His death seemed expressive of him, and so did Sheila’s, in very different circumstances. It seemed exactly right in terms of her character that she should die at home, not professionally attended, but while waiting for the transfer to a hospice that she claimed to want. It was a trait of her generation amplified by temperament and history to shrink from being any trouble, choosing to tidy herself away among strangers rather than make demands on her sons. What actually happened was what suited her best, dying at home, whether or not she had the boldness to say she wanted it.
I struggle to put Dad in this category of expressive deaths. If he had been able to script his last moments in his prime, then he would have faded away with a stern smile on his face, benignly absolving, while the three of us told him how sorry we were never to have lived up to the example he set. That impresario-patriarch side of his character had died before he did, and perhaps there were less extrovert traits that had not found much expression in the man we knew.
I made the funeral arrangements with A. France & Son of Lamb’s Conduit Street, just as I had done when Sheila died. The premises were pleasingly ramshackle, with awkward spaces and varnished partitions. There was none of the plushness of modern death. It was like an old-fashioned provincial doctor’s surgery, except that the patients weren’t bored or anxious. There were framed press cuttings on the wall, and one of them caught my eye while I was waiting to be attended to. As it turned out the firm, or its ancestor W. France of Pall Mall, by appointment to His Majesty, had been the undertakers (‘upholders’ was the word used at the time) who made the arrangements for Nelson in 1805.
This piece of information wouldn’t have made the slightest difference to Sheila, but it would have tickled Dad very much. Nothing could have been more appropriate for a Navy man like himself than the association with the splendid Horatio, who made the journey back from Trafalgar in a barrel of rum. Sailors on that voyage of triumphant melancholy are supposed to have paid their respects by taking nips from the barrel. This must qualify as the ultimate Nelsonian beverage, grog doubly fortified, spirit infused with a spirit well over proof, from which they took tots of the great man’s essence, helping themselves on the sly to sippers, gulpers, sandy bottoms of immortality.
Some time had passed after the funeral before it occurred to me that we hadn’t provided our funeral directors with a set of clothes for Dad to wear in his coffin, and that therefore he must have been kitted out by them in some rudimentary way from what had gone with him to the hospital, pyjamas or a tracksuit. Utter violation of his dress code in his prime, the bespoke double-breasted suits with their hint of Cosa Nostra.
How could this have happened? Sheila’s arrangements the year before had been taken care of more scrupulously, but then the circumstances had been different. She had died in the flat, with her clothes to hand, and it had been an obvious priority to make sure she was turned out as she might have wanted. It seems extraordinary that France & Son could have made no enquiry about our wishes, but extraordinary too that I didn’t think of it.
How did I imagine that Dad was going to be fitly costumed for the event? That Messrs France would sneak into the Gray’s Inn flat and make their own selection of mobster suit and club tie (the Garrick, please God)? How else except through my agency was Dad to be properly treated, at any stage after I had volunteered to take care of him? The fact is, he was my prisoner, as he is on this page, with no redress against caricature or cheap insight.
It’s perfectly possible that a discussion about clothes took place, one that passed through one of my brothers (or both), or even one that I was part of but don’t remember. In that case my fretting over the possibility of his going to the flames improperly kitted out is the same sort of mental tic as not being able to sleep for worry that the alarm hasn’t been set or the gas turned off.
Was there a part of me that wanted Dad to be unsuitably dressed in the coffin? Feelings about parents are such primal things that it’s safer to assume you harbour any and every disreputable emotion rather than give yourself a clean bill of health. The Oedipal agenda doesn’t lay itself out neatly, in the style of a PowerPoint presentation. My first book, Lantern Lecture, for instance, is almost entirely made up of insults to father-figures, something I managed not to notice for years.
The first-written piece was a fantasia in which the Queen contracted rabies from an infected corgi (the origin of the illness being a bat blown off course). Obviously the Queen is a mother-figure, except that her position of supreme authority makes her an honorary man, and Dad was not just a judge but one of Her Majesty’s Judges. The title story was a commemorative character sketch of one of Dad’s friends, Philip Yorke, the last squire of Erddig near Wrexham, and someone with about as much authority as the Milky Bar Kid. The withheld warmth of the story makes clear that I was choosing him as preferable to the father I actually had, a sort of antidote to the patriarchal poison. The fact that it was of course Dad who introduced me to Philip adds to the ungraciousness. In the final piece of the book, ‘Bathpool Park’, I returned to the patricidal fray but this time managed to do without the Queen getting in the way. The story analysed the operations of Dad’s court in the case of R. v. Donald Neilson and tried to show that it, and he, had missed the point. At the time of writing I thought of each piece as an exercise in a given genre, whether satire, elegy or analytical journalism, and so it is, but the impulse of antagonism is consistent across the group.
There were a few procedural hiccups before Lantern Lecture was published, but it wasn’t Dad who made difficulties. Faber submitted the typescript to his old instructing solicitor Peter Carter-Ruck for a professional opinion about its vulnerability to legal action.
The advice he gave was clear. Author and publisher would equally be open to charges of seditious libel. A stay in the Tower of London was not out of the question. Established authors on the Faber list were likely to express their distaste by changing publishers.
(Note to younger readers: treatment of the royal family was very kid-gloved in those days, a time that pre-dates even the decorous lampooning, as it seems now, of Spitting Image.)
Carter-Ruck was an old friend of Dad’s, it’s true, but I don’t think his opinion was a put-up job. Nobody ever said Dad backed down from a fight unless he was clearly going to lose it, and if he wanted the book squelched all he had to do was withhold his permission from the part of the book that couldn’t be published against his wishes, ‘Bathpool Park’. I had taken the precaution of showing Dad ‘Hoosh-mi’, the satirical fantasy about the Queen, only after he had rubber-stamped ‘Bathpool Park’, which was good tactics or sneaky dealing according to taste. When he read the more obviously problematic text, he praised it uneasily, adding, ‘But we’re in trouble!’ First person plural, not second person singular. His attitude was troubled support rather than alarm, though of course he might have had second thoughts about having given his blessing to another part of the book. An instinct of solidarity doesn’t necessarily have staying power.