Leaving the motorway we stop twice, searching with scant success for evidence of C’s ancestors and move on, skirting the southern edge of the city, inching crabwise towards our destination. Memory flaps between recognition and strangeness like a sheet on a line - that curve in the road displaced by new build, the expected turning further than I remember. C talks, picking over the bones of an old love. I am half listening, half present, the rest of me taut with apprehension, anticipation. Red brick, weathered to crumbling, glows in the afternoon sun. Take care, I want to say, this is a dangerous bend but there's no need. And then there is the village sign, the dip in the road, the farm on the left.
We park round the corner at the lane end and walk up to the house. I feel the need to defend it from C’s unspoken criticism although it had no part in my growing up and I had no love for its bricks and mortar, not even for the garden, when I came to it as an adult. A moment is all it needs. We turn back and head between high hedges up the lane to the church. I wonder how many hundreds of times I‘ve walked this stretch of road, escaping the confines of what had become the family home, lighting the first cigarette once out of sight At a gap in the hedge we stop and look back at the house. What was a small acer has become a crimson fire. I point out the lone oak in the field. I used to look out at the tree from my bedroom window, I say, remembering as I speak that my room had no view over the back garden.
It’s a stiff pull up the path to the small church which squats square and defiant on its hilltop, the entrance opposite the vast split trunk of a yew. I wonder which has been here longer, church or tree? All Saints dates back at least to the eleventh century and what survives is now a listed building. I think of other feet making the same short climb over the centuries and of our own traffic through the years: weddings and funerals, Christmas and New Year celebrations and the day-to-day routines of a church-going family. My head fills with photographs of our own special occasions, many of those pictured long gone. Today, though, the church is not my business; I walk past and follow the trodden earth along the side of the graveyard almost to the end where the land falls away into the valley: the best view in the county, I’ve always said, if only they could see it.
Leaving the motorway we stop twice, searching with scant success for evidence of C’s ancestors and move on, skirting the southern edge of the city, inching crabwise towards our destination. Memory flaps between recognition and strangeness like a sheet on a line - that curve in the road displaced by new build, the expected turning further than I remember. C talks, picking over the bones of an old love. I am half listening, half present, the rest of me taut with apprehension, anticipation. Red brick, weathered to crumbling, glows in the afternoon sun. Take care, I want to say, this is a dangerous bend but there's no need. And then there is the village sign, the dip in the road, the farm on the left.
We park round the corner at the lane end and walk up to the house. I feel the need to defend it from C’s unspoken criticism although it had no part in my growing up and I had no love for its bricks and mortar, not even for the garden, when I came to it as an adult. A moment is all it needs. We turn back and head between high hedges up the lane to the church. I wonder how many hundreds of times I‘ve walked this stretch of road, escaping the confines of what had become the family home, lighting the first cigarette once out of sight At a gap in the hedge we stop and look back at the house. What was a small acer has become a crimson fire. I point out the lone oak in the field. I used to look out at the tree from my bedroom window, I say, remembering as I speak that my room had no view over the back garden.
It’s a stiff pull up the path to the small church which squats square and defiant on its hilltop, the entrance opposite the vast split trunk of a yew. I wonder which has been here longer, church or tree? All Saints dates back at least to the eleventh century and what survives is now a listed building. I think of other feet making the same short climb over the centuries and of our own traffic through the years: weddings and funerals, Christmas and New Year celebrations and the day-to-day routines of a church-going family. My head fills with photographs of our own special occasions, many of those pictured long gone. Today, though, the church is not my business; I walk past and follow the trodden earth along the side of the graveyard almost to the end where the land falls away into the valley: the best view in the county, I’ve always said, if only they could see it.
The stone looks good, no sign of weathering. I’m surprised by the jolt of emotion when I read the last line of the inscription, long forgotten, ‘Together as in Life’. I’m unsure who was responsible for the sentiment, a tender evocation of a unity that wasn’t always evident. I’m reminded of the couple in Larkin’s ‘Arundel Tomb’, their effigies hand in hand, a perhaps misleading emblem of enduring love. Our father lived much of his life outside the home, absorbed in his railway career and, when that came to an end, in affairs of the church. Late in life my mother often told the story of Dad’s marriage proposal, sending her away to ‘think it over very carefully’ since he required a wife prepared to support him in his chosen profession, ready to move house at short notice when the opportunity for promotion arose. I imagine that Mum saw the marriage as a passport to advancement, an opportunity to exchange the poverty of her northern childhood for a better standard of living. In fact, there followed long years of privation, Mum stuck at home, often in a house she hated, nursing her invalid mother and with two small children to look after, the eldest growing into an increasingly difficult daughter.
