The Fragment that remained

The Fragment that Remained

According to St. Mark’s Gospel twelve baskets were filled with the ‘fragments that remained’ after the miraculous feeding of the five thousand. The fragment of my life that remained after Heather’s death on 12th July 2006 ended our sixty years of marriage, has filled the nearly-four years since that date with more incident and activity than at least the previous twelve!

This has not been due to chance. I realized that the sense of desolation and loss that overwhelmed me could only be dulled by constant busyness. I was fortunate in being still capable of life-filling activity and more than fortunate in having sons, grandchildren, other relatives and good friends willing and able to support me in my determination to fill my remaining days, months or years with activity and purpose.

I didn’t immediately realize how large and pain-filled would be the gap in my life left my Heather’s death. I remember that as I stood by her bed at 11.00 p.m. on that fatal night, my sense of loss was tempered by the knowledge that she was at last at rest. The half-smile on her face suggested that her passing had been a peaceful, even a happy one. That dreadful laboured breathing, to which I had listened day and night for four days, had ended. There would be no more of the uncontrollable shaking that the district nurse had described as ‘fitting’.

I phoned and spoke to the emergency doctor, explaining that I believed that my wife’s life had ended, that this had not been unexpected and that her doctor had visited her every day for the previous three days. A sympathetic paramedic called and confirmed that her life had ended. He said that he thought that it had happened some time before his visit. At 9.00 p.m. I had given her a drink, and then another when she had said ‘more’ (her first coherent word for three days). I had then settled her as comfortably as I could, for the night. I had immediately flopped down on the bed exhausted and slept solidly until waking up in alarm to unaccustomed silence two hours later.

Had it been as I settled her that her life had ended? I hoped that it had been. I wept at the thought that she might have wanted me to hold her as she was dying and that I had been sound asleep. I remember being so grateful that our doctor (Dr Dianne Halstead) had, against the advice of the District Nurse, strengthened my determination to care for Heather myself and at home and not to let her go into hospital. At least she had died in her own bed with me, awake or asleep, at her side.

The Paramedic asked if there was anyone who would spend the rest of the night with me if I asked them. I was quite sure that I had only to phone and either of my sons would have been on his way to Clacton. However, I wanted to be alone with my thoughts and my memories and I really didn’t need support. I had hoped and prayed that Heather would be the first of us to go. I had thought that I could live on my own (I hadn’t realized how hard it would be) and I knew that she simply couldn’t have managed without my support. Having one’s prayers answered doesn’t necessarily bring content!

I entrusted Heather’s body to Lesley Barlow. She was a local woman funeral director whom I had encountered, and found helpful and kind, a year or two earlier when I had been asked to officiate at the funeral of an acquaintance who, like me, had been a prisoner of war in World War II. A phone call brought two of her men who reverently and respectfully removed Heather’s earthly remains. I was left with my thoughts, waiting till 8.30 am before phoning Pete and Andy to tell them the news.

Pete, who was his own boss, told me that he and Arlene would come over to Clacton that morning to support me as I made the funeral arrangements. There was nothing that Andy and Marilyn could do so we decided that they would stick to their original plan of coming over to Clacton on the Sunday afternoon.

I had decided that I would like Heather to have a Quaker funeral with the brief committal ‘service’ at Weeley Crematorium followed, an hour later, by a Memorial Meeting held at the Quaker Meeting House ‘To give thanks for the Grace of God made evident in the life of our Friend Heather Hall’. Both the Committal and the Memorial Meeting would take the form of Quaker Meetings for Worship held in a prayerful and expectant silence out of which anyone present might feel moved to rise to pray or to give verbal testimony to the Grace of God in Heather’s life. I asked that the committal should begin with the playing of ‘Jesu, joy of man’s desiring’ and end with the playing of the tune of ‘The Day thou gavest Lord is ended’

Both the Crematorium Chapel and the Quaker Meeting House were crowded. Virtually everyone who had been present three months earlier at the celebration of our 60th wedding anniversary was there. I was particularly pleased that also present were Rev Chris Wood, of Christ Church URC Church where I had occasionally led the worship and Father Anthony Spooner of St. James’s Church who, as ‘our Friend Anthony Spooner’ had sometimes joined us at our Meetings for Worship when he happened to have a Sunday ‘off duty’. I knew, of course, that Clacton Quakers could be depended upon to provide refreshments for the mourners, many of whom had come a considerable distance to be present.

