Barbara

Barbara (2017)

 

This, (autumn) really is a season I look forward to all year. The apples are falling off the trees. I spend the rest of the year scouting out potential fruit trees to return to in the autumn, and here it is, Apple Time.

I must have first developed a particular fondness for the apple many years ago, when we visited a relative of Moomin’s, who had a fruit farm in Kent, on which discovery apples were grown for sale. The apple crop had recently been picked when we were there, and sent to market, but there were lots of windfalls, and we were invited to have as many of these as we wished. Discovery apples don’t keep, so they have only a brief selling season. That means, don’t keep ‘em, eat ‘em.

They have a lovely red skin and rosy red flesh inside. We ate a lot of apples that year and it fixed in my mind the season of the apple.

Before then, my experience of British apples had been that they were sour, and best eaten cooked, but could be eaten raw if you didn’t mind your tongue curling up a little bit at the edges!

A lot of the camp sites that we have stayed on in our caravans and motorhomes since then have had apple trees on or near them.

Sometimes the camp field itself might have once been an orchard, and there may be just one or two trees surviving.

This old tree is having a good year. It’s a pear tree. (picture missing) (Sorry, I should have said, for apples, read “apples, pears, and actually anything else that’s hanging off a tree and looks like it might be edible”) It’s in a field where we camp frequently. In other years it looks half dead, and the mistletoe is taking a tithe of its bounty, but the crop this year is bursting out.

When the fruit is on the tree it’s quite a dark green and feels like a billiard ball. At it’s best it’s sweet juicy and slightly gritty, but I have to be quick off the mark to find one of these, the owner of the site has a dog who will always snaffle any windfalls, and it’s the windfalls that taste the best.

 

There is an old orchard a brief walk from one of the laybys we use quite regularly. It is in a pretty little hamlet, and a footpath passes through the field. Livestock browse the grass and eat the windfalls. There may be ten trees there, surviving from what may have been a field of four or five times that number. Four or five of them are still fruiting abundantly, but about the same number are collapsing gently, creating interesting sculptures.

It’s lovely that the orchard remains at all, the hedges around it are massive and must be several hundred years old, as must the orchard.

 

This is my Aunt Barbara’s tree. It’s at the bottom of her garden in Beckenham, and that is Norman’s garage. Norman was my uncle, who died in the early 2000s. The garage he parked his car in gradually filling up with cobwebs.

Last year there were almost no apples on the tree. A frost must have hit at the wrong time, causing pollination of the blossom to fail.

This year it’s a lovely crop. I asked Barbara last week if she would like me to pick her some, and I found half a dozen on a low hanging branch, three for her and three for me. I put hers on the side in the kitchen as she asked. I hope she eats them.

She was 96 years of age and housebound. She had collapsed two years before, in 2015, and was taken to hospital. When she went home again it was arranged that she would have carers go to her home daily to help her manage, and enable her to stay in her own home.

I was her last living relative. We share a lifetime's happy memories of each other, and when she went home, Moomin and I visited her every three weeks or so to remind her who she was, as she slid ever so sedately into dementia, and to remind her how much she still meant to us.

On an earlier occasion I was walking Minnie in the garden, and I found a windfall that looked edible. I thought I would like to try it, so I took it into the house, washed it and bit a lump out of it.

I carried on eating bites out of it while I went back to sit with Barbara. She noted that I had an apple, and I said "Yes, its one of your windfalls"

She then said "it's got a maggot" which was true.

"Yes," I said. "I always reckon that if a maggot's eating it, it probably tastes alright!"

"Oh, I hadn't thought of that" she said, and smiled, which was the main purpose of being there, to give Barbara a smile!

*

We were woken from our sleep that morning. My phone was charging from the socket at the front of the van, so when it rang I climbed across Moomin and hurried to pick it up. The caller was a nurse at the hospital to which Barbara had been admitted earlier in the week. She said, "Could you come to the hospital please, Barbara is unwell and you can visit her at any time". This we read as hospital-speak for "Barbara is dying get your butt over here quick!". Everything we had planned for the weekend was laid aside and within an hour of the call we were on the road from Cheltenham to Bromley.

