Slowing Down (5 page)

In the pub across the road we discussed this metamorphosis. My friend Michael suggested that he was more like the unfortunate mouse turned up by Robert Burns’s plough (‘sleekit’ and ‘timorous’ certainly). This comparison seemed to me all the more accurate because of his very large ears. He’d always had them, I suppose, although it is when they grow older that some people’s suddenly do a Dumbo, and I’d never noticed his before. Now they seemed not only large but permanently cocked, like a small animal listening nervously for the pad or slither of a predator.

Unrecognized by him, I was glad that his daughter was at his bedside and that her small affectionate attentions (mopping his forehead, holding his hand) seemed to calm him at any rate for a time. I was pleased, not only because of this but also that she would presumably tell Ms Mogg that
Michael and I had come here on this baking day to visit him. She it was who had written to say that he had had a stroke, given me the address and asked me to go and see him, so here we were.

I’ve always liked and admired Ms Mogg, collector of horror films and the quiet but determined companion of our friend’s later years. Early on in their relationship, given her slightly androgynous and somehow nautical air, I’d named her ‘the Cabin Boy’. I felt now, after so long, loyal and devoted service, she should be promoted to Commander’s Runner at least.

He was not in a single room. In the other bed was a stout old gentleman in a white gown. He wore a small black skull-cap, so I presumed he was Jewish. I whispered to Michael how closely he resembled the Pope. As we were leaving, some nurses were getting him out of bed and leading him gently but firmly out of the room. By the terrible smell he had obviously shat himself. Extreme old age seems to enjoy demeaning us, destroying what dignity we once had.

The confused old person in the hospital across the road was Conroy Maddox, so far as I know the oldest living surrealist in the world. Although already in his nineties, until his stroke he had continued to paint, make collages and create objects.

Since his refusal to participate in the great 1936 Exhibition on the grounds that too many of the British contributions were not surrealist at all (he had been quite right in this), he had stuck to his guns through the war, and afterwards through the dismissal of the movement as ‘old hat’, until its return to favour in the late sixties and seventies. He had even begun to sell well and been able to give up his day job, as semi-pro musicians call it (he was, so far as I
know, a highly skilled technical draftsman), and paint full time.

I don’t intend here to go further into his life or his art, as there are recent books covering both these subjects, but I would point out that lately there have been several major exhibitions and retrospectives in both London and the provinces and a celebratory lunch at the Tate Britain to honour his ninetieth birthday. He often appeared at private views, not only his own but others relevant to his interests. Afterwards, if there were a supper in a restaurant, he would stay late, drinking lots of wine and his favourite liqueurs with their alchemical colours. He would talk too, admittedly, in his later days, somewhat repetitively. His favourite ‘surreal tale’ was of Queen Victoria, puzzled as to what to give her grandson, Prince Wilhelm, later the Kaiser, for his twenty-first birthday. After much pondering she reached a solution. ‘I know,’ she said, ‘I’ll give him Kilimanjaro.’ After a time I really began to enjoy the inevitable repetition of this anecdote, and Conroy with his black hair, heavy spectacles, small moustache and curious, almost lemon, complexion, was an age-defying lesson to us all, repetitive or not.

In recent years I had at his request opened several of his exhibitions including one in Ledbury, a rather interesting old town in the Midlands which was his birthplace. I mentioned it now to see if it struck a chord. ‘You remember,’ said his daughter, ‘I drove you there from London.’ Not a flicker of recognition or memory altered his vacant, seemingly empty bewilderment.

After about ten minutes Michael suggested to his daughter that we were tiring him. She thanked us for coming and we left, passing the incontinent Pope.

*

Michael Woods is a brilliant photographer, considerably younger than I but equally plagued by various physical ailments. A mutual friend sent him to see me, almost forty years ago now, to show me his images of the Portobello Road, not the ‘me old cock sparrer’ aspects of it, as I might have expected, but its melancholy boarded-up shops and people mumbling to themselves. He’d also taken portraits of many writers and painters, never obvious publicity shots but attempts to get behind the mask, and usually very successful.

