Friday, December 06, 2013
Intimations
of Mortality
I need to backfill slightly
for those of you who have not read an earlier post this year but which kicks
off the present one. I was born in India. By the time my family returned with
me to the UK I spoke Urdu and English. By then I was aware that my elder sister
had drowned and it took three or four years for my parents to conceive me. Four
years after me they produced a girl, too. Until I was forty five or so I had
the story of my sister’s death imprinted on my brain by my mother. She would
say, “Little Margaret would be fifteen now” or "Little Margaret would be twenty
five now”. In other words my dead sister was ageing as I was, a ghostly
precursor to my life. She died, I knew – I had been told many times - at the age
of a toddler, two or three, found drowned in the water tank in the garden. She
had apparently climbed over the little protective fence. There she was found,
like Ophelia.
I returned one day with my
dying father to find my sister’s grave. He was reluctant. Maybe the prostate
cancer and the catheter made him feel unprepared. Anyway we went. We found the
grave. It had been partially defaced with strange hieroglyphs. We interrogated
the register in the little church. There was her name, Margaret Sanger. There
was her age. Six years. Now, can you imagine? Six? But she was surely a
toddler! Finally my father talked about that distant time.
Margaret was born with a fear
of water. She hated being bathed and would scream. When she was eighteen months
her screams brought adults into the garden to find her pointing. A toddler was
drowning in the fountain but her prompt but precocious warning saved it. She
wanted to learn to swim. When my father took her to the swimming baths she grew
rigid as she approached and turned blue when he gently eased her into the
water. He taught hundreds to swim in his later life. He became a swimming pool
manager after the army. But not his own daughter. Not Little Margaret. The very
strange thing about her death was this: the post mortem showed no water in her
lungs. My father could not explain it except that she may have died from fear.
Or, I told myself, she had been asphyxiated and thrown into the tank. Who
knows?
The reason for repeating all this is that I
must have had some kind of preternatural cognizance of what death meant from
the very beginning. One cannot walk in the footprints of the dead all one’s
life without some extra sense of it’s presence. But, as you will have gathered,
my mother never let it inhibit my freedom to roam, to play beside water, to
take chances. She was not a character that could have fitted in the plot of
that terrifying film for all parents, Don’t
Look Now.
The first deaths I can recall were those of
the wrung-necked chickens. Then there were the annual cub wielding forays in
the barns of the farm next door as the rats were smoked out. We always had a cat and so I have many
images of the creature bringing presents of mice, voles and moles to the dining
table. A boy, climbing the sand quarry at the top of Shadforth, fell and was
suffocated. It did not stop us going there for Sand Martins’ eggs. I climbed
another cliff and took a young Jackdaw for a pet, one day taking it to school
on my shoulder. It did not fare well in the hen coop where I kept it and died.
Fish died in jamjars or the ponds I made in the garden, lined with clay. Death
was everywhere, as natural to me – even if intimidating – as the business of living.
The mother of a school friend and teacher in our tiny school, died of cancer. And,
to connect with the last post, an effect of death is the fading of colour; in
the eyes, in the flashes of red on a fish’s flank and even in the gleam of the
coat of a kitten killed by the warning snap of our dog protecting his dinner
bowl.
I’m not so frightened of the prospect of
the last journey, that Arthurian float across the waters that divide, because
death was there from the very beginning, sniping away. Being inconsiderate. I wonder whether life can be truly lived without an acceptance of it’s constant presence?
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