Barbara is my Aunt, my father's brother's wife. I am her next of kin, though not a blood relative.

Having come out of hospital two years ago recovering from a collapse which left her unable to fully care for herself, Barbara had adjusted to life with carers who visited her three times a day. She had put her life in order for the first year after her discharge from hospital, mainly it seemed by giving stuff away, but after that she began to suffer more from the alzheimers that she had been diagnosed with, and began noticeably to be "losing it". She kept going though, supported by her neighbours. Also, Moomin and I would visit regularly from Gloucester every three weeks, usually bringing a lunch prepared beforehand by Moomin.

We arrived at the hospital in the middle of the afternoon to hear that Barbara was suffering from a chest infection. She was in a ward with three other people and her bed was hidden behind a curtain. When we pulled aside the curtain to get to both sides of her bed she was inelegantly laid across the bed in disarray, her nightdress and bedding pulled aside exposing her privates.

We hastened to cover her up and move her so that she wasn't threatening to slide off the bed.

She was able to talk a little but for the most part I was unable to understand her. Moomin will say that when she told her that Jeffery was here, she beamed, but I didn't see that.

Initially we sat, Moomin and I, one each side of the bed, each holding one of Barbara's hands. At one point though, Barbara took our hands and pulled them both across her body inviting us to take each other's hand. A charming, funny thing for Barbara to do. We held each other's hands, resting lightly on Barbara's belly.

The second day was a Sunday, and a junior doctor who examined Barbara, told us that the chest infection was being treated with antibiotics. She used her stethoscope to listen to Barbara's breathing and said that the drugs were improving the health of her lungs. In spite of this good news, we wanted to tell the doctors about her circumstances; that she lived alone, rarely went out, and the dementia she suffered from was reducing her ability to live an independent life, but above all that she had often expressed to Moomin and her neighbours a strong desire "not to be here", especially since her sister died six months ago. In view of this we wanted the doctors to consider our request to stop the antibiotics and let nature take it's course. The junior doctor called in a consultant with whom we were able to have an informed discussion about Barbara's situation, and in which we were able to say that Barbara would be unlikely to be going home from this adventure and prolonging her life would not benefit her in any real way.

The consultant agreed to stopping the antibiotics and the nurse who had been on duty the previous day, and may have made the phone call to me the previous morning, said that she also agreed that that was the best course to take. As an aside she told me that on the previous day when her condition worsened Barbara had asked her "where's Jeff?", and I was very flattered that Barbara wanted me to be beside her in her hour of need.

Following that discussion Barbara was moved from the multiple bed ward she had been on, to a side ward on her own. A palliative care package was set up and on the Monday she had everything in place, including a syringe driver delivering to her a sub-cutaneous supply of sedatives and painkillers.

On that monday evening our daughter arrived, having driven down from Scotland just to see Barbara for a couple of hours. I felt very cautious about this but it worked out well. She, with her three year old son sitting on her lap, talking memorably about the last visit they had had with Barbara where they had taken her for a sightseeing tour of London that exhausted me just thinking about it, but Barbara had loved it. Towards the end of the visit, Barbara, who had not moved at all so far, except to breathe, turned towards my step-daughter and her son and looked at them. Barbara, at this time wasn't using her eyes much, and when she did look she only used the one eye, the right hand eye. I don’t know what was going through her mind, but this movement suggests that she enjoyed the visit.

That night when I took over from Moomin to stand vigil Barbara opened that one eye she was still using, and I talked to her, eye to eye.

I don't remember what I said, just speaking from an aching heart, talking face to face, stroking her hair and kissing her forehead , to which she responded with a loving smile.

My birth family who she loved dearly were a very undemonstrative bunch, and a little short of affection. In a forest of miserable people she, and her husband Norman, were shining lights and beacons of hope.

