Jeremy Clarke

I thought no one else was going to turn up at the crematorium to wave Terry off. But as the seconds ticked closer to the appointed time, knots of ashen-faced mourners began to trickle in from the car park and congregate around the chapel doors. Then Terry arrived. He arrived in a cardboard box inside a wickerwork casket laid longitudinally in the back of the hearse. He’d been dead nearly a month. Lung cancer. Diagnosed ten days before he died. He was cleaning windows right to the end. Today would have been his 65th birthday. Terry’s three brothers hoisted him in through the doors and the rest of us trooped in behind. The interior of the chapel disappointed me. Earlier, the ‘Civic Funerary Celebrant’ had told me that he didn’t really ‘do’ prayers.

My boy has stopped returning my calls and texts. The other day I called him 18 times in a row, from sheer frustration to begin with, then as a joke, to make him smile when he looked at his phone and saw that it said he has 18 missed calls. I’ve given up leaving messages. Is this what happens with your kids? You think you’re best friends, then crash! The shutters come down — and for no apparent reason. If I knew where my boy lived, I’d go round and knock on the door and ask him what’s happened, what’s gone wrong between us. But he’s taken infinite care not to divulge his address. It’s top secret. The last time we spoke was just before Christmas. He’d rung, asking for a lift somewhere because his car was broken down.

The other night, Jim, a pub landlord, was complaining angrily to me about the government. I listened but said nothing. Then he produced a newspaper clipping. It was an article about the British army’s latest sniper rifle. It had a range of, I forget what — two miles? In the wrong hands, said Jim, it would be possible for someone to lean out of an upstairs window in Lambeth and pot a New Labour politician fumbling for his car keys in the members’ car park of the House of Commons. In fact, I was looking at the wrong hands right now, he said, spreading them on the bar. Would I like to sponsor him on an assassination spree? Actually, I detest this political class so much I think it’s making me mentally ill.

It’s good to talk Last week, when the snow lay thickly on the ground, in a rare burst of altruism I picked up the telephone and dialled the number of a frail, elderly and vulnerable member of our community, to ask her if there was anything I could get for her from the village stores. The phone rang and rang and rang. Just as I was about to give up I heard the receiver being fumbled into position and a quavering, phlegm-coated voice say hello. ‘How are you?’ I said. ‘Do you need anything from the shop?’ I ought to have known that getting answers to these simple questions was no easy matter. I was perhaps the first person she’d spoken to for days. Far greater than her need for bread or milk was her need to talk.

Apart from going to the nearest town one afternoon to have teeth out, I hadn’t been out of the village for six weeks. I might have been depressed about this normally, but a jolly outing I had entered and underlined in my diary for the end of January kept my spirits up. I was popping up to the metropolis to watch a football match — an evening game, under floodlights. Our new manager, whom the critics were, to start with, eager to write off as an ingénue, a loser, a chancer, even a chimpanzee, was proving to be a man of honour, wisdom, good humour and sanity. Under him, the team was playing attractive, thoughtful football again. And winning. We’ve become bitterly disillusioned with our football club in the past few years.

Three years ago, when I couldn’t put off going to a dentist any longer, and had to make an urgent appointment, I discovered that the closest NHS dentist was in north Devon. I live in south Devon. Devon is a big county. It has more miles of road surface than Belgium. So I was forced to enrol for a course of treatment with a private dentist in the nearest town. Every time I visit this private dentist’s surgery I am reminded of the old saying that only the rich know the difference between being rich and being poor. In the waiting room, soothing, digitally recorded Mozart wafts you into a deep leather sofa. There is a choice of daily newspapers and up-market magazines, including The Spectator, and free tea and coffee from the machine.

Over the Christmas holiday I read a collection of essays edited by Carl Jung, Man and His Symbols, which Jung kicks off with an essay entitled ‘The Importance of Dreams’. Dreams ought to be taken seriously, says Jung. They are a specific expression of the unconscious and as such ought to be treated as facts. He concedes that a fact expressed by the unconscious, primitive, symbol-encrusted part of the mind is never going to be easy for the contemporary, rational, conscious part of the mind to interpret with any certainty. But Jung contends that anyone equipped with an understanding of primitive symbolism can learn to interpret correctly at least some of their dreams, and perhaps take advantage of the guidance and prophesy that is being constantly offered by the unconscious mind.

I’m in the barber’s chair, getting a trim, studying the reflections of the waiting customers in the mirror. One man, about 60 years old, his head in the Daily Mail, looks vaguely familiar. We’ve met somewhere before, I think. Then I remember. It was at one of our lurcher, terrier and ferret club summer shows. (Our club was disbanded shortly after the chairman died, so it must have been ten years ago at least.) I was stewarding the ferret show. We’d erected a gazebo to keep the sun off the show cages, and we’d strewn straw bales around for the exhibitors to sit on. The appointed judge was an old-school ferreting man of some renown and we were thrilled that we’d been able to get him.

It was minus four degrees, dampness hung in the air, and visibility was down to about 120 yards. As I drove up on to Dartmoor with fog lamps on, wipers going, and heater and blower at full blast, I didn’t anticipate that this year’s New Year’s Day ‘Get Fit For 2009’ guided walk on Dartmoor would be as well attended as it was. But about 30 people were milling about in the grid-referenced car park at two minutes to noon as I pulled in. It looked like an outdoor clothing and equipment fashion show.

Three missed calls. Two answer phone messages. The bank manager. He needed to see me. Would I make an appointment and come in to see him as soon as possible? His tone of voice suggested it was a matter of some urgency. Had some energetic, enterprising person fraudulently obtained my password or pin number and cleaned out my overdraft facility, I wondered? Normally I don’t need to have anything to do with the bank manager. A couple of years ago, however, this current one’s predecessor had smartly intercepted me on my way out of his bank and offered to lend me money. He led me into an office, candidly confessed that a recent change in the bank’s ethos now meant that he was little more than a glorified loan shark, and said how much would I like?