Everything was, as Quakers say, ‘in right ordering.’ A few days later I scattered Heather’s ashes round the apple tree in our back garden, where – every spring – Heather had watched the daffodils break through the soil and burst into bloom. I hope that, when the time comes, as come it must, my own funeral will be a mirror image of Heather’s.

It was not until after the funeral, and after replying, to the best of my ability, to the many letters of condolence, and of appreciation of Heather’s life, that I began to feel the full extent of my loss. We had been separated before. I had been overseas in the army for four years between our first meeting and our wedding. Later Heather had spent two years in a Sanatorium with tuberculosis, and brief periods in hospital. Twice I had been away for a week at conferences in connection with my work.

Usually though, we had had the certainty, and always at least the hope, of a reunion. Those separations, long as they had seemed at the time, hadn’t been forever. There isn’t a word in common use in English that expresses a final goodbye – Adieu instead of Au Revoir, Lebe Wohl rather than Auf Wiedersehen. But this was it. I was never again to see Heather’s warm and all embracing smile, never again to hear the happy laugh that I had always been able to evoke. The prospect was more than I could bear.

I would like to be able to say that my religious faith saw me through. I have, often enough, heard those who had endured similar crises say so when interviewed on the BBC’s Songs of Praise. I can, in truth, say no more than that it helped. Heather’s life came to an end on a Wednesday night. On the following Sunday I attended said Mass at St. James’ Church at 8.00 a.m. (I hadn’t been able to do so during the two years I was caring for Heather), and the Quaker Meeting for Worship at 10.30 a.m. I have done the same on almost every Sunday since. Both the Holy Sacrament with the accompanying familiar words from the Book of Common Prayer, and silent prayer and worship in the Quaker Meeting for Worship, have supported me.

I have since regularised the position and am in dual membership of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) and of Clacton-on-Sea’s St. James’ Church-of-England Church. (Strictly speaking, of course, I had never ended my membership of the Anglican Church into which I had been baptised in infancy and confirmed in boyhood.)

Never though have I been able to rid myself wholly of nagging doubt. Is Heather’s lovely spirit somewhere ‘out there’ freed from the bonds of time and space and awaiting our reunion? Or is death, as the zeitgeist of today’s materialistic Britain insists, a final end, with nothing but annihilation and oblivion awaiting us? I desperately want to believe the former, but the latter continues to invade my thoughts. Quakers make a virtue of doubt, urging us to ‘consider the possibility that we may be mistaken’. That is one Quaker ‘Advice’ that, unwillingly, I observe to the letter – and very uncomfortable I find it!

I take a little comfort in the fact that I am not alone. No one who has read the late Sir John Betjeman’s poetry could doubt that he was a man of strong Christian conviction. Yet he too was racked by doubt. His short poem Aldershot Crematorium expresses my mind exactly.

It tells how ‘little puffs of smoke, without a sound, show what we loved dissolving in the skies; dear hands and feet, and laughter-lightened face, and silk that hinted at the body’s grace’. At the end come the words of the Priest ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ followed by, ‘sharp, deep and painful, doubt inserts the knife!’

It was clear to me that it was only by busyness that could I hope to deaden, if not banish completely, my doubts, fears and feelings of loneliness, anguish and despair. There was plenty for me to do at first. A cataract had developed on my left eye (my best eye) during the past two years. While I was caring full-time for Heather there was nothing I could do about it. I gave up driving and sold the family car. Heather and I used a wheelchair-friendly taxi to get to and from the Quaker Meeting on Sundays. For shopping and other short journeys I used a bike.

Now alone, I couldn’t face the coming autumn and winter without being able to read. With the encouragement of my two sons I had the cataract dealt with privately. The sight of my left eye was restored. I didn’t feel though that, at 85, it would be a good idea for me to start driving again. I continued to use my bike, getting a rail pass for cheaper long distance travel. Some fifteen years earlier, Heather’s and my passport had expired. We decided that we wouldn’t be going overseas again so we didn’t renew it, and I destroyed the old passport. Now, I thought it just possible that I might be going overseas again, perhaps to Zittau in Germany, so I obtained a new passport.

For most of her adult life Heather had made a practice of writing, in minute handwriting on tiny note pads, any short piece of prose or verse that she found helpful. Her sources were the bible and other books, newspapers and magazines, radio and tv programmes. After her death I gathered these note pads together and typed out their contents, publishing them as an anthology entitled ‘Heather’s Treasure’. Inside the front cover was a line drawing of Heather created by our elder grandson, Chris. I had 200 copies printed and gave them, as a memorial to Heather, to every member of our extended family, to our friends, to every member and attender of Clacton Quaker Meeting, and to anyone else who I thought might be interested.

