We had lived in Epsom since 1972, for no better reason than it happened to be the place we found a decent flat; subsequently, we bought our first house a few hundred yards away. My mother, Margaret, had died aged 84, spending her last days in Shoreham Hospital. My father, Ron, two years older than Margaret, soldiered on at 43 Gerald Road until, aged 90, he had a fall and was himself admitted to hospital. The advice was that he could no longer safely live on his own, despite having kind and solicitous next-door neighbours. We asked him whether he would like us to help him find a good local home (at least, until his money ran out) or, alternatively, if he would prefer to come to live with us in Epsom. He opted for the latter and for two years we did our best to make him feel at home. Ironically this was viable, despite our limited space, because although his dementia became progressively more intimidating his dodgy hip meant his mobility was severely impaired and he couldn’t take it on himself to leave the house without warning. We purchased football coverage from Sky, which diverted and entertained him. As his short-term memory collapsed he could no longer differentiate between teams. We could in fact have played the same match over and over. Rightly or wrongly, I resolved from the outset on a policy of telling the truth. ‘Where’s mother?’, he asked me one day, ‘upstairs?’ I explained as gently as I could that she had died half a century ago. Occasionally he would ask if I was his brother. But through it all Annette and I sensed that he felt secure: whoever we were, we were of his own; he was safe. Agency, I firmly believe, is never entirely lost.
We were denied ‘advice’ in the new Epsom-and-Ewell marketplace for carers, but we eventually found our way to decent support. Carers, all but one of whom were kindness personified – has there ever been an occupation more under-rated and under-paid? – got Ron up in the mornings. I put him to bed. He was soon doubly incontinent. I ‘had to’ wash and clean him before settling him for the night. He was acutely embarrassed initially, which I understood: ‘I’m so sorry. I never thought it would come to this!’ But I discovered that I was not embarrassed. de Beauvoir wrote in Adieu of Sartre’s dying days and was, wrongly in my view, criticised for it. The fourth age is what it is. It will overcome many of us. I learned that any stigma should more appropriately accrue to third parties who signal shame in a natural process. My daughters added their support to Annette’s: our youngest, Miranda, humbled me with her readiness to step in with her sensitivity and skills. I am very lucky with my family.
Towards the end of this two-year stint, I had to write out a note for Ron explaining who he was, who I was and where he was currently living. He would read this note continuously, unless diverted by football on TV; and if I was in the room he would ask me the same questions at intervals of around 20 seconds, making meaningful dialogue almost impossible. More than once he said he had had enough: ‘if I could buy a pill for £10 to end it all, I would.’ I would guiltily distract him by changing the subject.
After these two years at Epsom, we made a ‘collective decision’ to sell Ron’s house in Worthing and, pressed for space, put the proceeds towards a larger house. This is how we ended up transferring from town to country. We fell in love with a semi-detached house in the nearby village of Mickleham in Surrey’s Mole Valley. Ron was to remain with us for a further six months before quietly passing away at the age of 92. Given that I taught medical students about ‘death, dying and bereavement’ for 40+ years, I feel justified in adding a few very personal notes on Ron’s passing. First, a quick comment on Margaret’s death on a ward in Shoreham Hospital. When visiting, I asked a junior house officer (HO) how she was and what the prognosis was. He recognised my name as editor of the medical student textbook Sociology as Applied to Medicine, which clearly made him nervous. BUT he stuttered and stammered his way to a clear appraisal for which I was most appreciative: ‘good communication’. She would not be leaving the hospital. As a result, we were able to collect and take Ron to see her to bid her farewell. I couldn’t help comparing the HO’s sharing the news of Margaret’s imminent death with the ‘bad communication’ of a consultant in his 60s in the same ward, who, when asked by a family clustered around the bedside of a sick patient who was clearly drifting in and out of consciousness about his prospects of recovery, I overheard simply blurt out: ‘Well, he’s had a good innings!’
It was early one Saturday evening that Ron said to me: ‘I’m feeling very tired.’ ‘Would you like to go to bed?’ ‘Yes, I think that would be a good idea.’ As I was helping him get ready and move the two metres from his chair to his bed, he said: ‘I just want oblivion.’ As I’ve said, he had expressed this view before, if never so bluntly. ‘Have a good sleep’, I said. He was weak and traversing those two metres was not easy, but then it often wasn’t. No sooner had I settled him down than he died, no more than moments after what proved to be his final words. As his departure dawned on me, to be honest my mind emptied of … well, it just emptied. Annette was as ever an impeccable source of support. Ron had been clearly and unambiguously ready to die. It is worth adding here that this is the more comprehensible the older you are. At the age of 74 at the time of writing this I can at least empathise with a desire to depart, although I am far from ready to depart myself. To make this point to my students I used to say: ‘I can’t think of anything worse than going clubbing, and I expect you can’t get your head round this!’ I was in my 50s. ‘Well’, I went on, ‘what you can empathise with depends at least in part on the phase of the lifecourse you currently occupy. People who are fourth agers – although not exclusively those in this group – can indeed, to paraphrase Kubler-Ross’ classic account of the stages of dying, be accepting or at least resigned to death.’
