WHEN THE OLD MAN DIED (Part Four : It may be a cliche...)

That morning of his funeral when I went off to witness me dad’s corpse, I’d left me mam back at the house watching cartoons on television. “Rupert the Bear”. “Rupert wasn’t sure he was ready to face up to the monster just yet!” Those were the first words I heard when I came downstairs on my way to the Chapel of Rest. “Rupert wasn’t sure he was ready to face up to the monster just yet!” Apparently he’d built himself a tree-house for a more spectacular view on the world, but a sudden gust of wind blew it away, landed on a one-eyed Cyclops! Rupert spent half the night terrified, till he realized it was a light-house.. His great adventure had turned into a shipping-hazard! Life could come crashing on the rocks at any moment. Of course eventually, with a little help from his friends, Rupert was brought back down to earth, returned home, and he realized the view from his backyard was just as miraculous as anything he could see from up in the air. A rainbow appeared to confirm his epiphany. The world was at peace. At least till his next great adventure, same time tomorrow, same channel…

“Do you like looking at dead bodies?” Asked me mam later, when I got back to the house. “I didn’t know he was that poorly! I never thought I’d be the last to go.” “Where are vyou going, mam?” “Eh, don’t ask me, I’m buggered if I know! It’s a mystery to me!” Her and Albert Einstein..

Let’s face it, someone’s facts will always be dependent on someone else’s fancies. One man’s tragedy is another woman’s cartoon. One woman’s soap-opera, another woman’s reality-check. One man’s revolution, another man’s “just more of the bloody same!” And most people don’t like change unless they initiate it. Including myself. I’d prefer everything stay exactly as it is till I decide to change it! I want to be in God’s fully informed vanguard and let the Devil take the hindmost by surprise!

The last time I saw me dad alive he seemed somewhat relaxed, lying back in his little hospital cot in Ward B2. And he’d really enjoyed his dinner, he said, he couldn’t remember what it was but whatever it was he’d really enjoyed it. He wanted me to tell the nurse, tell her he’d really enjoyed his dinner and he’d like it again, whatever it was.. So I did. It was broccoli and pasta in a cheese sauce with rice-pudding for dessert. He ate up every scrap, she said, “Mr. Bellwood seems to have got his appetite back!

But he didn’t feel much like talking tonight, he said, after about twenty minutes he told me he needed to rest, I should go and “enjoy myself, go have a beer, have one for me!” So I did. I told him I’d see him again as soon as I could. Next morning I flew back to America, to redeem me credit-card points. And that night he died. I got a call from my sister. he’d refused to wear his oxygen-mask, she told me, they’d keep puytting it on and he’d keep taking it off, they’d put it back on…But then in the middle of the night, when nobody was looking, he’d removed it one final time.

And I like to think he’d felt strong enough to make the choice. He’d accepted his fate. his time was up. Time to move on to a better place. Of course I’ll never know that for sure till I get to the same place. By then, I assume, it’ll be too late to put it into words, I shall take my secret to the grave. Or to the crematorium, where me dad took his. Ashes and smoke! Poufff! Now you see me, now you don’t!

But he did good, he did OK. Decent, honest - as far as I know- hard-working “man of the people!” Life-long Laborite socialist”! A Yorkshire man! An English man! “The English working-man, salt of the earth!” Women were the sugar in your Lipton’s, put the tiger in your tank and made sure you were always kept well-fed! He was the bread-winner, shouldn’t have to bake his own bread. I don’t think me dad ever learned to boil an egg! He was a creature of very specific culturally cliched imperatives. But aren’t we all? Different clichés, same weight of imperative. My cliché was “the starving artist”. maintaining integrity at all costs, incorruptible, no power to sway, the powerlessness of poetry! At the mercy of nothing but my own imagination. That should solve the housing-shortage and the Middle East crisis! Just because it’s a cliché doesn’t make it not true..

To the end, I’m told, he argued with my sister. Could never accept her as anything but his daughter, her duty to take care of him in his oldage, whether she liked it or not, it was what was expected. All he seemed to expect from his sons was an interest in sport and politics, having a pint with your mates down the pub every now and then, and a resolute independence. I guess me and my brother gave him a little of what he expected. My sister gave him a hell of a lot more, remained resolutely if a little ruefully accommodating to the end, no matter how much he moaned and groaned or belittled her sound womanly advice. Real doctors were men, nurses were women. Took care of the minor details, tucked you up at night. Women were the domestic caretakers, while men grapple with the bigger picture! Any woman who sought to transcend domesticity was denying her nature, just not worth flirting with, just want to be men, cause it’s men make the world go round, women just hold it steady at the base! And puffs, queers, homos, gays or whatever you want to call ‘em, slightly distasteful but relatively harmless anomalies! Non-English speaking people are obviously foreigners. Anti-government activists just attention-seeking fanatics who want to rock the boat cause they’re too bloody lazy to learn how to steer it! The monarchy is a stabilizing influence on socialism. The British Empire perfected civilization, and eventually the England soccer team will regain its’ rightful place as champions of the world, cause, let’s face it, there wouldn’t be any football at all if some smary English bugger from Rugby hadn’t inflated air into that little sack of leather! david Beckham would just be England’s answer to Paris Hilton, not a “real man”! Me dad was a ‘real man”. As soon as he stopped feeling like one, I think he knew the jig was up!

NB. One of my last memories of my more mobilized father was in Bridlington harbor, a northern seaside resort childhood-familiar to me from family holidays (in a cliff-top caravan park on Limekiln Lane, our particular caravan inspiringly inscribed “Why Worry?” over its’ front-door). I’d driven my parents there for a day-out. He jovially attempted a flirtation with the young girl installed serving up fish’ n’ chips. She paid him no attention at all, barely acknowledged his presence, and the crest-fall on his face was clearly visible. All he wanted to do was raise a smile, but no smile was offered, and I registered an old man’s invisibility and irrelevance to youth on his behalf. A few minutes later a seagull swooped down and stole my fish!

After the performance I did at the Buxton theatre-festival, the young reviewer commented that me dad sounded like a “bigoted narrow-minded chauvinist”. Labels I need to refute on the grounds that his lifelong behavior patterns were firmly grounded in his community and its’ particular opportunities offered, denied and defined. In my wildest dreams I can’t imagine him ever being prejudiced against anybody who was open to being friendly, no matter what color, race, creed or nationality. And if he was a chauvinist I’d have to suspect my mother of being a willing if not always happy-about-it accomplice. English working-class communities of the 1940’s-50’s were hardly educational hot-beds of opening up minds to anything other than what was already on their official books. In hindsight I consider they were both caught in the peasant-trap, still as common as muck in western civilization, no less than the bourgeois-trap, with the aristocratic escape-hatch always carrot-dangling out of reach…