I admired the work and recognized a surrealist eye. I was thinking of writing a book about Paris and suggested he became involved. As he knew very little about the movement I lent him several key books. Off he went via the Channel tunnel, to return with a portfolio beyond all my hopes. Furthermore he had not only photographed what Breton called ‘elected places’ (I had also given him a list of those aspects of the city the surrealists revered) but had recorded much else that seemed to him, and was, entirely relevant. The book was done, published and became a considerable and long-lived success.

We remained friends. He’d got to know Conroy and to photograph him often and with impressive understanding of his character, its virtues and failings, and so it was that we set out together to see the Wizard of Lambolle Road, NW
₃
.

I have a terrible addiction to taxis, an extremely expensive addiction these days. The doctors tell me I should walk a little each day and, with every encouragement from Diana on economic as well as physical grounds, I do try, although I especially hate steps and stairs and having to change
platforms; but on this expedition and accompanied by Michael Woods (whose Eeyore-like gloom alternates with sudden ill-suppressed bursts of laughter, an enjoyable contrast, or at least I find it so), I had resolved to hail cabs only in dire necessity.

And so we set off at midday, Michael tall and gaunt, me short and plump, like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, on the hottest day of the year. Knowing a certain amount of walking and the ascent and descent of several flights of steps in tube stations would be involved, I took my stout but pretty stick with the doggie’s-head handle.

The tube part didn’t take too long, nor the change on to the Northern Line, nor our getting off at some obscure station I’d never heard of near Cricklewood, but there were three lots of steep stairs and I was glad of my stick. Thump thump it went, like that of Blind Pugh in the first chapter of
Treasure Island
, but with less sinister intimations.

Emerging into a baking, anonymous suburb, we were immediately misdirected to the nearest taxi rank. Eventually we found the real one but only by retracing our steps and heading left instead of right. My ankles were beginning to give me gyp. I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed climbing into a taxi more.

Finally we arrived at the nursing home, a large Edwardian building with a curved forecourt. We went in, to be confronted by a very old, small, cross man in a dressing-gown whom a large African nurse took resignedly back to his room. Three minutes later he’d reappeared, making incomprehensible demands in an aggrieved treble whine.

The nice blonde receptionist told us that Conroy had been moved only two days previously to a hospital in
Hampstead, an institution much closer to my house in Shepherd’s Bush.

I have a card that conjures up taxis, ordinary London cabs, which charge the fare to an account. I got the nice receptionist to ring for one and was told it would be twenty minutes. It took an hour to materialize (‘terrible traffic, guv’). While we were waiting I sat on a narrow wall across the wide and busy road. Eventually Michael came across to me with the welcome news that the increasingly nice receptionist had asked us if we wouldn’t prefer to sit in the garden, and she’d let us know when the cab finally arrived.

So we did, and it was like a senile version of Alice’s mad tea party. At various tables under umbrellas sat the inmates. One old woman seated by herself gobbled up a huge load of Smarties with the urgency of an animal who fears that at any moment a stronger creature could emerge from the shrubbery to drive it off and gobble them up itself. Yet the most bizarre aspect of this garden of twitchers, cursers and blank-eyed phantoms was a small party of several inmates, one of whom was wearing one of those ‘novelty hats’, a towering green topper made, I believe, from felt. ‘Well,’ as Larkin wrote, ‘we shall find out’, but in my case, I hope not! Surely all the whiskey I’ve drunk, all the cigarettes I’ve smoked, will hopefully carry me off before, unlike my hero Falstaff, I grow ‘as cold as any stone’ and (to misquote) ‘a babble of green top hats’.

It wasn’t too far in the taxi and we quite quickly found Conroy on the fifth floor. After we left I was dying for an enormous gin and tonic. Michael’s antibiotics forbade drink so he had a bottle of still water on one of those awkward, benched, wooden tables. Then we asked the way to a rank
(I’d given up my resolution to stick to public transport, free as it may be for OAPs), and were told there was one at the bottom of the long, steep hill with its fine Georgian houses. We paused so I could do one of my ten-seconds-or-else wees into a privet hedge, this time unconnected to the constabulary. No pedestrians passed on our side of the road but several cars did and probably saw what I was up to, but registered no critical disapproval or even surprise. Long ago, when I often did the same thing from being very drunk rather than from the need to get rid of excess water in the system with the aid of a nightly pill, I noticed that, wherever I was (Berkeley Square, for instance, on one bright afternoon), people just pretended I was invisible, a phantom pisser!