My boy, and almost all the members of his family on his mother’s side, are dedicated smokers. Cigarettes are the joy and consolation of their lives. Whenever I go abroad, they take up a collection and I am handed a wad of money to buy and bring back as many tax-free fags as possible. When I went to Egypt recently, I was given money for cigarettes by his mum, his Aunty Pat, his gran, his mum’s next-door neighbours, by Tom and Glenda at number 47, and by Betty, a lady my boy works with, who really shouldn’t be smoking as her circulation is so bad she can hardly walk. Because Egypt is a non-EU country and Christmas was coming up, they really lumped in.

On our last evening in Cairo we were joined for dinner in the hotel restaurant by a local businessman who liked to socialise with the English tourists. He drew up the chair beside mine. The chair on his other side was vacant. The amplified music was too loud to permit general conversation across the table so the poor man was stuck with just me. Our table was a large one right next to the stage. He was a small, calm, dapper man. Every thought, word and gesture was so carefully measured I wondered whether he might be addicted to tranquillisers. Everything that I said he pondered carefully, as though my words were laden with the wisdom of Solomon. Being essentially dull-witted, I’m not immune to flattery of this sort.

We first encountered Ahmed, our dragoman in Cairo, when he stepped forward to greet us at passport control. He was dressed soberly in dark suit, black tie, black shoes. Shaved head. Designer glasses. His manner was brisk and unsmiling. But now and again an engagingly complicit smile lighted his hawkish face to remind us that he understood as well as we that all is vanity. He expedited the entry formalities then led us outside to a waiting people carrier and slid back the door for us. Ahmed sat up in front, beside the driver. The driver spoke no English and gave his full attention to the road ahead. Ahmed, on the other hand, was very comfortable with the language and liked to talk. The hotel was on the far side of the city. ‘Welcome to Cairo. What do you think of Cairo traffic?

One day last week I woke up slightly bonkers: a stranger to myself. I couldn’t think consecutive thoughts. Even my vision was blurred. I get days like that now and again. Perhaps I’m allergic to something. Downstairs on the kitchen table I found a note I’d written the night before, reminding me to take the car to the local main dealer by 9.30. The car had been referred there by the manufacturer in order for them to replace (free of charge) a potentially faulty motor in one of the adjustable side mirrors. I looked at the clock. It was 10.00. I was mortified. I picked up the phone, rang the dealership and delivered an abject apology. The receptionist laughed. ‘Don’t worry!’ she said. ‘If you bring it in any time before midday, that’ll be fine.

I have three friends whom I’ve kept up with since we sat together, aged five, in Mrs Asplin’s class at the local county primary school. After Mrs Asplin, we were taught by Mrs Dobson, then Mrs Asplin again, then Mr Seager, then Mrs Dobson again, then Mr Middleton and then Mr Farrell. These teachers were all kind except Mr Seager, who was Welsh and shouted at us and made us write out hymns. After that we were swallowed up by a huge, new and somewhat terrifying comprehensive school and in the second year I moved away from the area.  These friends have been easy to keep up with, however, because whereas I’ve moved about the country a fair bit, they’ve stayed put.

Last Thursday I was volunteer driver for the day for a Heartbeaters’ outing. Heartbeaters is a local exercise and social club for people recovering from heart attacks that meets weekly (and perhaps weakly) in the Baptist church hall for an hour of gentle physical jerks. We went to Greenway, Agatha Christie’s house on the east bank of the river Dart in Devon. She bought Greenway and its 33 acres in 1939 for £6,000, and the National Trust has just spent £5.4 million doing it up, in the words of its website, ‘to retain the spirit of the place, its almost wayward character, its atmospheric beauty and its timeless qualities’.

It’s a proud day when your boy goes for his first job interview with a career in mind and says he wants to borrow your suit. He left school two years ago, aged 16, knowing a bit about the Nazis and how to bake a scone and that’s about it. He gained no qualifications, something of an achievement these days. The parents’ evenings I attended each year were like going from one party political broadcast to another. Through their unhappy smiles, his overworked teachers assured me that my boy was either ‘brilliant’ or ‘doing brilliantly’. Which was a strange thing for anybody concerned about academic excellence to say about a lad who has never read a book in his life, nor shown the slightest inclination to do so.

The help-yourself breakfast buffet was a single, waxed carton of orange juice (made from concentrate), and a stack of small upturned glasses. I filled one of these, tipped it down my throat, poured another and bore it to a table set for one beside the swing service door leading to the kitchen. A grubby laminated menu on the tea-stained tablecloth said that the Continental breakfast was tea or coffee with brown or white toast. Dotted about at the other tables were what appeared to be foreign tourists: a solitary meditative backpacker, two not quite awake couples, a fitfully vivacious table of four Spaniards. The unspoken shame of having to start the day in such shabby, penny-pinching surroundings was palpable. On the far side of the room, directly opposite my table, was a large mirror.

The average age of the residents in our village here on the south Devon coast must be up in the seventies. Every time I answer the door the person standing there is panting and leaning on a stick. There was a murder in the village a couple of years ago. This man battered and stabbed his blind wife to death as she lay in bed, then killed the cat. He was 88 years old. His wife was 87. I don’t know how old the cat was. He was the oldest man to be charged with murder in English legal history. He pleaded not guilty on the grounds of diminished responsibility and the judge immediately set him free owing to his being too frail to be a danger to the public. That’s how old we are in our village.