Bamie was proud of his wife and toddler son, but it was only in his dealings with Dad that I could see his tenderness. He was a Christian, much involved in the activities of his church, yet to my eyes his strongest underlying characteristic was anger. In conversation he was very big on Matthew 10:34 (‘I came not to send peace, but a sword’), less mindful of Matthew 5:39 (turning the other cheek). It might be from a different gospel or a different religion.
When his church went on pilgrimage to Walsingham, it was Bamie who drove the bus. But on the way back into London after they had paid their homage to the Virgin, Bamie came very close to an incident of road rage when another driver tried to cut in ahead of him. What stayed with him from the day was not serenity.
I enjoyed discussing religion with Bamie in the sitting-room of the Gray’s Inn flat, while Dad turned his face from one of us to the other in low-level surprise, though I had a definite feeling of playing with fire. Riding in the bus with Bamie might well be exhilarating, trying to nose out into traffic ahead of him would certainly not be.
I invited him to consider that he liked the bits of Christ which were like himself, but had no time for the bits of Christ which were unlike Bamie. Debate wasn’t his natural element, but he maintained his position forcefully, with quotation, repetition and the occasional rhetorical question.
Did I mention to Bamie during our chats that my private life was not as standard as was implied by the occasional presence on the premises of that miniature aunty, my daughter? I did not. This was feeble, though I could tell myself that I had no business preaching a gospel of sexual non-conformity if the result might be to upset the crucial aspect of the arrangement, namely the smooth bond between Dad and his carer. This was a truth but not a sufficient one. If Bamie was minded to take Matthew 23:27 (‘Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees’) as the text for a homily, I would need all my debating skills. I could hardly deny I was a scribe when it was how I made my living. If he decided I was a Pharisee into the bargain, hypocrite and whited sepulchre, things would not go well for the household.
It made a great difference to me to know that Dad was in Bamie’s care, in his strong, scrupulous hands. Bamie worked a long shift, from three in the afternoon to ten at night, which was when I would return after spending time en famille. One evening he told me, ‘A lady came to see Dad and shouted at me.’ I didn’t need to be told that this was Edith Wellwood, though in fact Edith ended up (to everyone’s surprise including perhaps her own) approving of Bamie. Her initial mistrust wasn’t based on race but on long experience of other people’s unremitting incompetence. Confronted with such conscientious skill she surrendered. Her only concession to contrariness was to insist on calling him Bamber, as if his Sierra Leonean parents, great fans of University Challenge, had decided to name him after the long-ago quizmaster.
When the school summer holidays came around I was able to take a break, borrowing a converted barn in Normandy from a friend so as to spend two weeks there with Holly and her mother. Set free of Dad-related routines I immediately devised replacements. I would get up early for a shower, then cycle many kilometres to the bakery that made the best brioches, wearing a clinging vibrant orange singlet which I was fairly convinced I could get away with, though I knew better than to look at my reflection in shop windows en route in case the verdict went the other way. My timing was sufficiently predictable that the plunger in the cafetière would just be beginning its descent when I returned with the baked goods.
We made a day trip to Mont Saint-Michel during which I carried Holly on my shoulders across the causeway for what seemed several hours, knowing that there was absolutely nothing in Mont Saint-Michel to engage a six-year-old’s attention when we got there. The expedition was a failure even before the setbacks of crowded pricy restaurants and smelly dustbins, the generally oppressive atmosphere of a historic spot gone rancid from sheer picturesqueness. Tourists and supplies were being imported in order for one to consume the other before the tourists traipsed off to fill the buses again and the dustbins were emptied at last.
On the way home Holly fell asleep in the back of the car and the drive back to the barn outside Gourbesville, through fog over unknown roads, was oddly magical. In her brain memories of the day were being coded to record the stoical enjoyment that makes family expeditions special, when people have fun on principle, whether they want to or not. We adults listened to Mark Lamarr on some esoteric radio station, playing even more esoteric rockabilly. I hadn’t even known I didn’t hate rockabilly. With that rapturous winding-down of mood in a silence alive with twangs, the trip had to be classified all over again, as a success. The fogbound afterglow backlit the whole day.
Between them my brothers had been looking after Dad for that fortnight, and then I was back in harness. He seemed balanced in his static decline, though of course decline is never static.
He began to have difficulty swallowing, coughing and spluttering almost with every mouthful of tea or coffee. This was diagnosed as ‘dysphagia’, which my ghostly Greek A-level allowed me to identify as meaning no more than ‘difficulty swallowing’. Not exactly a revelation. The solution was to add a thickening agent to the liquid in the cup. In theory this was what Dad had always wanted, with every drink promoted to the status of soup, but the coughing and choking didn’t really go away.
I was mortified when I found that Dad had a sore on his heel. This wasn’t a surprising development, considering how little encouragement his blood was getting to circulate with any vigour. Dad was proud of the manly shape of his legs but had never done anything either to earn or to maintain it. Even as a young man he didn’t enjoy walking as an activity. In his prime he would get into his cherished Jaguar on a Saturday morning, then drive two hundred yards to John Brumfit, the tobacconist’s in Holborn Bars, to buy cigarettes.
When he had taken up ‘jogging’ in the 1980s, buying matching New Balance running shoes for himself and Sheila, he moved so slowly that I had to discipline myself not to overtake him at a comfortable walking pace. In retirement he had offered masterly passive resistance to any attempt at keeping him mobile.
Nevertheless I took the sore on his heel, this site of necrosis, personally. I was mortified at the failure of care. This time ancient Greek provided a more vivid etymology. Nekros means a corpse, and necrosis is a patch of local death.
One day as I was changing the dressing on his sore, Dad patted me on the back and murmured, ‘Dear Adam.’ This was so unlike his usual style that I bridled at it, saying something thoroughly ungracious like ‘What brought this on?’
His preferred manner was formal, a matter of raising a glass to Sheila when she entered the room and saying, ‘You elegant fowl’, the endearment safely sourced from a nonsense poem. After her car accident he went through a phase of calling her ‘the salt of the earth’, which I thought thoroughly patronizing. When he started abbreviating the phrase to ‘s.o.e.’ I would bare my teeth silently, as if I had taken a mouthful of salt myself.
He didn’t have a late-life nickname for me, which was no loss if Nogood Boyo was the template. While I was looking after him he would sometimes say that I was a ‘good guy’, or ‘one of the good guys’, in a tone of mild surprise, as if my reputation had suggested otherwise.