The next morning both her neighbours visited, not together, but arriving separately and leaving together. They were the two women who lived on either side of Barbara in Beckenham. They have been a tremendous support for her over the last 15 years or so, and particularly the last two. Moomin told me that as they left, that right hand eye opened wide, and watched them go. That must have been about midday and was probably the last time we saw the personality of Barbara.

We stayed at Barbara's bedside for several days, and got to know the hospital, slightly too well! At busy times it feels like a railway station, busy with people coming and going, and at night everything is muted.

We took turns to stay with Barbara overnight. One of us would go and sleep in the campervan, keeping Minnie, our dog, company for half the night. Then they would sit with Barbara for the second half of the night, allowing the other to get some sleep.

Walking the corridors at night to swap our shifts, the place was silent, and few people were about except outside the wards where nurses sat to be available for patients in distress.

Out on the main walkways the only movement was the cleaning machine that looked like a dalek, but had been painted in the livery of an ambulance. It looked as if it was supposed to move across the floor with it's polish pads rotating, sensing walls and hazards, and running continuously and automatically overnight. It didn't work like that though, a minder seemed to follow it around redirecting it when it jammed itself against a wall.

To reduce the risk of bedsores Barbara's hospital bed had an inflatable mattress. This was maintained at pressure by a motorised pump which periodically stopped and started and twittered with an almost melodic tune, playing like a relentless record; background to our vigil.

We could hear voices beyond the door of our cosy ward, those of the nurses and doctors talking at the desks just outside, but these were quite comforting. There was a fluorescent downlight from a power strip behind the patient and under that the wipeboard with Barbara's name, and the name written in felt tip pen upon it.

Nurses came into the ward to turn her, to check the syringe driver and to see that Moomin and I were OK.

 

Barbara’s handbag and slippers were in the bedside cupboard, and the end of Barbara’s dressing gown belt trailed from the cabinet door below, onto the floor, while a framed picture of Norman sat on top.

The medications that kept Barbara from becoming distressed were pumped into her from a syringe driver discreetly hidden beneath the bed cover beside her legs.

Outside the window cars went back and forth. Life continued as if nothing was happening in here. .

We tried to have somebody, either Moomin or me with Barbara at all times. This would perhaps have been more difficult had we not had our LDV Convoy campervan with us. We parked it in the car park of the hospital, and paid the parking for 24 hours, but we were told after the second day that as we were with a relative who was dying in the hospital we could have a parking permit for free. The complications of getting the permit were extraordinary. A nurse on the ward had to ring a man in a different building in a different part of London and ask him to send an email to the front office of the hospital requesting that they issue the permit for a defined number of days. As Barbara was dying in her own time, not to conform to the hospital’s time table, we had to reapply for the permit twice. Each time there were huge complications which fruitlessly dragged nursing staff away from their proper work. Telephone calls not answered, emails ignored, and the issuing office for permits closing early.

We learned later that the palliative care leader had rung the car park manager to get him to issue the permit, finding him to be deliberately obstructive because he didn’t like allowing people to park free. Since I discovered early on that the car park management is a flat fee contract and all parking fees go straight to paying off the PFI bill, this was definitely a jobsworth response.

The benefits of having the van parked outside were enormous. We could cook food, and curl up with the dog and sleep as we needed. Having the dog outside gave us a requirement for exercise away from the bedside. Obviously we slept in shifts, three or four hours on and three or four hours off. Minnie was always happy to curl up with me, except when she saw people moving around in the car park, then she would jump off the bed and bounce across the van.

Considering that Minnie had to be on her own such a lot while we were in the hospital, when she has been accustomed to our full time company, we are very grateful for the funny little creature’s tolerance.

On the twelfth night Moomin slept all through the night while I sat at the bedside.

