When my mother died, the undertaker from a nearby village asked if the family wanted to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, his reply—when I telephoned through the question—was, “Good God, no. I agree with Plato on that one.” I didn’t have the text he was referring to immediately in mind. “What did Plato say?” I asked. “That he didn’t believe in seeing dead bodies.” When I turned up alone at the undertaker’s—which was merely the rear extension to a local haulage business—the funeral director said apologetically, “I’m afraid she’s only in the back room at the moment.” I looked at him questioningly, and he elaborated: “She’s on a trolley.” I found myself replying, “Oh, she didn’t stand on ceremony,” though couldn’t claim to guess what she would, or wouldn’t, have wanted in the circumstances.
She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head towards me as I went in, thus avoiding an instant face-to-face. She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than the right, which was just like her—she used to hang a cigarette from the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the opposite side until the ash grew precarious. I tried to imagine her awareness, such as it might have been, at the moment of extinction. This had occurred a couple of weeks after she was moved from hospital into a residential home. She was quite demented by this time, a dementia of alternating kinds: one in which she still believed herself in charge of things, constantly ticking off the nurses for imaginary mistakes; the other, acknowledging that she had lost control, in which she became a child again, with all her dead relatives still alive, and what her mother or grandmother had just said of pressing importance. Before her dementia, I frequently found myself switching off during her solipsistic monologues; suddenly, she had become painfully interesting. I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from, and how the brain was manufacturing this counterfeit reality. Nor could I now feel any resentment that she only wanted to talk about herself.
I was told that two nurses had been with her at the moment of death, and were engaged in turning her over, when she had just “slipped away.” I like to imagine—because it would have been characteristic, and people should die as they have lived—that her last thought was addressed to herself and was something like, Oh, get on with it then. But this is sentimentalism—what she would have wanted (or rather, what I would have wanted for her)—and perhaps, if she was thinking anything, she was imagining herself a child again, being turned in a fretful fever by a pair of long-dead relatives.
At the undertaker’s, I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. Was she that cold because she’d been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally so cold? And no, she didn’t look awful. There was nothing overpainted about her, and she would have been pleased to know that her hair was plausibly arranged (“Of course I never dye it,” she once boasted to my brother’s wife. “It’s all natural”). Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than filial feeling; but there was a bidding farewell to be done, for all my long exasperation with her. “Well done, Ma,” I told her quietly. She had, indeed, done the dying “better” than my father. He had endured a series of strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily. When I picked up her bag of clothes from the residential home (a phrase which used to make me wonder what an “unresidential home” might be), it felt heavier than I expected. First I discovered a full bottle of Harvey’s Bristol Cream, and then, in a square cardboard box, an untouched birthday cake, shop-bought by village friends who had visited her on her final, eighty-second birthday.
My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round: what I had expected to be the lesser death proved more complicated, more hazardous. His death was just his death; her death was their death. And the subsequent house-clearing turned into an exhumation of what we had been as a family—not that we really were one after the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life. Now, for the first time, I went through my mother’s handbag. Apart from the usual stuff, it contained a cutting from the Guardian listing the twenty-five greatest post-war English batsmen (though she never read the Guardian), and a photo of our childhood dog Max, a golden retriever. This was inscribed on the back in an unfamiliar hand “Maxim: le chien,” and must have been taken, or at least annotated, in the early 1950s by P., one of my father’s French assistants.
P. was from Corsica, an easy-going fellow with what seemed to my parents the typically Gallic trait of blowing his month’s salary as soon as it arrived. He came to us for a few nights until he could find lodgings, and ended up staying the whole year. My brother went into the bathroom one morning and discovered this strange man in front of the shaving mirror. “If you go away,” the foam-clad face informed him, “I will tell you a story about Mr. Beezy-Weezy.” My brother went away, and P. turned out to know a whole series of adventures that had befallen Mr. Beezy-Weezy, none of which I can remember. He also had an artistic streak: he used to make railway stations out of cornflakes packets, and once gave my parents—perhaps in lieu of rent—two small landscapes he had painted. They hung on the wall throughout my childhood, and struck me as unimaginably skilful; but then, anything remotely representational would have done so.
As for Max, he had either run away or—since we could not imagine him wishing to abandon us—been stolen, shortly after the photo was taken; and wherever he had gone, must have been dead himself for more than forty years. Though my father would have liked it, my mother would never have another dog after that.
Chapter 3
Given my family background of attenuated belief combined with brisk irreligion, I might, as part of adolescent rebelliousness, have become devout. But neither my father’s agnosticism nor my mother’s atheism were ever fully expressed, let alone presented as exemplary attitudes, so perhaps they didn’t justify revolt. I might, I suppose, if it had been possible, have become Jewish. I went to a school where, out of 900 boys, about 150 were Jewish. On the whole, they seemed both socially and sartorially more advanced; they had better shoes—one contemporary even had a pair of elastic-sided Chelsea boots—and they knew about girls. They also got extra holidays, an obvious advantage. And it would have usefully shocked my parents, who had the low-level anti-Semitism of their age and class. (As the credits rolled at the end of a TV play and a name like Aaronson occurred, one or other of them might observe wryly, “Another Welshman.”) Not that they behaved any differently towards my Jewish friends, one of whom was named, rightly it seemed, Alex Brilliant. The son of a tobacconist, Alex was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry which pulsed with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He was better than me at English, and took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him. Down the years I would occasionally imagine his presumed success in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learnt that such biography-giving was an idle fantasy. Alex had killed himself—with pills, over a woman—in his late twenties, half my life ago.