Our bungalow needed refurbishment. For years Heather and I had done no redecoration and only routine cleaning. I decided to have it transformed into a home more suitable for an old man living alone. A kind neighbour of mine who had been a painter and decorator; and was in fact a Jack-of-all-trades (and a master of several of them!) agreed to do the work. An old cupboard, draining board and sink in the living kitchen were torn out and replaced with modern kitchen units, the walls were redecorated, the ceiling re-plastered and the Marley tiles of the floor exposed. My easy chair was sited opposite the tv set, with the land-line phone mounted on the wall within easy reach

The double bed in what had been our bedroom was replaced with a single one, the walls and ceiling were redecorated and a wall-to-wall carpet fitted. The walls of the quite wide hall had been lined with bookcases. These were removed to the smallest bedroom which became my ‘office’, housing a bureau, once belonging to Heather’s dad, a desk and my lap-top computer, printer and scanner. Around these ‘the fragment that remained’ of my life was increasingly to revolve. The walls and ceiling of the hall were decorated and wood laminate fitted over the floor.

The bathroom too received radical attention. I had the walk-in shower enclosure with its instantaneous electric shower water heater replaced with a small sit-down bath having a conventional but pump-assisted shower. This was supplied with hot water by the kitchen back-boiler. An old twin-tub washing machine was removed and a modern bathroom unit installed.

The sitting room, now used only for entertaining occasional visitors, was left unchanged and the front bedroom – the guest bedroom – became a storeroom.

It was toward the end to all this upheaval that I realized to my dismay that my physical condition was deteriorating. I was losing my strength, becoming less stable on my feet, tiring more quickly, finding stairs more difficult to climb, and ladders impossible.

While I had been caring for Heather I had had all the strength that I had needed. I had lifted her half a dozen or more times each day, supported her as she had walked with the aid of her large walking frame, from the bedroom to the kitchen or bathroom. I had pushed her in her wheelchair up the wooden ramp (made by our neighbour!) into the bungalow, dressed and undressed her and done everything else that was necessary. I had fitted large baskets on the front and rear of my bicycle and had used it, often fully loaded with shopping, almost every day. I had done all the cooking and food preparation, the household washing (with a washing machine!) and all the domestic cleaning. It was only because I wasn’t prepared to leave Heather, and couldn’t in any case spare the time, that I had given up gardening.

Within a couple of months all that strength had disappeared and I had become a feeble old man. I found that I could no longer ride my bike safely, nor walk to post a letter. Any effort gave me a nagging lower backache and left me exhausted. Gardening was out of the question.

I did what I had to do. With the help of Age Concern I found a gardener who comes in once a fortnight to keep my rather large garden tidy. With the help of my next-door neighbours I found a lady (their daughter as it happens!) who comes in once a week and spends a couple of hours cleaning through the bungalow. Both arrangements work perfectly. I also got rid of my bike (I was afraid of falling and breaking a hip as I tried to mount or dismount) and bought an electric mobility scooter, with a canopy, to give me an all-weather means of getting my shopping, visiting local friends and getting to church and to the Quaker meeting. Luckily I have no debts and my income and savings are sufficient to allow me to do these things. I realize that I am very fortunate in that respect.

In old age one must expect medical problems. The cataract on my right eye was dealt with but the operation revealed serious macular degeneration of the retina of that eye that distorts my vision. Fortunately my left eye is, so far, working satisfactorily. That too has macular degeneration, but less advanced. I was also found to have cancer of the skin and cartilage of my left ear. A first operation failed to remove all the affected tissue but a second one appears, so far, to have been successful. Other aches and pains, increasing forgetfulness, absent-mindedness, and general muscular weakness are simply the price I have to pay for having outlived most of my contemporaries. I promise that I won’t go on and on about them!

Meanwhile, my sons, grandchildren, and Heather’s nieces and nephew and their children did their very best to keep me occupied, find me interests, and to make me feel wanted. They have really been extraordinarily successful.

Grandson Chris, living and working in Taiwan, organised for me a Flickr site on which I have posted over 300 photographs – family photos, travel photos, photos of historical interest and so on. Most of the photos are accompanied by descriptive comments. The web address is www.flickr.com/photos/ernestbythesea The rather romantic pseudonym was Chris’ idea. He assured me that all the more sensible names were already in use. The site has brought me a number of interesting new friends and contacts. These included a Canadian second cousin whom I hadn’t known existed, who supplied me with previously unknown fragments of family history.