We, I mean the English, have this ability to imitate the three wise monkeys. On the tube, not so long ago but before my right hand developed taxi-itis, the carriage was full of businessmen, and women who’d been shopping, when the door between the coaches opened and five youths burst in. ‘You’re a load of fuckin’ wankers!’ they yelled at us. None of the passengers, including me, seemed to hear. One man turned over a page of his
Evening Standard
. The lads had another crack at it: ‘A load of fuckin’ wankers!’ they repeated even more aggressively. No reaction. I imagined they’d fared no better in the previous carriages – or would in the next ones either. Nothing was said after their departure and I thought, ‘I suppose that’s what we are really – a load of fucking wankers – whether faced by a small body of yobs insulting homeward-bound commuters or the sight of a drunk jazz-singer urinating in Berkeley Square.’ I suppose I personally had a feeble excuse – I might be thought of as too old to engage in fisticuffs.

At the bottom of the quite steep, quite long hill was a small circle of benches. Just beyond there was a busy main road with two more side streets a few yards to the right. Leaving me seated, Michael went on patrol there to see if he could intercept a cab plying for hire. In the next half hour only one passed and that occupied. I sat on.

I was not alone. On the other benches were about ten people swigging tins of strong lager and, to one degree or another, clearly pissed. They were not, however, the usual smelly old tramps who are regulars at most alfresco public houses, but rather young (middle twenties?) and fairly well dressed in that style which apes poverty–torn jeans, etc. – but gives itself away by being reasonably clean. They kissed a lot, and now and then one or two of them would begin to wander unsteadily off, only to return after a few yards to add another point to the repetitive and seemingly aimless conversation they’d been part of. At one stage a young woman staggered over to ask me if I had a light for her roll-up. When I said I hadn’t, she smiled without rancour and returned unsteadily to her companions.

Finally Michael gave up and, more discontented than ever, said there was a rank at the top of the hill we’d recently descended and so of necessity we reascended it. By this time the ‘short daily walk’ advised by my doctors had become a long one. Thump, thump, thump, went my dog-headed stick, only by now my ankles had really begun to ache, my calves to stiffen and itch, and my mood grown closer to Blind Pugh, although with unfocused malice and no murderous intentions.

Thump, thump – we passed the great stranded whale of the hospital where the sad husk of Conroy gaped in his bed,
past the pub, onwards and upwards, until finally, at a church, we turned left and there (for a moment I thought it might be a mirage already booked to carry some wedding guests to their breakfast) there was a substantial row of cabs, most of them black but some painted in bright colours to advertise insurance or supermarkets. So we took the one at the front and asked it to stop near Notting Hill, where Michael lives, and then on a mile to Shepherd’s Bush, where I do.

I ached all over but leant back in a state of relaxed bliss – like banging your head on a brick wall and then stopping.

I got home just before six, almost seven hours after we’d left and with seven minutes of it spent at Conroy’s bedside. I slept until supper at eight, lurched upstairs again and, having swallowed my three night pills, one the water pill (six visits to the loo before 7 a.m.), fell into welcome oblivion.

5. One Last Disadvantage

Eyes, nose, mouth and chin,

That’s the way to Uncle Jim.

Uncle Jim makes lemonade,

Round the corner chocolate’s made.

   Put a penny in the slot,

And out it comes, plop, plop, plop.

Schoolboys’ jingle

It’s now late November. In the interim I’ve been X-rayed, or scanned as they call it, moving very slowly on my back through a tube with the occasional flash of the camera above me. Not being claustrophobic, I didn’t mind this, although as usual I squeaked when I was injected to ‘relax the intestines’, but positively enjoyed the psychedelic colours that flashed now and then down narrow bands along the sides of the tube.