Mars-Jones - Kid gloves : a voyage round my father

This may be a memoir of myfather but I didnt set out to write one, more of an account of a particular time, thoughnecessarily having shreds and slabs of the man scattered across it. I informally moved in withmy parents while my mother was dying of lung cancer, something she did with self-effacingbriskness in little more than a month. After she was dead, in January 1998, it made sense for meto stay in place to look after the survivor.

My father had been casually described by medicalauthority as demented, though not officially diagnosed. He was likely to lose his bearings if hehad to adjust to a new environment. In fact this was never really something I considered. As anunder-employed freelance I had time to spare. Dad had a good pension and his rent for a largeflat in Grays Inn Square was low, thanks to the oligarchic machinery of the Ancient andHonourable Society of Grays Inn. As a retired High Court judge, ex-Treasurer and bencher hisstatus in its rankings was high. There was money to pay for a certain amount of care, so that Icould continue to be present from Tuesday to Friday at the school gates in Dulwich Village whenmy daughter Holly, six, finished her proto-academic day.

I didnt feel I had a duty to look after Dad, orif I did I preferred to hide it behind a more libertarian formula. I had a right to look afterhim. I had first dibs, I could play bagsie. It wasnt that I was bounden, merely entitled. Mybrothers might play a part, but Tim (the older) lived in Gloucestershire and was tied to Dadmainly by the bonds of rejection a phrase I found in Richard Sennetts bookAuthority and tried to persuade Tim was a productive way of describing his experience.Matthew (the younger), though based in North London, had a fuller workload than I did. I wasfree to look after Dad and no-one could override my claim. If I was going to end up doing itanyway, it was sensible to surround myself with the most selfish possible arguments. Then Icould never make out I had somehow been railroaded into filial duty.

Dads mental state seemed, to us laymen, closerto withdrawal than any lamentable state of confusion, delusion, vacancy. He could followconversations without taking an active part, in the time-honoured, head-swivelling fashion ofthe tennis spectator, happy to watch the interplay with no presumptuous thought of raising aracket himself.

There had been a time when he would smash backeverything that came over the net towards him, but he must have forgotten it. Dad had retired asa judge at seventy-five, and in the five years-plus since then he had done nothing remotelyactive, unless you count listening to Rachmaninovs symphonies. He was a half-serious Celticfundamentalist who would adopt anyone or anything he admired into the ranks of the faithful, andeven lugubrious Rachmaninov (described by Stravinsky as a six-and-a-half-foot scowl, and hardlyan obvious candidate for recruitment to the ranks of undersized charmers) could be made over asan honorary Welshman.

Dad wasnt professionally Welsh, if that meansany sort of caricature, but he was serious about his Welshness. His English intonation wasstandard, perhaps modelled on the radio voices he heard in his childhood, before regionalism wasa virtue rather than an obstacle to progress. Its true that he deviated from the receivedpronunciation to say sandwich as sangwidge, making it sound like language, but that washis only deformation of spoken English. When he spoke Welsh, though, therewas an extra vitality detectable, almost a roguishness, as if the character that expresseditself in his first language was less thoroughly moralized than the public figure and even thefamily man.

Welsh people were better or maybe they just hadbetter names. Osian Ellis the harpist. Caradoc Evans the writer. William Mathias the composer.Clough Williams-Ellis the architect of Portmeirion. Kyffin Williams the painter (rhymes withPuffin). Every sound was firmly enunciated by Welsh speakers, taken care of at both ends,launched and landed.

Welsh tongues held on to every part of the word,even in the case of a straightforward place name like Bangor, separating the syllables butsomehow leaving the g on both sides of the chasm, rolling the final r. Welshspeakers didnt positively give it two stressed syllables, they just couldnt bear to cheateither part of the emphasis that was its birthright. It was as if the natives, unable to defeatthe saesneg invader on his own appropriated turf, him with his second homes and hisgleaming Range Rovers, became interior emigrants, finding a refuge in the living rock of thelanguage, and clung to every craggy inch.

Even when speaking English Welsh speakerspronounced words lingeringly. Dad remembered a preacher from his youth whose version of the wordphenomenon was like a four-gun salute. A cow in a field, he said, is not a phe-no-men-on,and nor is the moon in the sky. But when the cow jumps over the moon that is aphe-no-men-on.

In retirement Dad could seem vague because hisattention tended to be de-centred. His hearing was very acute, and even his vision (despitealleged macular degeneration) could be disconcertingly sharp, picking out window-cleaners atwork on the far side of Grays Inn Square when he wasnt near the window himself.

He might comment on somethingon the radio that no-one else was listening to, which could give an impression of disconnection.A couple of years earlier, when he had been mildly feverish with a kidney infection, I had sleptin his room for a couple of nights so as to help with the management of the pee bottle in thelong watches of the night. Once I was drifting off to sleep, with the World Service dimly on theradio in the background. The programme was about mountain climbing. I was woken by his voicesoftly calling out to me. Adam?

Yes Dad, what is it?

Have you ever worn crampons?

If I hadnt made the connection with what was onthe radio, I would have thought he was away with the fairies, not up on the peaks with thealpinists of the airwaves.

It hadnt even seemed certain that hed be ableto take in the fact of Mums death. His routine the morning after she had died was standard,with a carer arranged by the council helping him along the corridor to the bathroom, but fromthat moment on the days routine would be taken apart. I had the feeling, hearing the splash ofwater in the bathroom and the chatty coaxing, that he was being prepared for execution.

I didnt know what I would do if at some point heasked, Wheres Sheila? once hed been told. Would I have to keep on breaking the news, orwould it be better to come up with a story about her being out shopping away on holiday, even and hope he wouldnt ask again?

In fact, once he was installed in his bedroomchair and the carer had left, he took in the information fully and cleanly. He said, Oh God,but then after a deep intake of breath turned the exclamation into the beginning of a hymn,singing, Our help in ages past, our hope in years to come. He wept and I held his hand. Henever lost sight of the fact of her death, never deluded himself. When, weekslater, I apologized for the fact that he had been given no warning, he seemed surprised, as ifit was the most natural thing in the world for his wife of fifty years to slip away without aword.

Sheila had said that she didnt want him to knowwhat was happening. I had just finished telling her that her dying belonged to her and that sheshouldnt consider anyone elses wishes, so I could hardly overrule this decision even though Idisagreed with it. She said that she could cope with everything except the thought of his lifewithout her, and so we kept him in the dark.