The day war broke out

I used to hear this catchphrase of comedian Robb Wilton’s a great deal when I was a child, because I happened to be born on September 3rd, and any reference to my birthday, at any time of the year, was always tagged by my father with the line, almost as if he and my mum were proud to have had their eldest on a Significant Day. I wonder if this happens to Caryl Churchill, with whom I share the birthday. I doubt it (not least because she was born a year to the day before war broke out, and, in passing, isn’t ‘broke out’ a curious phrase, as if war was like measles or a change in the weather? I wonder which came first, the phrase, or Robb Wilton’s line).

September was a good day to have a birthday, because a) we were always on holiday then, b) (as I have remarked before, several times) it was the start of the traditional we-weren’t-expecting-that Indian summer. I don’t remember it ever raining. I remember my seventh – or it might have been my eighth – birthday well. I was given a bike. In the morning, my father took me down to the green in front of Bamburgh Castle, and taught me to ride it (there can’t have been many more scenic places to learn to ride a bike), and we were allowed to have a tent up in the garden of the cottage where we went, every year, on holiday. You can see in the picture below that, far from being obsessed with my new means of transport, I had already been diverted into playing picnics with my sister. The bike lies lopsidedly on the grass.

Of course, I can’t be sure this picture is taken on my birthday, and of course, I can’t really say I remember it well. My memory has been conditioned, sharpened and refined by the fact that pictures were taken, and that they seem to take place on the same day. I’ve only just found this one, this past weekend, in an album, dust-covered and unopened since she died.

My family seems, in retrospect, to have been quite food-obsessed, in that it was an unwritten rule that, on my birthday, I could eat whatever I liked, even if the combination on the plate looked wrong. I will spare you the options, but there is no doubt that Twiglets were involved, lots of them. Even now, if I meet someone I haven’t seen since childhood, the subject of Twiglets is raised. Since I actually ate very little then, something my current bulk makes a bit surprising – I almost never ate sweets, for instance – it is clear that it is quite surprising that I did not grow up with knobbly limbs, covered in sticky brown spots.

My birthday cake had to be blue. This was not gender-conditioning. It was because no other food was blue, and I liked the oddity (I did some appalling experiments with food-dyes in my twenties. Heston Blumenthal would understand).

But birthdays are bitter-sweet, like Twiglets and blue cake. Because my sister died eight years ago, and there is no-one I’d rather share it with. So I’ll dedicate this latest one to her.

A birthday

My sister

Today – March 16th – is eight years to the day since my younger and only sister Clare died, and since she was two years younger, it means, very strangely, that I have had a decade of life which she never saw or knew. I could write down a fairly substantial list of influences on how and who I am, but her death had more impact than anything else. It was as if someone had reached inside me and not only switched a lot off, but also yanked at a series of levers. Within a year, I had left the job I’d been doing for nearly three decades, and started trying to do something else, something I wanted, before I ossified. (Much the same happened to my younger brother, and also to my mother – it almost literally sobered her up, made her more resilient. I only saw her crack once, and that was when we – the four of us, the fourth being her husband – went together to see her body in the hospice. She simply said, ‘I remember the day she was born’. Banalities like this are more moving than anything else.)

Death can make you – me, maybe – very selfish. For quite a while, my attitude to the world was that it had known nothing about suffering; coming to terms with the death of others, of people I hadn’t known at all, became hard. It was wanting to own the death as special, a predictable but unworthy emotion. And viewing her, still and cold, was a particularly strange experience, because it was the metastasis of an eye cancer which did for her, and she had had an eye removed over three years earlier. So when we went to see her, she had one eye – the false eye – open. The illusion of her being able to see was disturbing and memorable in even measure.

She was cremated on a Friday. The only significance of this was that it was the local vicar (not that she was a believer) had Fridays off. So we were allocated an as-it-were locum. He was called Norman. Norman came round to discuss the funeral. ‘How long have we got?’ we asked him (we meant, how much of the service did we own?). He thought a bit, weighing up the thirty minutes, and thought that we (my brother and I) should certainly have, between us, a minute. Unless I am mistaken, everyone else left the room at this point.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘my brother and I have things to say.’ In fact, I had at least twenty minutes already written, although I knew I’d have to cut it. ‘But,’ he protested, ‘people get very upset when they are talking at funerals.’ That remark has stuck. I explained that we were both teachers, and that talking was what we did for a living. He wasn’t reassured at all, but, after what seemed oddly like haggling, we got Norman to take the minute – he introduced the closing song we’d picked, You Don’t Have To Say You Love Me, while we took most of the rest.