The fiction is that our parents are buried side by side. In reality our mum, being the last to die, is on top. It’s more than four years since her committal - I believe that's the correct term - and the neglect shows. But I have come prepared. I take the trowel and shears, the plant, a pot and compost from the bag and crouch down at the graveside. It’s hard work and slow: the new shears are spring-loaded and I’m finding my upper arms too weak to snip away at the overgrowth for long. The area nearest the headstone is choked with couch grass and groundsel. I settle into a rhythm, alternating between yanking at the weeds and trimming the surface of the plot. Soon I give up my attempt to stay reasonably clean and kneel on the damp earth. I have no memory of Mum on her hands and knees scrubbing floors but I’m pretty sure it would have gone with the territory of the housewife, especially in the early days. Well into widowhood, ‘and I do all my own housework’ was still her proud boast. What would she make of me now, always scornful of her tidy habits and a grudging helper in house or garden, taking up such a lowly position with a good grace? We fought almost constantly as I turned from a surly and ‘contrary' child into a secretive, arrogant adolescent, tearful and truculent by turns, beset by passions, nursing the burden of my misunderstood state like a precious child of my own. My mother was out of her depth, prone to fits of temper punctuated by attempts to pacify. We prowled our territories in mutual mistrust although I recall the occasional truce: the post-Watchnight service party where we giggled at the host’s evident tipsiness or the day we struggled up the lane, clinging to each other in hedge-high snow. In her last months as dementia took hold we found an easier way of being together. Now, kneeling at her side, I feel as if I’m performing a service. In an unbidden echo of the childhood religiosity that I’ve been unable to shake off entirely, I’m reminded of the sister (Mary? or Martha?) who, rather than helping with the chores, sat at the feet of Jesus listening to his words and worshipfully anointed his feet with the entire contents of an expensive vial of perfume, Growing up, I might have wished for such an extravagant and affirmative show of love but Mum, ever practical, would have been on the side of the doers. I suspect she might have enjoyed this odd role reversal.
She would have appreciated this afternoon, too: the warmth of the sun, the murmur of farm machinery, the gently rolling landscape softened by trees, the first hint of the autumn colours she prized. No fan of big open spaces or the wild, she was frightened of water. Hers was a quiet life. She had no real interest in music, was apt to dismiss my dad’s loud-volume listening as a ‘din’ although she liked Gilbert & Sullvan - as long as it was delivered by the D’Oyly Carte Company. Her ultimate punishment, one stage further than the quick slap on the upper arm or the back of a thigh, was the silent treatment. She could keep it up for days. And yet, and yet… as I push the trowel deeper, worrying at the impacted roots, I see I have barely broken the surface of who she was. I remember her determination, returning to school in her fifties for ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, her jam-making and silver-smithing, the sense of humour she shared with a few close friends, the understated elegance she worked so hard to achieve. I don’t think she ever made her peace with her northern origins but I promise myself, on my next visit, to plant the low-growing rose ‘Lancashire’ and imagine the roots finding their way into her bones.
She would have appreciated this afternoon, too: the warmth of the sun, the murmur of farm machinery, the gently rolling landscape softened by trees, the first hint of the autumn colours she prized. No fan of big open spaces or the wild, she was frightened of water. Hers was a quiet life. She had no real interest in music, was apt to dismiss my dad’s loud-volume listening as a ‘din’ although she liked Gilbert & Sullvan - as long as it was delivered by the D’Oyly Carte Company. Her ultimate punishment, one stage further than the quick slap on the upper arm or the back of a thigh, was the silent treatment. She could keep it up for days. And yet, and yet… as I push the trowel deeper, worrying at the impacted roots, I see I have barely broken the surface of who she was. I remember her determination, returning to school in her fifties for ‘O’ and ‘A’ levels, her jam-making and silver-smithing, the sense of humour she shared with a few close friends, the understated elegance she worked so hard to achieve. I don’t think she ever made her peace with her northern origins but I promise myself, on my next visit, to plant the low-growing rose ‘Lancashire’ and imagine the roots finding their way into her bones.