Barbara hadn’t eaten or drunk for at least 12 days and she had stopped weeing into the catheter. She still breathed and the heart was still pumping. The nurses and the palliative care people were quite amazed that she survived so long. We were now in our thirteenth day and while we wanted to be with her earlier on, now, for our own health’s sake we just wanted it over.

During that thirteenth day her breathing pattern changed. A dozen hard breaths followed by a period without lung movement changed to continuous breathing but undulating in intensity from harsh to almost silent. That then became even and shallow breathing. In the late evening I went off to get a full night’s sleep, but Moomin phoned me after midnight to say that her breathing had become shallow in the extreme, and by the time we had closed the call she saw that Barbara had stopped breathing altogether.

I left our van, entered the hospital, and walked into the ward. There Moomin explained, sadly, to me that it was over. Looking down at the crumpled body on the bed, I could see that Barbara was gone from this place.

*

Later I began to wonder what we had done.

I began to count the days and the hours, and to recollect the time watching Barbara breathing, the walking through the hospital corridors, the drinking cups of tea, the interesting conversations with the nursing staff, the sleeping in seats, and the gradual realisation that in sitting by her bedside for just shy of two weeks in hospital, we and she, had a bit of a phenomenon.

I suppose we were a bit stunned, and didn’t know what to do next. It was one o’clock in the morning, Barbara had just died, and we watched as a doctor went into the hospital ward to certify her death.

After that we could go, so we went off through the empty corridors of the night-time hospital once again. This time we stopped off in the hospital chapel for a moments reflection. As we entered the dimly lit room we noticed that there was a person sleeping on benches against the wall, so we tiptoed past, and sat for five minutes in thoughtful silence, creeping out again and going to our van in the car park.

There, Moomin and I, with Minnie, our dog, slept together at the same time, in the same bed, for the first time in nearly a fortnight.

Later that day, when we got up, we went back into the hospital, to collect Barbara’s death certificate from the bereavement office. An appointment was made for us, with the registrar at the council offices in town, to register the death, and we made our own appointments with the solicitor, to start the probate of the will; and with the funeral directors to arrange the cremation ceremony.

The undertaker supplied us with a humanist celebrant, who we met at Barbara’s house the following day. We discussed her life and personality at some length with him, and he went away and wrote a script that he proposed to deliver in the service, including notes from his discussions with her neighbours.

The next major job was preparing for the funeral, inviting friends and relatives, organising food, and sorting through the house contents. There was a codicil to her will, asking that her neighbours and relatives have first choice of her chattels, anything else remaining the property of her estate, and to be disposed of by the solicitor.

When we spoke to the undertaker he asked us if we wanted flowers, but Moomin said that we would request, in the invitations we sent out, that no flowers be sent, but that donations to a nominated charity, The Alzheimers Society, could be sent to the funeral director’s instead. Moomin also said that she would make a single flower arrangement from the plants she would find growing in Barbara’s garden, and that that alone would be placed on the coffin.

This promise was made some 10 or more days before the day of the funeral, and as we walked down Barbara’s gardens each day and as autumnal October turned the leaves, I anxiously watched all the flowers gently wilting. Finally, the day for making the arrangement came, and Moomin went out with the secateurs, selecting the brilliant red leaves of the Acer tree, a slightly browned rose, a few fuchsias, and other flowers. She also found some bits from the dried flower arrangement in the hall inside the house, and some flowers volunteered to us by a neighbour, who knew what Moomin was doing, and had a bunch of flowers from a plant which had grown as a cutting from Barbara’s garden.

 

When the bouquet for the coffin was ready, I took it to the undertaker. They looked beautiful, and appropriately autumnal, reminding us, both of the season, and of the colour of Barbara’s hair, which retained much of its redness ‘til the day she died.

As we assembled at the crematorium, we may have been 30 or so mourners. We milled around at the entrance, needing to be herded like sheep. The young undertaker, leading the service with a formal dignity, showed us to our seats, and after a decent pause, Barbara, in her coffin was carried to the table for the service to begin.

