Jeremy clarke

Provence “Painting is a stupid job. Do something useful and train to be a nurse,” commented a man beneath a column I wrote last month. Although well used to the vitriol leveled at artists from some quarters, I found this particularly annoying. I was a general nurse from 1981 to 1985, after which I completed psychiatric training and spent five years working in acute psychiatry in the East End of Glasgow. That was followed by a year as a district nurse and seven more as a practice sister. I nursed because my lower-middle-class background, with its discouragements and lack of contacts, didn’t equip me even to consider somehow making a living from the two things I’d loved most since I was a child: books and art.

Provence In the hope of renting out the main cave house during the summer, I’ve been clearing to make room for guests. At the bottom of a cupboard I found two of Jeremy’s Barbour jackets. He bought them compulsively in secondhand shops and I’ve given away three already. Standing at the clothes recycling bin in the car park, I remembered just in time to check the pockets. With Jeremy you never know what you’ll find. The other month, rooting about for scissors in his as yet uncleared bedside cabinet drawer, I found a sizeable lump of granite-hard hash which must have been at least six years old. My hippy ceramicist neighbour Geoffrey was delighted.

Provence Life was complicated when I fled to Provence in November 2014 with no job and very little money. At first a comedian friend and his wife lent me their second home. The intention was to stay for six months, recover from a traumatic marriage break-up and write a book about my father, who was a giant (7ft 4in) and had for a spell in 1938 toured Nazi Germany and England as part of a world-famous revue. I was also planning to learn copy-editing in the hope that when I got back, I could get a job as the oldest-ever publishing intern. But in those days I didn’t even have a laptop and since money was running out, I had to abandon both ideas and find work.

Provence The other Monday I hosted the third annual meeting of the Jeremy Clarke Memoir Club on what would’ve been his 69th birthday. At the far end of the dining table, deep in the bare rock of the cliff, there’s a 27-inch high plaster cast of a bust by my ex of our youngest daughter as a youthful Baucis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The sculpture is bedecked with necklaces, a small bunch of faux anemones and part of the headdress I wore as a 21-year-old bride. In front of the bust I placed my grandmother’s black basalt Wedgwood urn which contains the remainder of Jeremy’s ashes. André began the meeting with the five-day odyssey his Italian father took alone on foot across the Alps in 1936, to escape conscription into Mussolini’s Blackshirts.

In the early 2000s, academics, philosophers, politicians, members of the royal household and business people – including the CEO and the owner of a newspaper group – sometimes came round to the house for tea, drinks or dinner. Anxious to keep up, I started to read the papers more thoroughly. The Economist and New Statesman I found dull. On the recommendation of a friend, I bought The Spectator. The writing was better. Sometimes you’d find arguments for and against a subject, for example fox hunting, in the same magazine. But more than that – it was entertaining. Jeremy Clarke’s Low Life column, however, was in another league. It was poetry; brilliantly observed, lyrical, fearless and funny.

Provence A few days before my middle daughter’s Oxfordshire wedding this summer, my youngest announced that she and her fiancé, who’ve been together for years, were getting married within weeks. They’re moving abroad and bringing their wedding forward would help, she said. Two daughters married in less than a month. Mrs Bennet would be proud or envious. On hearing the news I panic-booked an easyJet flight to Edinburgh for the day before the youngest’s wedding, only to realise it got in at midnight, just 12 hours before the ceremony, and had to abandon that and rebook for the previous day.

Provence ‘What do you mean?’ I wanted to ask the man who told me last autumn it was time to move on. I hoped he didn’t mean find a new boyfriend. I like him and his wife a lot and it was meant kindly – so I kept quiet as we stood in their kitchen and they gave me instructions for my weekly visits to check the house after they left for winter. But it stung. Jeremy was still with me night and day in everything I did. I tried not to let my face fall a second time when the man told me he was paying someone else to drive his Aston Martin back to England. I wanted to ask the same question of another man, a widower friend of a friend, who said, in an otherwise ordinary message: ‘This isn’t an offer or a request, but how do you feel about sex?

Provence My eldest daughter’s husband is from Como. In the early 2000s George Clooney caused a stir in the town when he bought a villa on the lakeside nearby, triggering what’s become known as the Clooney effect – a rise in house prices and the number of ‘bougie’ shops and restaurants catering for an increasing number of visitors. Rather than take a boat trip and gawp at the Villa Oleandra, visitors would be better heading to Gardone on Lake Garda and visiting Gabriele D’Annunzio’s insane Il Vittoriale. Unlike Clooney, D’Annunzio (1863-1938), whose motto was ‘Me ne frego’ (I don’t give a damn), was a short, ugly, almost blind, toothless early 20th-century proto-communist/fascist war hero.

Provence Summer has arrived. The evenings are warm enough to sit out on the balcony terrace and watch the lights come on in the village below. Each night at ten, the great limestone cliff, into which my little house was built, is floodlit for a couple of hours. On cue two huge baby eagle owls (fully grown wingspan 170cm) begin rehearsing for adulthood and flap clumsily, then majestically, around the rock, calling for their parents and terrorising the smaller nesting birds hidden deep within the crags and crevices. English women wearing broderie anglaise dresses, straw hats and anxious smiles drift about The annual migration of tourists has begun too. On market day the car parks are full by 9.30 a.m. and the queue for Patricia’s cheese stall is 12 deep.

The other week my eldest daughter and I were staying with friends in Richmond for the launch of Jeremy’s third collection of Low Life columns. The night before the anniversary of his death – the day of the launch – I woke at 2 a.m. and unable to sleep was back in the cave holding Jeremy’s hand; machines clicking and beeping as his life ebbed unpeacefully away. He died at 9 a.m.  A few weeks after Jeremy died, I dreamt he walked into the house… he looked fit, strong and full of life At 9.05 a.m., in tears and still wearing a nightie, jumper and flip-flops, I ran downstairs, almost colliding with one of our hosts, out the back door to the bottom of the garden. Beyond the high wooden fence and gate a path ran parallel with the Thames.

Since I had a brush with death a couple of years ago, I have often wondered who my far younger wife, Carla, might marry after she has buried me. When I was out for the count in intensive care in Ravenna, the hospital’s duty priest, an Argentinian, even administered the last rites. ‘They do it just in case these days,’ Carla told me, as if it had all been a bit of a laugh, which I suppose it may well be if you believe, like her, that death is the prelude to eternal life. The other day, a herd of donkeys came charging into our garden out of the blue and I soon put two and two together They belonged to our nearest neighbour, Gianni, a farmer.