Chris’ younger brother Nick, living and working in Brussels, knew how much I missed my former part-time job of writing Tendring Topics, a weekly chat and comment column in a local newspaper. He organised for me first a blogspot www.ernesthall.blogspot.com and then a website www.ernesthall.net I now post Tendring Topics….on Line, an up-to-2000 word comment on local and national affairs and on my life, on both of those sites every week. The blogspot is probably best for those interested only in Tendring Topics because it gives immediate access, not only the current week’s blog but previous ones. On the web site there is also ‘about me’ a very compressed biography, my photos, and the typescript of a number of sermons that I have preached in the past, mostly at Christ Church, URC Church in Clacton.

This blogspot has brought me back to writing on my laptop, one of the few activities that I can still really enjoy. As well as the blogspot I have also been writing my autobiography, of which this ‘Fragment that remains’ is positively the final instalment. It is a work that was beginning to rival Tolstoy’s War and Peace in size if not in content!

Then, of course, there have been my travels! These have been spectacular and have taken place only thanks to the encouragement, support and active help of my sons and daughters in law and my grandchildren. My three trips to Zittau, Germany’s most easterly town – and consequent brief visits to Poland and the Czech Republic – are recounted at some length elsewhere in this autobiography. Pete, Arlene and Nick have all played major roles in these. Thanks also to Pete and Arlene, I have made three trips to Brussels to visit Nick who now lives and works there, and to be introduced to his Belgian girlfriend Romy. On one of these occasions we visited the field of the Battle of Waterloo (little changed since 1815!) I brought back as a souvenir a facsimile of ‘The Times’ carrying an account of the battle and a copy of The Duke of Wellington’s report sent back to England.

One other journey deserves a special mention. For my 86th birthday Pete, Arlene and Nick organised for me a mini ‘grand tour of Europe’. We took an early flight to Geneva where Pete and Arlene had arranged for us to pick up a hire car. We then drove along the north shore of Lake Geneva, passing Montreux and the historic Chateau de Chillon, before striking south into the mountains towards the Great St Bernard Pass. We turned off the road a few miles short of the pass and took a winding and ever-climbing road to Champex sur Lac, high in the mountains beside an emerald green lake. It was where Heather, the two boys (then 13 and 16) and I had spent our very first camping holiday in Europe in the summer of 1969. We found that what had been a small Alpine village was now quite a posh ski resort – a sort of Frinton-on-the-Alpine-Lake!

After lunching at a restaurant in Champex we drove on through the Great St Bernard tunnel to the ancient Italian city of Aosta taking a break for coffee at a pavement café, sitting in warm sunshine beneath a backdrop of snow-covered mountains. We drove the length of the lovely Aosta Valley, passing a side valley in which we had camped on two occasions in the ‘70s. At the Aosta Valley’s end was Monte Bianco or Mont Blanc. We drove through the tunnel into France and thence on to Geneva where, after an evening meal by the lake-side, we caught our plane and flew back to Stansted. In the one day we had visited France, Switzerland and Italy and had revived memories of three happy camping holidays of the past.

During the past four years I have visited Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Italy, Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic! Quite an achievement for an octogenarian – but one that would have been out of the question without the support and help of my family.

Nor have my travels been only to mainland Europe. On two occasions (a third is scheduled for next month – May 2010) Andy and Marilyn have driven me to Sheffield where we have stayed at a very comfortable hotel while visiting granddaughter Jo (now a Social Worker attached to the Renal Unit of a Sheffield Hospital), seeing something of Sheffield and something too of the lovely Peak District, that is much closer to Sheffield than I had realized. Next month (May 2010) they have booked for us all to see a stage performance in Sheffield of ‘O What a Lovely War’, a satirical musical that I saw, and thoroughly enjoyed as a film many years ago.

Both Pete and Arlene, and Andy and Marilyn, visit me at Clacton from time to time. We always lunch at the Bowling Green at Weeley, three or four miles out of Clacton, and then drive on to one of the many attractive seaside resorts or rural beauty spots in our area. I very much appreciate these visits and I also very much appreciate the way in which Andy keeps in constant touch, phoning me every Sunday evening to make sure that I am OK. Heather would be very pleased if she knew (but perhaps she does know!) how very much both our sons, and all three of our grandchildren, have meant to me during these past few years. They are all, especially the three grandchildren, well scattered, but emails, mobile phone text messages, and my blog on the internet, help us to keep in touch.

