the door of the hospital ward.

She must have signed those papers because the operation went ahead as planned the next day. I went to school and Linda went to work as usual. At the hospital in the evening we were told that Lily was in intensive care following the surgery. The nurse asked if there was an adult with us. Linda explained that she was Lily’s next of kin and was eventually allowed to see her. I wasn’t. I whispered to Linda that I thought this was unfair, but she wasn’t about to press my case, fearing that making a fuss would only lead to her being excluded as well.

A tracheotomy had been performed because Lily was having difficulty breathing and, as she was so poorly, a coma had been induced. Linda was warned about the condition in which she would find her mother. ‘She will know you’re there, so talk to her and tell her that she looks well,’ said the intensive care sister as she shepherded Linda to Lily’s bedside. ‘You have to give her encouragement.’ Linda described the ward to me later. Dimly lit, it was filled with the gentle hum of medical machinery and a strong smell of Jeyes Fluid. Lily lay with her eyes tightly shut, wires and tubes poking out from every part of her tiny frame.

Linda suppressed her tears and her deep disquiet. She told Lily that the operation had been a success, that she’d soon be home. She waited for a response, scrutinizing Lily’s face intensely in search of the slightest twitch or flicker. There was nothing. No sign that she’d heard. No indication that she knew Linda was there. The sister asked Linda to leave and we caught the bus home.

Linda went back every day, sometimes with Mike, more often alone. If her sheer willpower could have improved the situation, Lily would have leaped out of bed and turned
cartwheels. As it was, her condition deteriorated day by day. A week after the surgery, on Wednesday 4 March, Mike drove Linda to the hospital for her usual early-evening visit. She was told that Lily’s kidneys were failing and that she would need another operation that evening. Linda wasn’t permitted to see her, even to go through her daily routine of chatting away without receiving any response.

When Linda and Mike returned to Walmer Road, the three of us sat in the back room around the fire, saying very little but thinking a lot. At nine o’clock that night there was a knock on the door. It was the police with a message from Hammersmith Hospital. Linda was to ring them immediately. She decided to head straight to the hospital rather than waste time in the phone box. I’d given up appealing to be allowed to go with them. Linda had enough to cope with already and in truth I was frightened about what I’d have to face if I did go. Instead I was dispatched to stay with the Coxes so that I wouldn’t be alone in the house. Mrs Cox was, as always, accommodating. I could sleep on the floor in her large front room. Space could be found for Linda in a bedroom upstairs. Whatever happened that night, neither of us wanted to return to the cold despair of Walmer Road.

As I disappeared into the paraffin-scented warmth of 318 Lancaster Road, and Mike’s Ford Zephyr bore Linda to Hammersmith Hospital, the snow began to fall.

Linda and Mike were left sitting outside the intensive care ward for a long time before a doctor came to speak to them. He was
brusque and to the point. During her second operation Lily’s kidneys had failed. There was nothing more that could have been done to save her. She had died in theatre.

Linda was poleaxed. She had been utterly convinced that Lily would survive; that the surgery would be the turning point for her. That she’d return to a more tranquil life, free of debt, live in a decent house with its own front door, some reward for all those years of toil and squalor. For the operation that was to have transformed Lily’s life instead to end it so prematurely was the final cruelty inflicted on a woman who had borne so much misery so courageously for so long. Linda was in such distress that she didn’t think to ask to see Lily, and nobody invited her to do so.

At Lancaster Road, under some blankets on the living-room floor, I was wide awake when Linda arrived in the early hours. She took me into the kitchen on my own to break the news to me. I knew I was expected to cry, but somehow I couldn’t, and didn’t. I went back to my blankets, pulled them over me and lay there, trying to comprehend the enormity of what had happened. It was unthinkable that I would never see Lily again. Eventually, I drifted off to sleep. I knew that Lily deserved tears but my eyes remained resolutely dry.

Somebody had to deal with the aftermath, and inevitably that somebody was Linda. It is scarcely believable that my sister, at just sixteen years old, could have dealt with it all so completely, but she did.

First thing in the morning she wrote to convey the sad news
to our Auntie Jean in Liverpool, asking if she’d pass it on to Lily’s siblings. Then she went to a phone box and rang the nursery where she worked to ask for time off, and Sloane school to tell them I wouldn’t be attending for a while. Mike had to go to work, so next Linda and I trudged through the snow to Hammersmith Hospital.

A woman from Administration told us that Lily’s body was in the mortuary. Linda must arrange for it to be collected by an undertaker as soon as possible. The woman echoed a common refrain: ‘Why haven’t you got an adult with you?’ I felt like telling her we were fresh out of them. Linda was handed a death certificate. ‘You’ll need this,’ she was told, ‘and your mother’s birth certificate. She can’t be buried or cremated without both.’

Linda said she’d search for it at home. If she couldn’t find the original, the administrator advised, she would be able to obtain a copy from Somerset House, where the records of the births, marriages and deaths of every person in the United Kingdom were kept. The administrator gave Linda the address printed on a card, along with a brown paper bag containing Lily’s belongings. ‘We had to cut her wedding ring off her finger before the operation,’ the woman explained. ‘It’s in the bag. Oh, and we took her false teeth out as well – you might want to give them to the undertaker.’ These offhand remarks stunned Linda almost as much as the news of Lily’s death.

Lily had never removed her wedding ring. Perhaps it was simply because it wouldn’t come off, but I suspect there was more to it; that it was just too big a step for her to take. That ring symbolized a commitment she had never broken, even if Steve had. It gave her dignity and it was a badge of the conformity that was so important to her. For her to lose it at
the end, in such a brutal way, was shocking. Even I could sense that.

And as for the teeth, we’d had no idea that Lily wore dentures. We subsequently discovered that she’d had all her natural teeth removed when the National Health Service was created. Like many people then, she’d chosen that drastic course of action rather than endure a life of painful dental surgery on teeth already damaged by a poor diet and malnutrition. In the early days of the NHS dentistry was entirely free, so having every tooth taken out was an option that seemed sensible to many working-class people, including Lily and Steve. Lily must have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact she wore dentures. We’d known about Steve’s – they’d grinned at us from his bedside every morning – but Lily, with her lovely smile, her pearl-white teeth? False? Surely not. Yet here they were in a brown paper bag. Another vestige of her dignity stripped away at the end.

Next on Linda’s to-do list was informing Steve – or at least, getting a message to him. On our way back from the hospital we went to the flat in Peabody Buildings where Steve had taken us as small children to see his mother. She was dead by this time and the flat had been passed on to Steve’s youngest sibling, our Uncle Jim, a good fifteen years his brother’s junior, who now lived there with his own family and an impressive collection of Frank Sinatra albums. Although Jim didn’t have Steve’s musical talent he was passionate about Sinatra. Jim was the only relative of Steve’s we had any time for – or who had any time for us. He was now married to a lovely woman, our Auntie Betty, with one small daughter and another baby on the way. They alone had stayed in touch with Lily and she had always appreciated their empathy.