As she came in, the music, “Clair de Lune” by Debussy was played, and we closed with “Unforgettable” sung by Nat King Cole, both pieces we knew she liked because of our conversations with her neighbours. The committal music, when the coffin was lowered away from sight, was “’Til there was You” sung by Peggy Lee. I chose this because I recalled back in the sixties when my family were sharing Christmas in Catford with Norman and Barbara, Norman had just bought the single record and was playing it over and over, through the three or four days we were there. It got to be a bit of an earworm that year. I guess they liked it!

In our turning out of the more personal paperwork from the house we found a surviving letter that had been sent to Barbara from India, by Norman, during the war. As always it was addressed to Darling Barbara and was full of affection and longing for her. In it he tells Barbara that he is being made fun of by his mates because he has pinned up the picture of his glamorous sweetheart by his bed. I think this card survived the late pruning of their wartime correspondence because Norman had attached a photograph of himself to it. This and several other cards from Norman to Barbara were placed in the coffin, and with the flower arrangement from the garden, they all went with her, into the fire.

The humanist celebrant who lead the ceremony, spoke the words that we had agreed , and added those of Barbara’s neighbours lending a comforting gravity to the occasion. I particularly liked the reminiscence, from one of the neighbours, of her child playing at having a tea party with Barbara, and Barbara would pretend to eat a sandwich, or pretend to drink a cup of tea, everytime her child would offer it, with as much enthusiasm, and as much patience as if this was the first time she had been asked to play

I had known, from as far back as the time when Barbara became ill, two years ago, that the day would come when I would close the door on the Beckenham house for the last time. Barbara had lived there for a little over fifty years, and she and Norman had filled it with their own charming, and quietly tasteful stuff. They had prints, paintings, carvings, knick-knacks and oddities; books and radios; pottery and furniture. Most of this was so uniquely theirs that I knew that if it was still in the house when I closed the door on it for the last time, the loss I felt would be too much to bear.

With this in mind, we really wanted friends and neighbours to take away things from the house in compliance with Barbara’s wishes, and with each item that was carried away, some of the spirit of Norman and Barbara would go with it to be shared in a new home.

To fulfil this, the sandwiches that Moomin had ordered were laid on the table, and the tea was made for the after-funeral party.

Some people came up from Helston in Cornwall, getting up at five o’clock in the morning to be at the funeral, came to the party after, and went back again on the same day. Others came from as far afield as Scotland, Germany, Yorkshire, and Dorset. Some were her neighbours, or had been her neighbours when she lived in Catford, I remembered some from my childhood, but others were strangers to me, who had come to love her because she had taken them under her wing, being a safe harbour in stormy seas.

Most of the people who had attended the funeral came back to the house, and most people took something. They needed some persuading that this was for real, but the atmosphere in the house was celebratory and convivial, which was just what we knew Barbara would have wanted.

The funeral was held on the Friday, and we were to hand the keys of the house to the solicitor on Monday, so that they would empty it in readiness for selling it, and we spent the Saturday and Sunday finishing off our clearing of things we didn’t want to leave behind, and persuading the two adjacent neighbours who had been such a big part of Barbara’s life, since Norman’s death, to take more stuff, chairs, clothes, television, tables, anything, everything.

On the Sunday afternoon we looked around the house, making sure there was nothing of our own left behind and loading into our van items that we were to deliver to ours and Barbara’s friends. The largest item, and therefore the most urgent was Barbara’s dressmaker’s mannequin, which would go where we knew it would be well used, at the home of a friend of ours in Mid Wales, who already had Barbara’s beloved sewing machine.

Satisfied that we had done all that we could in Beckenham we closed the doors and drove away.

We left the keys to the house with Barbara’s solicitor on the Monday morning, and by Tuesday morning we were across the border, into Wales.

Delivering Barbara’s chattels to her friends and relatives, those who were unable to attend the funeral, would take us on a few adventures yet.