But No Longer At Ease, Here In The Old Dispensation

[liadnan]

A year ago today my brother rang very early in the morning to tell me my father was dying.

It wasn't unexpected. Since his first stroke, in late 1999, he'd been declining visibly, and I had, frankly, been expecting it for six months. But still...

He wasn't a demonstrative, or openly affectionate man, my father. He hated the fact that the pills he was on had the side effect of making him prone to burst into tears at a depressing item in the newspaper. In those last years he'd regularly cry at the memory of 11th September, but I don't remember anything of the sort from when we were growing up. He did lose his temper and shout -though never anything more- at the drop of a hat, but otherwise his personal emotions were rarely expressed.

Partly I think it was to do with the death of their eldest child, my brother Tim, killed on his bicycle at the age of 12 -one month after his birthday- just over a year before I was born. Tim was something of a genius child, and a child actor who was about to appear in a professional production of A Winter's Tale at the time he died. It affected my parents and my two sisters in different ways: my father almost never spoke of him.

Despite his reticence, he cared deeply about things. He cared about his family, about the village he served for years as parish councillor and eventually chairman, and above all about words. He really wanted to be an actor, and as a teacher he spent his life trying to enthuse children about drama, poetry, and literature -he had a particular thing about the importance of children's literature as well, which firmly imprinted on me. Two children he taught, a brother and sister were, much later, good friends of mine: they claimed he was the best teacher they ever had. He had an odd collection of other skills and interests: a fascination with trams and light rail all his life, and also with airplanes (he did his national service in the air force), and a certain artistic ability: his illustrated diaries from family holidays are a joy to behold. Sadly only two of his children inherited that skill, and I am emphatically not one of them.

He was a curious mixture of conservative and radical liberal. A few years before he died my sister asked him why he had joined the Conservative party and risen to become local chairman (in the 60s I think), this after a furiously argued Sunday lunch (these are frequent in my family) during which he had been expressing strongly socialist, if not marxist, views. He blamed Churchill. I saw him in a suit about once a year, and he was given to wearing red socks and a red shirt, but always with a proper jacket. He loathed Margaret Thatcher with an unmitigated passion -largely I think because he was a state school teacher, though a devout believer in grammar schools- which caused some friction in the 80s, when the chair of the ward Tories was once again in our house for the 83 and possibly the 87 elections, this time in the person of my mother. His diktat that the name of "that woman" was not to be mentioned in his hearing caused problems when the committee was sitting in our dining room. And yet, he was at heart an old High Tory... oh, except for the Irish nationalist leanings. Born in Ireland, one of his uncles had been in the Rising (while another was dying in the Dardanelles in Her Majesty's navy), and though he moved to England as a child and save for the few years we lived in Ireland around the time of my birth spent most of his life in Kent and Hampshire, he remained proud to be an Irishman, defiantly nationalist and frequently muttered about "giving the Six Counties back", though I think he was aware that much of this was a romanticised view on his part, and to an extent it was a pose. A devout and old-fashioned Catholic he was notorious for loudly muttering the congregation's part of the mass in Latin, yet he had surprisingly liberal views on many other live issues. Family recollection is divided on what he felt when we discovered, at my grandmother's death, that her wedding was not, as everyone had always been led to believe, a year and five months before his birth, but five months only. That was in 1929: he was a child of the great depression. My sister and I were under the impression he was extremely upset: my mother claims he found it highly amusing.

He understood me better than he usually let on, far better than my mother I think: he knew when I was depressed and knew when to shut up, which is not her strong point. After the results of a bout of depression at university landed me in hospital and a narrow shave with the Mental Health Act he wrote me a letter which I still have, which was more helpful than anything anyone else did or said at the time: he talked about his faith and, which staggered me, his doubts, about life and love and family, and it really did make me think differently.

It was my mother who told me, a few months before he died, that my Call Night was one of the proudest days of his life, more even than all the academic stuff. His father had been a solicitor's articled clerk in Dublin, and then London and then Kent, from the age of 16 (save for during the First War) and to him the fact I had gone to the Bar was a huge source of satisfaction.

He taught me a huge amount: from an understanding of politics -he introduced me to Private Eye and the financial pages of the newspapers, where he claimed one found something approaching real news, at a young age- to a fondness for and a certain amount of knowledge of whisky, wine (his main motivation for voting for Europe in 1973, he once claimed), and cigars, to, most important of all, an appreciation for words, for literature and for speaking aloud. He ran the readers at church and regularly press-ganged me in, I remember standing at one end of the hallway which runs the length of our house and reading the lesson to him at the other, again and again until he was satisfied not only that he could hear me but that I was understanding it and using my voice to communicate that understanding. An elderly friend of his once told me she only understood St Paul, in any translation, when he read it. He disapproved of using the microphone in church, claimed it wasn't necessary. But then, he could read from the lectern in Winchester Cathedral and be heard perfectly at the main door, the other end of the world's longest gothic nave, without benefit of electricity. As I said when I spoke at his funeral, I remember those lessons every day I stand up in court. He and several of the other drama-orientated English teachers of the LEA were involved in a drama group that regularly performed in the Cathedral: poetry and plays, mostly of a religious bent, by Eliot, Fry, and many others of that ilk (which is how he came to know the ancient Mrs Eliot, and Christopher Fry, and Martin Browne) and I remember as a child going along to hundreds of different performances attended by the great and the good of Hampshire.