My father used to comment, of funerals, that there was ‘a good gate’ (or otherwise). Clare’s half-hour attracted a very large gate. (Ironically, she had re-trained as a teacher of the visually impaired not long before she lost half of her own sight. She was popular.)

Now I need March 16th to have a gate of one. I have a simple ritual, which is to play a series of songs she liked (suspecting she was dying, she had written out a list to be played at any wake), between one and two in the afternoon: she died about about half-past one. I buy some flowers, tulips probably, because I know nothing about flowers, but have a vague attraction to tulips. Somewhere in the centre of this suite of songs is the Mamas and Papas version of ‘Dedicated To The One I Love’, not for the twee title, but because it was a song we both liked, for its contrasts – the soft intro, the swelling and almost raucous chorus. (Really oddly, John Phillips, the leader of the Mamas and Papas, died on pretty much the same day as Clare – two days later, to be precise.)

Every year, I have the same fear, which is that I won’t be able to weep. But I do, and I will.

Dylan Thomas wrote, very gnomically, in his poem ‘refusing to mourn the death of a child, by fire, in the Blitz,’ that ‘After the first death, there is no other.’ I can’t be sure what he meant, but the line makes a lot of sense on its own. I was too young to take in my father’s death (although I was 34): its impact was limited. But after Clare’s death, for me, there will be no other.

Clare, taken by my brother, David

Boxing Day

My memories of Boxing Day as a child are much as those of any other middle-class boy. A slight sense of anti-climax was soon mitigated by the remembrance that there were toys to play with (toys that had perhaps only been opened during the pomp and ceremony of The Day, what with my grandfather holding up the proceedings to listen, standing up, to the Queen, and stuff like that). My parents, certainly a little the worse for wear (aka gin – although I never saw him even slightly other than sober, he drank gallons of the stuff), were in sleep-in mode, in their giant and rock-hard double-bed (rock-hard because my father had a bit of a masochistic streak when it came to sleeping – it was a bed you tried bouncing on at the risk of breaking every bone in your feet).

In the middle of this hive of inactivity, doing his level best to look nonchalant, and generally ignored for the moment by my sister, by my parents, and by me, wandered my brother, curly-haired, barefoot, waiting for the light-bulb to go on in everyone’s head. Boxing Day was (and is) my brother’s birthday. It must be the worst posssible day to have a birthday (other than on Christmas Day perhaps, or, I suppose, February 29th). You wake up into other people’s exhaustion. However, he seems to have been pretty undamaged by the whole experience, and the doctors say that he won’t need counselling very much longer now he’s 52 (Happy Birthday!).

I have been very lucky in my siblings, and circumstances helped the luck along. When I started doing family history, I was amazed to find how often rivalry persisted, and usually sibling rivalry. Since I wasn’t content to research people on paper, but burst into their lives, their homes and their families as well, I found that – since a fourth cousin is a bit like a stranger on a train in this respect – all sorts of family feuds were confessed to me. Two sisters I met in the 1990s had not commuincated with each other since the end of the war (it was an argument about a stepfather). Now I met them in successive weeks. The secind one knew I had photos of the first, and her children and grandchildren, and eventually gave in and asked to see them. A fortnight later, the sisters met. I had acted as a catalyst, much to my surprise (and also pleasure).

My father didn’t like his sister, nor she him (my father was his mother’s favourite, and my aunt was treated with horrible misogyny by my grandfather). My grandfather did not like his sister, and vice versa. They fell out in 1953, and never saw each other again.  It is a recurring theme in many families – most strikingly in the case of Enid Blyton, whose daughters, when interviewed, appeared to be talking about an entirely different mother. The younger daughter, Imogen, actually remarked that she didn’t know her mother was her mother for most of her childhood, while the elder sister (now dead) could be relied on to sing Blyton’s praises. And the Blyton set-up was a weird one. She expelled the father (who never saw his daughters again) and installed a new ‘father’, who was even shown in promotional newsreels. And do read Hilary Mantel’s ‘Giving Up The Ghost’ for the extraordinary story of her parents.

But what happened to us was that we were sent to boarding schools, and the abiding effect was that, ironically, since I loathed the schools, the second one anyway (another subject), we saw enough of each other to make a feast. We got on very well as adults. (Individually, we didn’t get on with my mother and father, in different ways, or rather, got on with them at different stages of our lives, and that’s partly also because we were dispersed.)

Anyway: happy birthday to my surviving sibling. I’m glad you’re around.