Below is the first paragraph of an email that I received from Chris in Taiwan towards the end of July, 2009, not long after the third anniversary of Heather’s death:

‘I read your blog and looked at your photos on Flickr. I am so glad you do that, as I can see and read about what you are up to. I particularly enjoyed the pictures of you on holiday. I saw the picture of you and Grandma, and what you wrote about her. It was very moving. Three years have gone by very quickly. I have found that Grandma left me with a lot of values or attitudes towards money, food, health and how to treat other people. I often think about her and find myself remembering things she said or how she lived, especially now I am older. I often hear myself telling Ariel, ‘my grandma always did this or said that…’. I think that she made a very strong impression on me when I was young even though I hadn’t realized it at the time. I always have very warm memories of her’.

Receipt of messages such as that, help to make my life worth living.

I must not forget the four nieces and one nephew that I have inherited from Heather. I had neither brother nor sister but Heather did have a sister, younger than she was, and her family are all much warmer, kinder and more attentive to me than any mere uncle-by-marriage has any right to expect. All are regularly in touch either by visits, by email or by both. Time passes! Those nieces and that nephew, whom I remember best as little children, now have families of their own.


My extended family has extended further. I have five great-nieces and a great-nephew ranging in age from six to a ‘second year’ medical student who is almost twenty-one. I love and am proud of every one of them. I hope that they think kindly of the ancient great-uncle who tries never to forget any of their birthdays.

Which reminds me that I am now also an ‘honorary uncle’ to three year old Maja and her seven month old (at the end of April 2010) little brother Tom, of Zittau. They are the son and daughter of my friends Konni and Andreas Kulke. I hope that I shall remember their birthdays as faithfully as I do those of my great-nieces and nephew. I fear though that it is unlikely that I shall be around to remember more than another one or two of the birthdays of any of them.

A self-congratulatory song that I thoroughly detest and which, at one time, I seemed to hear every time I switched on the radio was My Way sung by Frank Sinatra. Looking back over my life, it seems to me that whenever I have done or said something that I have afterwards deeply regretted it has always been because I had been trying to go ‘my way’ – heeding neither the advice of Heather nor of others wiser than myself, nor the inner voice of conscience. It follows that, unlike Frank Sinatra, I can’t say, ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few – but then again, too few to mention’. On the contrary, I’ve had too many to burden anyone else with. So I won’t. This is an autobiography, not a confession!

I think that, as I approach my ninetieth year, I have really done as much – or perhaps rather more – that I could possibly have hoped. I am still writing my blog and posting it onto the internet every week. I have visited Zittau three times (I hadn’t thought that I would ever go there again!) and have good friends there. I am glad that I have made new friends at St. James’ Anglican Church and at Christ Church URC Church. I am sorry that I and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), that Heather and I joined in 1948, have drifted apart – but I don’t think that it is I who have drifted. I still have good friends in Clacton Meeting but I no longer find it to be the warm and welcoming group, united in worship that it once was. I remain in membership and I am a regular attender, possibly the most regular attender, at Meeting for Worship, but I am more than glad that I have revived and renewed my membership of the Church of England.

My two sons both have satisfying employment and are settled in life. My three grandchildren are all graduates doing satisfying and socially useful jobs. All have partners with whom I hope they will spend the rest of their lives as happily as Heather and I have done. What more could I ask?

In the past few months (I am writing these words in April 2010) I find that I am having some of the experiences that Heather had towards the end of her life. I too, often have the feeling that there is someone (always a benign presence) other than myself in the bungalow. I often feel that Heather is near me and I hold one-sided conversations with her, telling her all the family news (I have never before told any of this to anyone – they would probably think I should be ‘sectioned’)

Twice I believe that I have seen Heather. The first time was about six weeks after her death. I was dozing in my comfortable chair in the kitchen when I woke up and realized that there was a young girl in a green dress standing opposite me and watching me. I realized that it was Heather, as she had been a year or so before I met her. As I recognised her, she disappeared. Did Heather have a green dress as a child? I have no idea. She certainly didn’t have one as an adult. The second occasion was just a week or so ago. Again I was in that chair and came out of a doze to realize that there was a woman sitting beside me in a chair that I knew was no longer there. The woman got up, walked to the door and went through it across the hall into the bedroom. There, she turned round and looked at me. It was then that I realized that it was Heather as she had been in her thirties. Immediately again, she disappeared.

An apparition? A waking dream? A hallucination? Self-delusion? I have no idea. Surely though, had it been a product of my own subconscious mind, Heather would have been immediately recognisable. I do know that the visions were by no means frightening or threatening and that I would welcome another.

Perhaps one day there will be another. This time Heather will not disappear when I recognise her. She’ll give me one of her wonderful warm and welcoming smiles – and tell me that the time has come for us to be reunited.