They will have further to travel - I’m not sure how much further - to reach my father’s remains but I like to believe they will make it eventually and will be welcome. Unlike our mother, Dad remained proud of his working class Wigan heritage, his self-published autobiography laboriously charting his climb from an engineering apprenticeship in Horwich to the heights of Chief Mechanical and Electrical engineer for the London Midland Region of British Rail. Using the headstone for support to pull myself to standing, I remember his catchphrase ‘finished with engines’ - we thought of incorporating it in the inscription but agreed in the end to reserve it for the order of service. I stretch out my stiff back and legs, staggering as I struggle to stay upright on the uneven ground. I look down into the valley, the last of the sun bathing fields and buildings in liquid gold. Glorious, Dad would say. I search for a way of matching his energy and remember instead a reflective moment, when three or four of us gathered in the tiny ringing chamber of the bell tower on the day of his burial. There was music - Elgar, possibly, and Strauss’s Four Last Songs. For a March birthday and an April death the first song, ‘Spring’, was particularly apposite. I find a recording on my phone and, upping the volume, balance it on top of the stone. As I fold myself back to kneeling, the soprano’s voice soars over the straggle of graves. Dad’s musical tastes became more catholic with the years and the full-blooded emotion of the Strauss is so characteristic of his final enthusiasms that it’s as if he’s with me, above ground. I begin to tackle the plant I’ve brought, a small spreading hebe which had seemed an ideal shape as a temporary stopgap. In fact it’s pot-bound, firmly wedged in its plastic case and extricating it takes what feel like hours of tugging and twisting until it sits on the grass in front of me, its root system a solid carapace. I make a feeble attempt at teasing out one or two strands and then give up, settling instead for sticking it in the new pot as it is and dribbling in a little compost wherever it will go.
The second song, ‘September’, matches the month if not the weather - no ‘cool rain’ seeping into the ground here - but as a lament for the last days of summer and for the end of life, its melancholy tone is perfect. This morning I’d watched as a distant tree released flurries of pale leaves, light as petals, shimmering in the sun. Their downward drift is echoed now in falling phrases in the music and the piece closes with what I think is a horn picking up the tender note of longing for rest. I was fortunate to be with both parents in their final moments and I’m still moved by the memory of our father hanging on until the morning after my birthday, when he came as close as he ever came to a declaration of love for me, his ‘darling daughter’. Ours was never a family - or perhaps a generation? - that spoke its love easily and even now the kids are the ones who trade hugs and ‘love yous’ naturally whilst my brother and I still dodge awkwardly round physical closeness. Now, remembering the room in the Infirmary where Andy and I watched and waited, there’s much to regret. In my teens I found my dad insufferable, in my twenties an embarrassment, his intensity overwhelming. He was an enthusiast - music, of course, and his beloved railways. He was also by nature a cataloguer, keeping meticulous records of his audio tapes and his slides, mainly railway-related. These would have been quite an archive, if only we’d thought to keep them rather than following Mum’s instinct to get rid of the lot. He came to travel late but embraced it, working for brief periods in India and New Zealand after he officially retired, and was a lifelong churchman. He was also keen on projects, master-minding a campaign for a new church roof and the refurbishment of the bells. I see myself in so many of his characteristics: his intensity, his passions, his strong will; less so his optimism. ‘Everything points to happiness’ he was given to saying when things were not going terribly well or, worse, ‘Couldn’t be better, really.’
I’m struggling now, wearied by the emotion of the afternoon and by the effort of my modest bit of gardening. Fortunately C comes to finish off the snipping and then leaves me on my own to wrestle for a few more minutes with the roots that go way down in the hole where the vase sits beneath the headstone. It’s no good, I can’t shift them, can’t get to the bottom of them, not even with the combined determination of both parents. Instead I clamber up the bumpy ground to the tap for a last drink for the hebe, trampling who knows who underfoot, a precarious few yards but amazingly I make it without falling and then I just listen to the last song, ‘Im Abendrot’. Sunset, I think, a perfect coincidence. In fact when I check at home later, it translates as ‘the evening glow’, surprising for what I always think of as a very matter-of-fact language. It’s beautiful, sonorous and slow, a fitting ending to the cycle and to my digging and there’s a section which reminds me of ‘The Lark Ascending’ (checking later I discover that there are two larks in the words). There’s just time for a final memory, a last regret: a conversation with my dad about the production of Top Girls I was part of in Hallbankgate Village Hall, for one night only. You should have told me about it, Dad said. I would love to have seen it. You wouldn’t, I said. It’s full of swearing. That wouldn’t have mattered, he said. I would have loved it. He was probably right.
Time to go. I replace the plastic vase at the head of the plot, pushing it down on top of the recalcitrant roots and arrange the flowers we bought from the bucket at the lane end in the village, a mixed bunch of cultivated blooms and wild flowers. I take a photograph and have a last look at the view. As I turn away, a surge of sobbing stops me on the path and I have to pause to catch my breath. I realise later that this is the first time I’ve cried - really cried - for either death.
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