In This Block There Lives a Slag…: And Other Yorkshire Fables. Bill Broady

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       Songs that Won the War

      Radiation salvoes, for a while, had held the cancer at the left lung, but then supposedly arthritic side-effects were revealed to be an all-out offensive on the spine that hadn’t – for some reason – shown up on the scans…Hopeless, so they moved my father from infirmary to hospice.

      I was glad to see him out of there. When I’d heard talk of NHS demoralization I’d imagined longer queues in casualty, higher levels of sickness and staff turnover, more snapping and sighing, undusted window ledges, the odd mislaid corpse: I wasn’t prepared for the hospital’s descent – in the five years since my mother died – into an abyss of unfocused fear and hatred. Compassion and competence had been shut down along with the dark, echoing dermatology wing. A series of specialists – with half-moon glasses and gold pinky rings – sidled up to rubbish each other’s prognoses: an endless Tom and Jerry dialectic, until the disease itself shut them up. Half the housemen were German, over on cheap short-term contracts: one of them had prodded my father’s chest, where the blue-black shrapnel seemed to swim subcutaneously, like fish in a silted-up pool. ‘Vere did you get zis?’ he asked in best Gestapo fashion. ‘Narvik 1940’ – my father rolled his eyes – ‘Your lot.’ He didn’t forgive: the last real animation he’d shown was in punching the air when Lechkov’s bald head put Klinsmann and Co out of the World Cup.

      The nurses were even worse. Vampire-pale, stony-eyed, at visiting times they moved from bed to bed, weirdly vibrating, avid for the drama and tears: the ICU was better than East Enders or Corrie. They hated my father for grimly recording each cracked window, jammed radiator and empty light socket, every little oversight and cruelty, everyone’s names: after his red Silvine notebook had mysteriously vanished he hid its replacement inside his pillow. They hated me for my lack of obvious grief: my diffidence cracked just once – when they offered me pre-bereavement counselling and I burst out laughing. After that, eyes averted, they stumped past us, as if crushing hideous vermin under their thick soles. Whatever happened to the bow-tied doctors who used to work the wards like game show hosts, the ward sisters like opera divas, the Hattie Jacques matrons? Whatever happened to the student nurses of my youth – vivid, tender, blithe as spring throstles and self-parodically hot to trot…though seldom with me?

      The hospice was high above Wharfedale, the last house before the moors. As I left the car I got, as always, a tang of ozone, although a hundred miles from the nearest coast. It was a wool baron’s Italianate mansion, converted, ringed by immaculate parterres, pulsing and blaring with crude life and colour: where were the bosky, bowering cypress and yew? The residents were never seen outside, though today I glimpsed lemur-like flittings in the sunporch shadows.

      The hall’s darkness enveloped me like squid’s ink and I groped towards the window lights’ tiny lozenges at the top of the mock-baronial staircase, toe-kicking each invisible riser. Halfway up, the Pain Management Team – three grinning boys in luminous white, like a tumbling act – passed me in mid-air, breasting the front door with one more kangaroo bound. The oak bannister I’d cowered against was strangely warm and yielding: time rubs off hard edges, makes things kind – old buildings are the best to die in, or die into. ‘It’s bad luck to be the first to die in a house,’ my grandfather had said, just before he was.

      My favourite nurse was on station: the one who, by nightlight, had rubbed my father’s back with toothpaste instead of muscle relaxant and hadn’t stopped giggling about it since. Above the ligature-tight chain of her St Christopher her soft, wet face beamed perpetually on her ‘ressies’ – as if, in dying, they were essaying some much-loved party piece. She winked and wagged her finger at me, knowing that I carried a whisky bottle in my poacher’s pocket. She’d got my number: a dinosaur, whose pain took an age to reach heart or brain. It had been three months after my mother’s funeral when, traversing the ridge away from Ingleborough, I looked back to recognize, in the mountain’s beetle-browed profile, her dead face.

      My father’s grey hands lay in a plate of untouched food. On the white traycloth was a line of crimson splashes – lung blood – like a restaurant critic’s five-star recommendation. His pills were laid out ready – the doomed fleet he was about to launch on his bloodstream. His eyes opened and his arms elongated to reach the t-bar above the bed, to give the illusion that he was raising himself in welcome, his fingers fluttering on the metal like a flautist’s. The more he wasted away the heavier he got: it took two nurses to cross-lift him, tightening a plastic sheet or straightening a pillow were major undertakings. His head looked to be getting larger, doming, with a strange metallic sheen: his arms seemed to retract into his sides, his legs to fuse: it was as if impotence and anger were turning him into a lethal projectile, a shell in the breech ready to be fired into the infinite.

      I gave him a slug of Chivas Regal and poured the rest into his empty lemon barley bottle. ‘Ah, Jeepers Creepers,’ he said, ‘Jesus Lethal!’ – he always pretended to forget its name – ‘Still, you don’t have to be able to say it to be able to drink it.’ He rested his bristled chin in the plastic drinking trough, as if taking the liquor through his pores. I’d turned him on to Chivas in those days when in every bad, bold photo of the Stones Keith Richards seemed to be finishing a bottle.

      I’d swapped my Red Army watch for the huge self-winding Timex, dying on his motionless wrist, that now slid, its metal strap ripping out hairs, along my arm. The fluorescent hammer and sickle seemed to be affecting him – he spent the last of his strength on raging against capitalism. Or maybe it was a symptom of the cancer or his finally admitting the anger he’d always felt. I remembered watching Tebbitt, white-plastered like a pierrot, being lugged out of the bombed Grand Hotel and, as his teeth bared in an equine grimace of agony, I had seen my father respond with one of his rare smiles. It obsessed him that it was the Navy – out in The Falklands, with inadequate air-support – that had saved Thatcher’s bacon: СКАЧАТЬ