So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance, which felt more heroic than it was, to the mild regime of God-referring that an English education entailed: scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, the annual Thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s Cathedral. And that was it, apart from the role of Second Shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptised, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, weddings, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons; and, more widely, to get a sense of what Englishness once was.
My brother had marginally more liturgical experience than I did. As a Wolf Cub, he went to a couple of regular church services. “I seem to recall being mystified, an
infantile anthropologist among the anthropophagi.” When I ask how he lost his faith, he replies, “I never lost it since I never had it to lose. But I realised it was all a load of balls on 7 Feb 1952, at 9:00. Mr. Ebbets, headmaster of Derwentwater Primary School, announced that the King had died, that he had gone to eternal glory and happiness in Heaven with God, and that in consequence we were all going to wear black armbands for a month. I thought that there was something fishy there, and How Right I Was. No scales fell from my eyes, there was no sense of loss, of a gap in my life, etc. etc. I hope,” he adds, “that this story is true. It is certainly a very clear and lasting memory; but you know what memory is.”
My brother would have been just nine at the time of George VI’s death (I was six, and at the same school, but have no memory of Mr. Ebbets’ speech, or of black armbands). My own final letting go of the remnant, or possibility, of religion, happened at a later age. As an adolescent, hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn’t possibly exist because the notion that He might be watching me while I masturbated was absurd; even more absurd was the notion that all my dead ancestors might be lined up and watching too. I had other, more rational arguments, but what did for Him was this powerfully persuasive feeling—a self-interested one, too, of course. The thought of Grandma and Grandpa observing what I was up to would have seriously put me off my stroke.
As I record this now, however, I wonder why I didn’t think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, this might be because the sky did not judge it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: go on, my son, enjoy it while you’ve got it, there won’t be much more of that once you’re a disembodied spirit, so have another one for us. Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth and whispered complicitly, “I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel.”
Chapter 4
At primary school, we had our voices tested. One by one, we went up to the front of the class and tried to sing an easy tune to the teacher’s accompaniment. Then we were placed into one of two groups: The High Voices or The Low Voices (a musical Rest of the World). These labels were kindly euphemisms, given that our voices were years away from breaking; and I remember my parents’ indulgence when I reported, as if it were an achievement, the group into which I had been put. My brother was also a Low Voice; though he had a greater humiliation in store. At our next school, we were tested again, and divided—my brother reminds me—into groups A, B, and C by “a repulsive man called Walsh or Welsh.” The reason for my brother’s continuing animus more than half a century on? “He created group D especially for me. It took me some years to stop hating music.”
At this school, music came every morning attached to a thunderous organ and nonsensical hymns. “There is a green hill far away / Without a city wall / Where the dear Lord was crucified / Who died to save us all.” The tune was less dreary than most; but why would anyone want a city wall built around a green hill anyway? Later, when I understood that “without” meant “outside,” I switched my puzzlement to the “green.” There is a green hill? In Palestine? We didn’t do much geography now that we were in long trousers (if you were clever you gave it up), but even I knew it was all sand and stones out there. I didn’t feel an anthropologist among the anthropophagi—I was now part of a quorum of scepticism—but I certainly sensed a distance between words familiar to me and meanings attached to them.
Once a year, on Lord Mayor’s Prize Day, we would sing “Jerusalem,” which had been adopted as the school song. It was a tradition among the rowdier boys—a posse of unreformed Low Voices—to launch at a given moment into an unmarked and frowned-upon fortissimo: “Bring me my arrows [slight pause] OF-DEE-SIRE.” Did I know the words were by Blake? I doubt it. Nor was there any attempt to promote religion through the beauty of its language (perhaps this was regarded as selfevident). We had an elderly Latin master who liked to stray from the script into what posed as private musings but which were, I now realize, a calculated technique. He came on like a prim and sober clergyman, but would then mutter, as if it had just occurred to him, something like, “She was only an Arab’s daughter, but you should have seen Gaza strip,” a joke far too risqué to retail to my own school-teaching parents. On another occasion, he grew satirical about the absurd title of a book called The Bible Designed to Be Read as Literature. We chuckled along with him, but from a contrary angle: the Bible (boring) was obviously not designed to be read as literature (exciting), QED.
Among us nominal Christians, there were a few boys who were devout, but they were regarded as slightly weird, as rare—and as weird—as the master who wore a wedding ring and could be made to blush (he was devout too). In late adolescence, I had an out-of-body experience once, possibly twice: the sense of being up near the ceiling looking down at my untenanted flesh. I mentioned this to the schoolfriend with the elastic-sided boots—but not to my family; and while I found it a matter for mild pride (something’s happening!), I didn’t deduce anything significant, let alone religious.
