A Winter’s Tale
Snow, loss. and amemorable experience for a rather grumpy Civil Servant.
Doctors and clergymen! doctors and clergymen! The bane of my life. Difficult. Very difficult. Wilful even. Clergymen who did not send in their quarterly marriage returns to me, the registrar, and would then make up the most unbelievable excuses as to why they had not. Flooded vestries, sudden fires, or W H Smiths plumb out of ink … again. Clergymen! It was an eye opener to me. And doctors, doctors had to be handled with kid gloves, because if they cut up rough about modifying their crazier death certificates I would have no option but to refer the case to the coroner. That would mean post mortem and that would mean upsetting the relatives, upsetting them even more than they were already that is. Who needs that?
One maverick doctor had to be handled extra extra carefully. He was not just a doctor, he had a title into the bargain. Did he inherit it, or was he awarded it for services to something or other? I did not know, but it did throw me a bit. Did I call him Dr. or ‘your lordship’? Maybe he bought his title on ebay because he didn’t know that a real lord just signs his surname. He used to put in the lord bit. Every time. Bad form.
His usual was to just record that someone had died of old age. Perfectly reasonable in the real world, but not in the eyes of the law. The law dictates that you must have died for a reason, not because you just decided to throw in the towel, pop your clogs, join the heavenly choir, whatever.
This morning he had sent into my office the caretaker of a block of flats where a lady had died, to register the death. Not possible. No way, He had no connection with the woman, and a fairly tenuous hold on the English language. I rang the doctor lord. There was nobody else he said. No relatives, neither he, nor the undertaker were permitted by law to do it, and the deceased had lived with another elderly lady who was housebound, and could not possibly come to my office.
“Please, do what you can.” Click.
That ‘please’ was a first. Who wants to imagine their nearest and dearest on the pathologist’s slab? Nobody. I called the friend, a Miss Wells, and offered to take my register, and see her at home.
She was very pleasant and grateful, but I regretted my offer. It was winter, getting near the shortest day, and early in the afternoon the sky blackened and little flurries of snow began to fall. I really was regretting it. My drive home was not the most pleasant at the best of times and I didn’t fancy a rush hour drive in the dark and the snow. I closed early, it was only two thirty but the darkness was thickening and the snow falling with that determined inevitability which always seems far worse than rain. Snowflakes are just bigger I suppose.
It was a big old block of flats with a vintage lift; one of those with clanging folding iron grid doors. I reached the second floor, found the door and knocked. I heard a voice tell me to come in, and I obeyed it. The room was large, the ceilings high. I half expected to see the deceased lying stretched out in her coffin, but checked my imagination. It was easy to imagine in the gloom of that huge room, overstuffed with clumsy dark furniture. Large pictures in heavy gilt frames surrounded us. She greeted me warmly, a round face, the face of someone accustomed to pain I thought. The lines taught and sharp, but a good humoured face above the green twinset and the row of pearls.
She was Margaret Wells, she introduced herself, Miss Taylor, the deceased, was her friend, with whom she had shared this flat for thirty years. I sat on the edge of my chair, and got out my register, my pen. So to the details, ready for the black book. Miss Wells obviously did not get the chance to talk much. Her conversation was interesting. She was intelligent, a retired teacher, she told me, Miss Taylor had been a Civil Servant. She talked of their lives, the foreign travel, the shared enjoyments, concerts, plays. A life of ordered interests, but a good one, and a loving one. There was a break in her voice, and moistness in her eyes, when she spoke of her friend. But not the sort of woman to break down and cry in front of a stranger I thought; one of the old school.
As I sifted the facts to make my record, my eye kept moving to the window, and the snow falling thicker, and faster through the gloom.
‘Would you like some light?’ I said, and got up to switch it on. Nothing happened.
‘Oh, we never use that light’ she said, ‘it’s easier for me to use this lamp’. She clicked the switch, and a pool of light surrounded her and the empty chair opposite her throwing the rest of the room into dark oblivion. I could barely see what I was writing. And a strange new thought began to circle in my mind that I was never going to leave this place; that I was bound here forever, and would never see my own home and family again. What nonsense, I said firmly inside my head and began to pack away my books and pads into my black leather case; my case with its gold crown and E11R on the flap, which was some sort of comfort. I was an official, a servant of the Queen, I couldn’t possibly be held captive and helpless in a London suburb. Could I?
I rose to go, and took her hand to shake it, but she held onto it. No not go yet, wait, see if this awful snow would stop, or slow at least. It looked like a blizzard by now. I must have a cup of tea, and something to eat. She slowly raised herself from her seat,and hobbled on two sticks into the kitchen. It seemed like a half an hour before she came back with a beautifully laid tea trolley; tea , biscuits, porcelain, embroidered linen, and lowered herself again into the chair. I drank, quickly, nervously. I was beginning to panic. Just a bit. I really was never going to get home.
Beside her chair was what my parents would have called a Radiogram. A big polished walnut cabinet holding a radio and record player. Was I fond of music she asked? Oh yes. We talked about music and musicians, and all the time the room around her little lagoon of light became darker and darker. Most of the singers and musicians she talked about were well before my time. Did I know Helen Watts? ‘No’, I said, and wanted to kick myself as she reached across to the shelves which must have held hundreds of vinyl LPs.
“You must hear her, she is superb, none of the modern singers can touch her.” So we sat in the darkness listening to Helen Watts singing Dido’s lament, surely the saddest piece of music in the world. The grief in that beautiful voice seemed to be tumbling and falling all around us like the falling snow, and my home seemed, like Aeneas, to be moving farther and farther away.
‘When I am laid in earth
Remember me, remember me. Do not forget my face.’
It is a lifetime since that grim afternoon, miss Wells, and you will have followed your friend long ago, but I do remember you,
I have not forgotten your face.
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Here is a YouTube link to ‘Dido’s Lament’ –