What to do if someone dies at home? I rang our local general practice ‘out-of-hours’ service, and a message was relayed to a locum who was on a call. She would attend asap. Apparently, the police require to be informed and a post-mortem carried out if the deceased has not been seen by a doctor in a two-week period prior to death. Two police officers came by, drank tea and were kind and sympathetic. The locum arrived and confirmed the death. It occurred to me that, okay, Ron had left his body behind, and I am an atheist, but it was ‘as if’ his soul had vacated its embodiment. What followed was worthy of a Monty Python script and would have amused Ron. An ambulance arrived at the summit of the rather steep hill on which we live. It was not its crew’s normal vehicle, which was being repaired. Unfortunately, its brakes were not up to parking, and it kept slipping back down the hill; the driver had to ask our neighbours to move their car so he could take advantage of their flat parking space. The body was prepared for removal. A second unanticipated problem. Our house is 56 steps down from the hill. The outside lighting failed, so I had to carry a torch to illuminate the way for the stretcher. No soul, and now no body. Nor was this the end of a veritable comedy of errors.
A series of subsequent phone calls on my part failed to locate Ron’s body. The undertaker’s local office was closed (permanently), and nor were any other mid-Surrey ‘branches’ able to trace its whereabouts. Eventually it was tracked down to East Surrey Hospital, where the post-mortem was to be carried out. They would ring me with the results. They didn’t. When all was eventually resolved I noticed that Ron was recorded as a ‘female’. I was less amused than Ron would have been, but I made no complaint. Nor was I distressed by what seemed like a conspiracy of incompetence: when we are gone, we are gone. Ron was no part of this farce.
To return to our new home in Mickleham, which provided more than enhanced space, although my commute to UCL over the next nine years became more complex. Epsom had been an excellent hub for commuters, then offering services every 15 mins to Waterloo and Victoria, with access also to London Bridge, each journey taking about 35 minutes. The travel from Mickleham involved catching the half-hourly 365 bus from close by to Dorking Station, a 50-minute journey to, usually Waterloo, and a tube up the Northern Line to Goodge Street. It meant a very early start if I had a lecture at 9am. But we had fallen in love with Old School Cottage from a first sighting. In fact, so enthusiastic were Annette and I when we first gazed down its 56 garden steps that we put in a bid before I had viewed the property inside and went on to purchase it before clinching the sale of 58 South Street in Epsom, a risky expedient. The estate agents, Wadsworths, donated a bottle of champaign to mark our moving in. The move itself was not quite the stress-inducing life event that Brown and Harris might have predicted from their classic study, Origins of Depression; but it was heavy physical labour nevertheless. Our overriding challenge will be anticipated by any academic, at least of my cohort – books! We had thousands of them (our daughters had counted over 6,000 not so long before the move). The removal firm was excellent, not least in carrying Ron in his wheelchair via our ‘right of way’ through our new neighbour’s garden – even as he repeated ‘Will I need a parachute?’ – and I wish I could now remember their name.
I imagine we had heard of Mickleham prior to our move, and we had certainly by-passed it on the A24 a few hundred times when visiting Ron and Margaret in Worthing, but we knew little about it. We discovered that the rough track leading to our new home, Byttom Hill, had some history to it. In 1789 Sir Charles Talbot had made over a parcel of land to the parish of Mickleham for the construction of a poor house. Since 1601, due to the declining fortunes of the Church, courtesy of Henry VIII’s suppression of the monasteries, parishes had been charged with a responsibility to provide relief for their local poor. The means to do so came from a levy on the better-off and was distributed by overseers as either outdoor or indoor relief. According to a local historian, Ronald Shepherd, outdoor relief sufficed until 1789 when a poor house was judged essential. Poor houses were austerely functional, designed to stigmatise and deter. The one half-way up our hillside track, was apparently an elongated, two-story building containing eight dwellings. As if to anticipate the present neoliberal era of accelerating inequality and the redeployment of stigma as a weapon against the disadvantaged, whether poor or disabled, it was soon put about that the inhabitants were ‘taking advantage’. Furthermore, after the Napoleonic War the numbers of ‘needy poor’ rose nationally, leading to the passing of a new Poor Law Act in 1834. Individual parishes lost their responsibilities in favour of ‘unions’ of neighbouring parishes, leaving Mickleham’s high and dry. In 1838 a proposal was made to convert the poor house into an almshouse, but it came to nothing. Another Talbot stepped into the breach, this time Sir George, who in 1845 supplied the means for the reconstruction of what was by then a dilapidated building; and an almshouse was erected. A fire in 1864 levelled this to the ground. Shepherd defines this as a blessing in disguise: the eight sets of rooms Annette and I now drive past daily are apparently a significant improvement. Nestling beside these rooms is the King William IV pub. Built in 1830, this one-time resource for workers on the nearby Beaverbook Estate offers wondrous views across the A24 to Norbury Park. As any readers of my blogs will know, this pub has over the years become a writing retreat for me, the more so under its present owners, Eamonn and Anne and manager Kat. Old School Cottage might not have the Elizabeth 1 vintage of 58 South Street, but it does have a story and a certain age attached to it. It was built and founded as a National School in 1843. Its conversion into a dwelling took place in 1900. Old School Cottage is a conversion of the school, while our neighbour’s Old School House is a conversion of the schoolmasters’ house. While both properties are semi-detached, they each enjoy near-complete privacy.