So To Bed

Bed-time

I am summoned to the crumbling parental estate on an urgent mission. Bath-time has gone wrong. The old man needs lifting. His naked body is parked in the tub and cannot get enough purchase or lifting power to elevate. The various mats, handles, steps and supports have not been properly applied or utilised and we are returned to the primal fundamentals of younger lifting power.

Other relatives have heeded the distress call – sister and cousin are there, both experienced in the humane arts of child-rearing and parent-caring. Two sisters of mercy who regularly deal in the naked realm of bodies infantile and geriatric. So why me? Dear God, why me? I am the cerebral second son, he of the ivory tower, one who would much prefer to be incarnated as a Byzantine goblet than a thing of flesh.

It's because I'm a bloke. The old lady is insisting that it is my task in order to preserve the modesty of the old man. He's well down the road to Alzheimer oblivion and wouldn't really mind who hoiks him out of the tub, but the old lady's gimlet eye is pinning me like a sprawling butterfly to the arm chair as she shrieks at me to ascend the stairs to face my inner demons.

So up I go. The sisters of mercy are standing by waiting to receive the towel-shrouded Lazarus from the enamelled coffin. As with most traumatic moments, it goes by in a trance, the inner man departing to leave some memories to be dealt with at a stronger time. Of course I botch it and nearly injure the poor old fellow. But finally he is wrapped and upright so the women waiting outside can come into the bathroom to take over. Foolishly, I linger outside taking deep breaths. Suddenly the old man emerges naked save for his incontinence pants.

We read about the most terrible outcomes for human beings both historical and contemporary. Bodies have been burned at the stake, sliced apart, blown to pieces, vaporised, trashed in their millions. In an age of information even the most insensitive mind cannot help but be affected by the knowledge of what people do to each other. But these are only things on the printed page or tv screen. There must be a lot of fragile guys like me who would rather read about the worst horrors in the world than see their father in his clinical underwear.

Although his mind has gone I guess the old man's benign essence will remain until the day he finally departs. He is part of what has now become known as the Golden Generation – those too young to be chewed up by the last world war but old enough to have enjoyed the fruits of Keynes followed by the Big Give-away of Monetarism - decent teaching salaries with only moderate bureaucracy to hinder the dignified work, large affordable houses, nice pensions, early retirement and so to bed. He had the best of post-war culture, too – a time when the arts flourished in the abandonment of their Edwardian shackles but had not yet slipped into the terminal decline brought about by Arts Council Protectionism, Consumerism and the emergence of the Trash Culture.

It was a time when a moderately good poet might be published by Chatto, as he was. But was it all a bit too easy? For the last ten years or so of his cognitive life he seemed to spend a lot of time gazing at his hens at the end of the garden, perhaps removing himself from the stark ferocity of the wifely realm. In early retirement he had found himself at a bit of a loose end, like a schoolboy finding the gleefully-awaited summer holidays a bit too long. As a child I remember him sat in his study at composition in a cloud of Henri Wintermans cigar smoke, until the wife removed that little pleasure along with the bacon breakfasts and fish suppers. He was always gazing into the distance in search of a Good Line until finally he lost his thread and started to drift.

When sat on a bus with the youth of today plugged into their i-phones, I tend to return to the thoughts of H. G. Wells - my boy-hood Influence-in-Chief. The Time Traveller visits a world where the human race has evolved into two separate species – the effete but affectionate Eloi mess around in a seeming earthly paradise, but come bed-time are cannibalised by the Morlocks, the underground descendants of the working classes.

The internet could be the means by which the post-golden generation is pacified. Left with nothing to inherit, the only world remaining to them is the artificial paradise of endless gaming and deletable friendships, a world they are encouraged to inhabit by the wealthy 1% who treat them as disposable labour and click-bait.

When Trump-ets sound and the walls come tumbling down, will the nouveau-Eloi respond by casting off their shackles of unreality and building something more tangible in the old Green and Pleasant Land? After so much time spent in cyber-space, will they have the experience and psychic cohesion to cope with the coming crisis? Or will the Yankee Piper of the Dispossessed serenade bed-time for Humanity?

A few days later I am sat with my parents in their garden on a splendid, blazing autumn day. A good friend of mine is here with us, experiencing the on-set of a depressive episode. He is at that stage in the process where you experience a “pain so utter it swallows substance up” (Emily Dickinson). It is the sort of pain that people like my Dad always managed to avoid, being one who “as in a swoon goes safely where an open eye would drop him bone by bone”.

For a moment my friend's face fills with tears. The old man's face assumes an expression that I have not seen in it for a long time – a look of infinite concern.

“Don't...don't...there's no need to be so...it's a lovely day.”

And I recalled the last lines of The Time Machine:

“And I have by me, for my comfort, two strange white flowers - shrivelled now, and brown and flat and brittle - to witness that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.”