For such a devout Catholic he did an enormous amount for the Anglican cathedral and diocese, I think he saw it as an essential part of the fabric of local society about which he cared so much: just as he worked incredibly hard for the village, organising the purchase of recreation grounds, the building of halls, the clearing of the old quay and so on. At root he believed in community, society, art, culture, education for its own sake, and that in working for all those causes he was, ultimately, working AMDG. Perhaps it isn't so strange he loathed Thatcher.

He was a grumpy old bugger. But his funeral was packed.

This is what was, along with Journey of the Magi (which maybe had a particular resonance because his birthday was at Epiphany), one of his favourite poems, A Song For Simeon, both Eliot of course. Both poems often ran through my head in those last months.

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

Grant us thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
have given and taken honour and ease.
There went never any rejected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children?
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path, and the fox's home,
Fleeing from foreign faces and the foreign swords.

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation
Grant us thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

According to thy word.
They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saints' stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,
Thine also).
I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,
I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.
Let they servant depart,
Having seen thy salvation.

Comments

[rhodri.livejournal.com]

Lovely.

[rparvaaz.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this.

*hugs Marcus*

I hope this day is peaceful, and your memories joyous.

[booklectica]

Thank you for writing that.

[morgaine-x.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing this, even as my eyes tear up at my desk.

[lizw.livejournal.com]

Yes, and mine.

[f4f3.livejournal.com]

Thank you, and the poem is going straight into a common-place book alongside those few fragments I have shored against my ruin.

[liadnan]

For completeness, Journey of the Magi, which is actually the one I remember him reading in the Cathedral:

The Journey of the Magi

'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For the journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky,
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins,
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

-- T. S. Eliot

[itchyfidget.livejournal.com]

That's really lovely; thanks for writing.

[ajva.livejournal.com]

I echo the sentiments of the other comments: thank you.

[hano.livejournal.com]

Thank you for that mate. Rather comforting at the moment

[lexin.livejournal.com]

Despite the fact that my father was an old fashioned socialist and yours not, your father and mine sound as if they would have a great deal in common, not least that they both taught English at state schools during the 70s and 80s. If there is an afterlife, I hope they meet.

I'll raise a glass to him.

[fi.livejournal.com]

What a wonderful piece; it's rare one reads something so eloquent. He sounds like a real character, a "fine figure of a man", as they'd say at home.

[nicnac.livejournal.com]

That's incredibly touching; he sounds like an amazing man.

[pashazade.livejournal.com]

You were fortunate to have such a man as a father. The Eliot caught my eye; Journey of the Magi is my own father's favourite poem.

[fairymelusine.livejournal.com]

At the risk of being redundant, this is a beautiful entry, and that father of yours sounds like quite a remarkable person.

[deililly.livejournal.com]

He sounds like he was a tremendous man.

Thank you for sharing him with us.

[cobwellac.livejournal.com]

That was a very beautiful and touching entry.

[alan1957.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the above.

One thing struck me particularly...when your 'Conservative' father taught you the benefit of reading the financial pages as the source of 'real' news. I believe that was the very first leason I was taught when I joined the somewhat less conservative Workers Revolutionary Party!

A fine post.

[cybik.livejournal.com]

Thank you for writing that. It was very moving to read.

[nedrazeall.livejournal.com]

Wow, If my daughter remembers me with even a touch of that I would be happy.

[ex-ajhalluk585.livejournal.com]

The particular Eliot poems have always struck me as some of the most profoundly moving and deeply religious - without the connotations that marred "religious" as a term for me when I was growing up - works in the language, and having them bound into your memories of your father adds even more to them.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I found this very touching. Thank you.

[aliandrik.livejournal.com]

That's an amazingly touching post, and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm somewhat choked by it. He sounds an amazing man who did things his way without feeling he had to fit into any boxes.

I hope that the good thougts today far outweigh the sadness. Thinking of you.

[ex-greythist387.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting this. It's a window on someone whom few or none of us reading could have seen in the way you describe.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_hypatia_/]

Late to this but wished to say I am glad you wrote it. The old fashioned Catholic conservative who hated Thatcher, lover of Eliot, the FT for 'real news', the passion and compassion for community irrespective of labels, in my case I'd add the scientist/engineer who gave me my passion for music and books. He understood me better than he usually let on, far better than my mother I think the connection is what I miss most. Its entirely possible that they overlap on their clouds aiming their grouchy thunderbolts at the Gekkos, the sanctimonious, the self righteous and those who overcharge for Mozart instead of making it freely available :)