Along by the Mole
When the rains come and the waters
Of the Mole rise up to flood the land
There’s an eerie beauty about the place;
But the downpours have gone now,
And only the squelch of sodden mud
Reminds us of the river’s ambition.
The weed-edged path we take winds
Slowly up, then opens into tumbling grass
Where butterflies jerk in fragile flight
And the bottle-green sheen of a dragonfly
Hovers briefly before darting out of sight.
It’s into the woodland, thickly shaded
With tall, thin, ghostly trunks and wispy
Boughs scrapping for the light denied
To us as we shuffle long and deep,
Rutted puddles and twigs beneath our feet.
We have sandwiches, fruit and hot coffee,
And a rough table furnished with benches
Awaits in a clearing bounded by farms;
A herd of cows punctuated by white egrets
Lies ahead, while sheep amber lazily
To our left, oblivious of the approach
Of two sheepdogs, alert, tense, eager
For the farmer’s whistles of command.
The route back is different and carries
Us close by the Mole; we scuttle down
Through a wave of sweet-flowering garlic
To its bank, circumventing nests of thorns
And the scrawny splinters of dead saplings.
By the fast-running waters is a platform
On which we stand and stare, hoping
In vein to catch a kingfisher in flight,
But spirits lifted by the sight of a heron.
Over the railway line and we ascend
Once more, rising high above the Mole
Till the path narrows and steeply drops
And, breathing freer, we are home again.
The Quick Slow Goodbye
1: A Death in the Family
He’d been with us for two and a half years,
Mainly sitting in his chair watching football:
We’d bought a television for his room
And one of the few pluses of dementia
Is that you never see the same game twice.
‘I don’t know who I am or where I am’
Was his constant refrain, so I wrote it down
On a piece of paper and left it by his chair
And he read it every twenty seconds or so.
For all his confusion, I sensed he felt safe.
He once said to me that if it wasn’t for his hip
He would walk to the end of Worthing pier
And jump off; and after he came to live
With us he said he would pay £10 for a pill
To end it all if he could. I joked it away:
‘No you wouldn’t, you’d say ‘I’m not paying £10!’
And he grinned: ‘You’re probably right.’
Around 6pm one Saturday evening he said
He was tired. ‘It’s early, but I can help
You to your bed if you like?’ ‘Thank you.’
We’d covered half the two metres to his bed
When he quietly said: ‘I just want oblivion.’
Focused on getting him into bed, I didn’t reply.
Lying flat and silent he died ten minutes later
While I held his hand.
I didn’t know what to think.
This was what textbooks call a good death,
Though for my father it was a while overdue.
But I wasn’t ready and I sat stunned,
Still holding his unresponsive hand,
Talking to him gently as I took it all in;
Ok it was time, and everything was in order,
But I wanted him back, just for five minutes,
Not for his benefit, for mine.
Two days later I wept copiously.
2: An Ambulance Came
Mid-evening on that Saturday I was put
Through to the out-of-hours GP service,
Was told the locum was out and about
But had been informed; the police too
Would have to be told, and a postmortum
Carried out as my dad hadn’t seen a doctor
In the past fortnight; numbly, I consented.
Two policemen arrived first and had tea
While we waited for the locum, who turned
Up eventually and confirmed the death
They were all very kind.
The locum arranged for the body to be collected.
An ambulance arrived, drove up our hill,
But was unable to park because its brakes
Wouldn’t hold, so neighbours moved their car
And made available a flatter space:
‘Our normal vehicle is in for a service’,
The driver said, ‘so we borrowed this one.’
It was dark now, and this strange assembly
Of untoward events was compounded when
Our garden lights failed and the 56-step climb
From house to ambulance was black and perilous;
I preceded the stretcher bearing what had once
Been my father, walking backwards with a torch.
I had seen my father leave hours before,
But I felt dazed when his body was driven
Gingerly, respectfully, down Byttom Hill.
- Where Is He?
Later I rang the local undertakers, as advised,
But it was closed, permanently; and no other
Undertaker in mid-Surrey had my father’s body.
Somebody, somewhere, had misplaced him.
More phone calls: he was in East Surrey Hospital
And I would be told when the postmortum
Had been conducted and the results known.
But I wasn’t rung, and on his death certificate,
In black and white, he was down as a female.
This litany of mishaps, so wrong, so hurtful
To so many would have amused my father
No end: I can see his wry smile.
We found ourselves a vicar who presided
At the cemetery, and it was a fillip to the family
That this solicitous man seemed to think
The recordings of my father’s German drinking
Songs from the 1930s strangely appropriate,
Even covertly theological.
- Absent but Present
For atheists there is a finality to death,
No need for the false succour of fantasy.
Maybe this is why I was not unsettled,
Or put out by the Monty Python sketch
Of the lost and found of my dad’s body.
He is here as long as I am, and longer yet
In the scraps of memory of my daughters;
He will fade slowly, then absolutely.
We should just get our heads round this.
But for now, and until I take my leave,
He lives on in who I am and wish to be,
And I see him not as a fourth-ager waiting
To die, the husk of a human that de Beauvoir
Saw and described in her then-fragile Sartre,
But as a pre-war shipping agent in Germany,
Courting my mother in Barnet’s tennis club,
A white-kitted naval officer posted to Trinidad,
A spy crossing the Andes on a mission,
Conscientious war-trained teacher at St Andrews
Top scoring with 35 runs against the lads
In the calm, dry dusk of Homefield Park.
But mostly, I see a calm, kind, thoughtful man
And a good father.
Just Another Species
Many of the tough quandaries of life
Evaporate if we don’t expect too much;
After all, we’re just another species.
As Heidegger said, we are chucked in,
Didn’t choose it, so it’s bound to give
Pause for thought, to make us anxious.
Worse still, as Sartre once explained,
Each free choice we make destroys
What else we might have done or been.
But as I mentioned, there’s no reason
To expect too much of homo sapiens,
In a nutshell: we are not god-like.
Who’s to say hedgehogs are not smarter,
Or bolder candidates like rats or ants?
Maybe is just a matter of wavelengths.
We need to know our limitations,
To come to terms with our fallibility:
We’re clever enough to think it through.
There’s stuff we know we don’t know
And so much more that we don’t know
We don’t know, but that’s actually ok.
As Popper said, don’t drill to bedrock,
No need; just far enough for stability
And the confidence to persevere.
We can rest content in the rich confines
Of our finite intelligence, noting discretely
That there’s no other option available.
It’s Waking Up Out There
Spring is nudging the winter aside now;
A plump magpie is trying in vain to sing,
A blackbird swoops low from a bough,
Beak spilling full of fresh moss to bring
To her hidden home in the creeper.
A pair of chaffinches are busy on the roof,
Extracting their plunder between the tiles;
And there’s a sparrow pecking at the hoof
Marks left by deer as the herd roamed miles
In the still, crisp and silent early hours.
Overhead a buzzard stops on the wind,
Emitting a slow, signal, mournful cry,
Scanning the mottled fields, only to rescind
Its call and take flight once more to try
Fresh terrains for its evening succour.
Yellow butterflies dance feather-light
Amongst the crocuses, dipping, darting,
Flitting low in elegant pairs in the bright,
Soft sun before feinting high and parting
For rival gardens and coloured prizes.
Days will yet send us different skies,
Frost, cloud and rain will vie with the sun;
But Spring has announced itself, and wise
People will breathe deep, Winter’s done
And the earth is coming back to life.