The doctor came to see him from time to time. My grandfather didn’t really need medical treatment, but he got ‘chesty’ in the winters and so the doctor ordered cough linctus, which probably had no effect. He said, ‘There is nothing wrong. Your father’s quite healthy. He is getting old, well past his three score years and ten. He will just potter on until he fades away.’
In those days, doctors accepted that people die of old age.
‘He shouldn’t be smoking that pipe,’ said my aunt.
‘Let him,’ replied the doctor, ‘if he enjoys it.’
For years, my grandfather had smoked a briar pipe filled with a villainous black tobacco called Twist, which he cut up himself with a penknife. I remember poking the shards of tobacco into the bowl of the pipe and lighting a coloured spill from the fire, holding it over the bowl as he sucked hard to get the thing going. The smoke was prolific and the odour pungent (to this day I adore the smell of a man with a pipe). The doctor was right. My grandfather enjoyed it, and it certainly never did him any harm, until the day when my aunt found a large burn hole in his bed! After that he was supposed to smoke only when one of his daughters was present. I doubt if he obeyed.
‘He won’t eat properly.’ my aunt said. ‘I cook a nice dinner and he only picks at it.’
So the doctor advised a pint of stout a day. My grandfather seemed to live on this, plus a bowl of bread and milk, which he made for himself each night. I wasn’t aware of any other treatments prescribed for his failing strength.
Tragedy struck the family when my grandfather’s eldest son died at the age of forty. I remember the old man weeping at the funeral.
‘Why could it not have been me? My life is over. My only wish is to join my dear wife in her grave. But he, my son, he had everything to live for.’
He was visibly smaller. It was not merely that I was growing up and getting taller. He had been a guardsman, well over six feet tall, and he shrank by several inches until we were the same height. His proud, military bearing seemed to fold in on itself, and his confident step became an old man’s shuffle.
He felt the cold more, and needed several layers of woollies to keep him warm. He had a coal fire every day, except in the hottest weather, and always kept a good stock of fuel in the grate, but chopping wood and carrying coals became harder as the years passed, so he made lots of journeys to the coal house, carrying a little at a time, and someone else chopped the wood.
We still went to his allotment on sunny days, he and I, me pushing the wheelbarrow, he prodding the pavement with his stick. But the weeds grew higher and higher and could not be controlled. Eventually, we dug his last crop of potatoes, and he had not the strength, nor indeed the interest, to plant any more.
My grandfather seemed to be withdrawing into himself. He became deafer, which cut him off from conversation, but he seemed perfectly content to sit in the luxury of silence, puffing his pipe, and thinking his thoughts. Sometimes he chuckled quietly to himself. Occasionally one saw a tear in the corner of his eye, but if anyone asked why, he did not respond. He had never been a talkative man, and, as he drew towards the end of his life, speech became even more of an effort, something he did not want to be bothered with. When he had to speak, his words were slow and measured, and somewhat distant, as though his mind was a long way away, and had to be coaxed back into the world around him. Sometimes he spoke of death, saying, ‘I will soon be going to my dear wife.’ On another occasion he spoke of seeing his dead son again. He also spoke of the Angel of Death approaching. This is an old-fashioned concept, but was very real to former generations.
It was obvious that he was fading away, although he was never particularly ill in the medical understanding of the term. The regular pumping of his heart, which circulates the blood, conveying oxygen to all parts of the body, was becoming irregular, but he never had any pills to control the heartbeat. Without adequate oxygen supply, the internal organs gradually lose their efficiency, and eventually cease to function. The tide of his life was gently ebbing away.
The last week or two of his life came suddenly. One day, he was pottering about as usual, and the next he couldn’t be bothered to get up. ‘Let me bide,’ he told my aunt who tried to chivvy him out of bed. He more or less stopped eating, and took only sips of fluid.
I was nursing then, and lived about forty miles away, but I came back as often as I could to see him. It happened that I was with him on the day of his death. I had seen quite a lot of people die, all nurses have, and I knew what to expect. As soon as I entered the room I could see the change, which is obvious to the experienced eye. In the last few hours of life something mysterious happens, which can best be described as a veil being drawn. The dying person looks the same, but is not the same. Breathing changes, skin colour changes, the eyes change, muscle tone all but vanishes, speech becomes virtually impossible. The nearer one approaches death, the less one has the strength to resist it.
I told my mother to call the rest of the family. By a miracle of public transport, they all arrived, and he died in the evening of that day.
The doctor was not called until afterwards, and then only to sign the death certificate. He asked if we wanted a woman to come in to lay out the body, but I said no, I wanted to do it myself. And so I prepared his body and put a shroud on him, in readiness for his last journey to the grave, as I had been taught in my first year of training.
I do not know what the doctor entered on the death certificate. He knew, and we knew, that the cause of death was old age. But he could not put that. Legally, death has to be the outcome of an illness.
For everything there is a season,
A time for every matter under the sun.
A time to be born, and a time to die.
— Ecclesiastes Chapter 3, verses 1 and 2
1953
AN UNNATURAL DEATH
It is rare to predict one’s own death, or to meet anyone who has done so. But occasionally it happens, and I knew such a lady.
Mrs Ratski was Latvian, born in the 1880s, and virtually her whole life had been lived under the shadow of military conflict. She was a simple peasant woman, and she was immensely strong, both physically and morally.
In 1941, the German armies marched into Latvia and brutally crushed the resistance. Her husband and four sons were forcibly drafted into the German army, and they all died except Slavek, her youngest child. Slavek survived because he was taken prisoner of war by the British. It was the luckiest day of his life. In England he was a free man, and he worked on a farm, which is where he met Karen. Slavek was a good-looking boy with wide blue eyes, blond curling hair, and an infectious joie de vivre that made everyone he met feel good. Karen was a Land Army girl, and the work was hard, the day long, and she was often exhausted at the end of it; but not too exhausted for assignations with Slavek.
After the war, in 1947, they married. He worked as a garage mechanic and she as a hairdresser, and between them they saved up enough money to put a deposit on a terrace cottage and take out a mortgage. They were proud and happy property owners, and they had two little daughters who were six and seven at the time this story begins.
One day Slavek received a letter from his sister Olga, in Latvia, saying that their mother had suddenly announced that she was going to die, and that she must see her only surviving son first. Accordingly, she had applied for a visa to leave the country.
Nothing more was heard for fourteen weeks and Slavek supposed that the whole thing had been forgotten. He had not reckoned with the resolution of a determined old lady! Alone, and with only a spare pair of boots and an extra shawl, Mrs Ratski had set out to walk across northern Europe, to reach the French coast, and find a boat that would take her over the channel to England.