It was probably Alex Brilliant who passed on Nietzsche’s news that God was officially dead, which meant we could all wank away the merrier for it. You made your own life, didn’t you—that was what Existentialism was all about. And our zestful young English master was implicitly against religion. At least, he quoted the Blake that sounded like the opposite of “Jerusalem”: “For Old Nobodaddy aloft / Farted & Belch’d & cough’d.” God farted! God belched! That proved He didn’t exist! (Again, I never thought to take these human traits as arguments for the existence, indeed the sympathetic nature, of the deity.) He also quoted to us Eliot’s bleak summary of human life: birth, and copulation, and death. Halfway into his own natural span, this English master, like Alex Brilliant, was to kill himself, in a pills-and-drink suicide pact with his wife.
I went up to Oxford. I was asked to call on the college chaplain, who explained that as a scholar I had the right to read the lesson in chapel. Newly freed from the compulsions of hypocritical worship, I replied, “I’m afraid I’m a happy atheist.” Nothing ensued—no clap of thunder, loss of scholar’s gown, or rictus of disapproval; I finished my sherry and left. A day or two later, the captain of boats knocked on my door and asked if I wanted to try out for the river. I replied—with perhaps greater boldness, having faced down the chaplain—“I’m afraid I’m an aesthete.” I wince now for my reply (and rather wish I’d rowed); but again, nothing happened. No gang of hearties broke into my room looking to smash the blue china I did not possess, or to thrust my bookish head down a lavatory bowl.
I was able to state my position, but too shy to argue it. Had I been articulate—or crass—I might have explained to both cleric and oarsman that being an atheist and being an aesthete went together: just as being Muscular and being Christian once had for them. (Although sport might still provide a useful analogy: hadn’t Camus said that the proper response to life’s meaninglessness was to invent rules for the game, as we had done with football?) I might have gone on—in my fantasy rebuttal—to quote them Gautier’s lines: “Les dieux eux-mêmes meurent. / Mais les vers souverains / Demeurent / Plus forts que les airains.” [The Gods themselves die out, but Poetry, stronger even than bronze, survives everything.] I might have explained how religious rapture had long ago given way to aesthetic rapture, and perhaps topped it off with a cheesy sneer about St. Teresa manifestly not seeing God in that famous ecstatic sculpture but enjoying something altogether more corporeal.
When I said that I was a happy atheist, the adjective should be taken as applying to that noun and no further. I was happy not to believe in God; I was happy to have been academically successful so far; and that was about it. I was consumed with anxieties I tried to hide. If I was intellectually capa
ble (while suspecting myself of being merely a trained exam-passer), I was socially, emotionally, and sexually immature. And if I was happy to be free of Old Nobodaddy, I wasn’t blithe about the consequences. No God, no Heaven, no afterlife; so death, however distant, was on the agenda in quite a different way.
Chapter 5
While I was at university, I spent a year in France, teaching at a Catholic school in Brittany. The priests I lived among surprised me by being as humanly various as civilians. One kept bees, another was a Druid; one bet on horses, another was anti-Semitic; this young one talked to his pupils about masturbation; that old one was addicted to films on television, even if he liked to dismiss them afterwards with the lofty phrase “lacking both interest and morality.” Some of the priests were intelligent and sophisticated, others stupid and credulous; some evidently pious, others sceptical to the point of blasphemy. I remember the shock around the refectory table when the subversive Père Marais started baiting the Druidical Père Calvard about which of their home villages got a better quality of Holy Ghost coming down at Pentecost. It was also here that I saw my first dead body: that of Père Roussel, a young teaching priest. His corpse was laid out in an anteroom by the school’s front entrance; boys and staff were encouraged to visit him. I did no more than gaze through the glass of the double doors, telling myself that this was tact; whereas in all probability it was only fear.
The priests treated me in a kindly way, a little teasing, a little incomprehending. “Ah,” they would say, stopping me in the corridor, touching my arm and offering a shy smile, “La perfide Albion.” Among their number was a certain Père Hubert de Goësbriand, a dim if good-hearted fellow who might have acquired his grand, aristocratic Breton name in a raffle, so little did it fit him. He was in his early fifties, plump, slow, hairless, and deaf. His main pleasure in life was to play practical jokes at mealtimes on the timid school secretary, M. Lhomer: surreptitiously stuffing cutlery into his pocket, blowing cigarette smoke in his face, tickling his neck, shoving the mustard pot unexpectedly under his nose. The school secretary displayed a truly Christian endurance to these tedious daily provocations. At first, Père de Goësbriand used to poke me in the ribs or pull my hair every time he passed me, until I cheerfully called him a bastard and he stopped. During the war he had been wounded in the left buttock (“Running away, Hubert!” “No, we were surrounded”), so travelled cheap-rate and had a subscription to a magazine for Anciens Combattants. The other priests treated him with head-shaking indulgence. “Pauvre Hubert” was the most common remark heard at mealtimes, whether as a muttered aside or shouted directly into his face.