Christmas revisited
Jeremy Clarke
Last February, our last resident died and the house reverted from a Residential Home for the Elderly to a private house. On Christmas Day, there were just two of us swapping presents to the loud tick of the grandfather clock in the day room. If one of the bells in one of the rooms had gone off, we’d both have jumped up instinctively. But no bells rang and there were ridiculously few dishes to be washed up after lunch, and for the first time in 20 years no heart-stopping games of ‘Pat the Balloon’ with the residents either. But later on, dozing alone beside the ash-log fire after lunch, my paper coronet askew, I was conscious of ghosts in the room: elderly, contemplative ghosts revisiting the hearth around which they spent their last Christmases.
There was Commander Jim Newman, one side of his face red, as usual, from sitting too close to the fire. Even when his memory went completely and he couldn’t remember his own name, Commander Newman remained the perfect gentleman. There was that one particular Christmas Day, during lunch, when he shit himself so terribly, poor man, that we had to clear the decks and evacuate his end of the dinner table. But his apology was of such grace, dignity and good humour I swear it was a pleasure to clear up after him. Then, after lunch and a complete change of clothes, he caused another temporary suspension of festivities by tripping headlong into the fire and taking the Christmas tree with him. I saluted Jim, as always, but he was looking away.
Violet was there, too, Violet Joint. Miss. Spastic leg and no teeth but gums hard enough to chew an apple with. Lived and worked all her life in the same village. Highly superstitious. Illiterate. Couldn’t say for official purposes which sex she was. Passed extraordinarily large motions. Big ‘Pat the Balloon’ player. Couldn’t say the word ‘Commander’. Spent three years laughing at my father, living proof that the unexamined life is definitely worth living, then passed away in her sleep. Violet, alas, was laughing too much to notice me.
And there over by the bookcase was Miss Molteno, granddaughter of the first prime minister of Cape Colony, born and raised at Stellenbosch when the social difference between servants and served must have been quite marked. I can remember, for example, her leaning over the rail at the top of the stairs and spitting at my father, who was standing underneath, in the hall, with his apron on. I hadn’t seen expert spitting like that, with the forward lunge and the sideways slingshot action from the neck, since I was at school.
And there was Doris Smith, another Miss, a tiny, blind, self-consciously proletarian woman from Lancashire who ate little and hated to be any trouble. Her catchphrase was: ‘Oh, I am a damn nuisance!’ A tumour killed Doris in the end. It grew across her gullet and she died of thirst. The day before she died I heard Doris croak bitterly to the care assistant, ‘Oh, I am such a damn nuisance!’ They were her last words.
And there was my father in his sheepskin coat and rubber gloves, recently come indoors after rodding the sewer for the third time in a week. It was he who was making Violet laugh. He was telling her she must limit the size of her stools or find another old people’s home. He was specifying a maximum length by holding his forefingers about six inches apart and thrusting them under her nose. My father, the deadpan comedian who in the end became too deadpan for our taste. We chased him away and he drank himself to death in a council flat. How foolish of us not to recognise how comedians must forfeit their own pride and should therefore be forgiven everything.
They were all there: Betty, with MS, whose husband’s clothes were found on the beach and his body never found; gentle Miss Busby, mourning her sweetheart killed near Ypres; old Mrs Rye, riddled with cancers and knitting Christmas presents all year round; Mrs Dodds, with emphysema, who squeezed my hand so tightly at the end; and Mrs French, who knew she was going to die that evening and came downstairs to say goodbye to everybody.
I hailed them all, especially my father, from the comfort of my chair. But they were looking away.
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