Grief

“You are going to die before me and leave me to deal with this, and I will curse your soul for all eternity,” I once said half-jokingly to my husband over a glass of wine. We were having one of our regular conversations about what he was going to do about his late uncle’s possessions, which had arrived at our house in lorry-loads about a year after we had married. “Why don’t you do half an hour of sorting every weekend? I will help you,” I would suggest in reference to the multiple barns, basements and attics at our farm, which were now piled high with three generations’ worth of male hoarding. But with an increasing number of children in the house and no sense of urgency, progress was slow.

Mark Nowak, father of the murdered Henry Nowak, spoke powerfully in public after Vickrum Digwa was convicted of the crime. He said there was ‘no moment when the pain stops’ and he thought there never would be. This prompted a comparison in my mind. Last month, Daphne Hamilton-Fairley died, aged 95. Our families were neighbours and friends in Bayswater in the late 1950s, and kept in touch after we moved to the country. Daphne’s husband, Gordon, was a most distinguished oncologist at Bart’s. One morning in 1975, he was walking in Campden Hill Square. His dogs sniffed under a car. A bomb planted there exploded, killing Gordon (and the dogs). The IRA had intended to blow up the MP Sir Hugh Fraser, husband of the famous Lady Antonia, who lived next door.

We knew the church would be packed as Shelley had died so young. We knew the church would be freezing, as her funeral fell during the Arctic spell that whitened the bracken and iced over puddles the colour of Dairy Milk. When we drove into Simonsbath just after lunchtime, the sun was only grazing the hilltops, leaving valleys in deep shadows. We’d allowed plenty of time, but the lanes were already crammed with vehicles. My husband and I had intended to stand at the back of St Luke’s so as not to take up precious places, but thanks to Ivo’s near-village-elder status we were ordered into the emergency seating in the chancel.

It’s half an hour before lights out when my dad arrives at my bedroom door holding Roald Dahl’s Danny the Champion of the World. He kicks off his shoes, loosens his tie and wedges himself next to me in my small single bed, his toes waggling in their socks as they regain freedom after a long day in the office. In the evening he smells of the menthol toothpicks he always carries in his top pocket (in the morning, when he drops me off at school, he smells of the spicy pink toothpaste which I once tried and which burned the roof of my mouth).

There were many tributes paid to the Jersey aid worker Simon Boas when he died of throat cancer in July, aged 47. In writing and speaking about his terminal diagnosis with courage and humour, he was admired on the island and beyond. My mother-in-law, having spent years working with aid charities, lives on Jersey and knew Simon well. So I listened with interest earlier this month to an item about him on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. The host, Emma Barnett, had spoken to Simon days before he died. Now she was about to interview his widow. Or, as she referred to Aurelie Boas, ‘his wife’. As editorial mistakes go, this may not seem especially grievous. It is certainly common.

Friends in Calais invited me to their baby’s birthday party. He’s a year old. They suggested an overnight stay and I planned to reach France by about mid-afternoon and have a stroll, visit the sights, buy a bit of tat for the nipper and a litre of plonk for the proud parents. Clouds of sweet diesel vapour enveloped me. My pulse quickened. In the 1970s, it all smelt like this The morning express sped me south and I was entertained on board by the Bing-Bong Pixie who referred to the train as ‘this 10.02 service from London Victoria to Dover Priory’. She recited the name of every stop on the line and repeated it twice each time we reached a new station. Her chirpy tone concealed a rather malevolent side.

‘Like being chained to a lunatic.’ That’s how a man feels in relation to his libido. And the lunatic latches on to anything, irrationally, and without warning. In Cambridge recently I dropped into a lecture given by a beautiful historian, Lea Ypi, from Albania, whose discourse included this observation about revolutionaries: ‘Once they attain power they lose all interest in revolution.’ Good point. Her blonde hair spilling over her shoulders absorbed far more of my attention than her political reflections and I was desperate to speak to her afterwards, but I had no way to orchestrate a meeting. She raised one eyebrow at me suggestively.

On the window ledge of my sister Carmel’s bedroom there’s a tray of cards inscribed with the months of the year, days of the week and numbers from 1 to 31. If you can be bothered to adjust the display every morning, you’ll have what’s called a ‘perpetual calendar’. I need to remember that I already have drawers full of Thompson memorabilia Sunday 3 October 2021 was the day Carmel’s calendar stopped being perpetual. That morning she woke up with a fever so alarming that her next-door neighbour called an ambulance. Before it arrived, Carmel changed the calendar; then she kissed goodbye to Otto, her Norfolk terrier, walked downstairs and left her house for ever. The next day, another ambulance took her from the Royal Sussex Hospital to Guy’s Cancer Centre.

No one can say that, over the course of the past year, we have not had the opportunity as a country to practise the grim arts of grief and mourning. We all know the figures — 127,000 Covid deaths and counting — but I wonder if, in the face of this onslaught, we have lost sight of the vital fact that behind each loss there will be a group of family members and close friends of the deceased setting out on the long, slow trudge down the boggy path of grief. How are we dealing with this suffering? When my father died extremely suddenly six years ago, there was one thing for which I was even more unprepared than the abrupt absence of the most cheerful person I had ever had the pleasure to know.