I’LL GET MY COAT

Our lane expires in a T-junction with a main road. Before the coming of motorways, this road was the main arterial route to London. Despite the parallel motorway section a few miles to the north, which opened forty years ago this year, the old A road remains busy; indeed its use has discernibly increased in the thirteen years that we have lived here. Just by the turn into our lane is a sign signalling the end of the speed restriction that obtains through the village strung further along the main road. But few drivers restrain themselves until they reach that sign; they put their foot down as soon as they have cleared the identifiable shops. The road seems especially like a racetrack around teatime.

Late yesterday afternoon, a man sauntered down the lane, crossed the main road and weaved through the gateway opposite the end of the lane. This gateway is a sort of fixed kissing gate that allows access to pedestrians and their dogs but thwarts cyclists, prams, wheelchairs and anything of comparable or greater un-manoeuvrability. Beyond it, a small housing estate spreads across a greensward and beyond that is a corner shop, which was the man’s objective.

Having fulfilled his errand, he retraced his steps. As he approached the weave gate, he saw that a cat was ambling ahead of him towards the gateway. It slowed, stopped, sat on its haunches under the lowest bar of the gate and looked around laconically at the man. The man stopped too. He evidently was calculating that to approach the gate might alarm the cat into running ahead. A narrow pathway skirts the road on the gate side (there is none on the far side) but the cat could hardly be relied upon to turn onto that pathway. Cats are more apt to spring forwards and hope for the best.

Rather than be responsible for the cat being squished by a vehicle, the man set off to his right. Between the main road and the little-used ring road around the small estate runs a hedgerow, grown up around a wire fence and punctuated with horse chestnuts. The man paced a few dozens yards until he came to a gap in the hedge where the wire had long been beaten down to allow access. There was still plenty of low growth in the gap and he stepped gingerly for he knew that the stings of nettles, which easily penetrate ankle socks, are especially potent at this time of year.

He then took an extended step towards the roadside pathway but, as he did so, his trailing foot caught in something unyielding – a branch of ivy perhaps or a trailing length of fence wire – and he sprawled forwards. The momentum of the step that he had been in the process of attempting carried him across the pathway and he landed face down half in the road itself. His sudden fall gave no time for the approaching driver to brake or swerve and the vehicle passed over his head, killing him instantly.

I was that man. Apart (clearly) from the last sentence, my account of the incident is as accurate as I am capable of making it. As I fell forwards towards the road, I distinctly thought: “I am going to die now”. As I hit the road, I turned my head towards the oncoming traffic but, amazingly, there was none. I scrambled up. Vehicles passed on the other side of the road – one car tooted at me but I couldn’t tell how to read the toot. Then the traffic stream resumed on the near side including, almost immediately, two juggernauts. Just a few seconds either way would have sealed my fate.

Becoming aware that my left wrist and left knee were both fairly painful and that the left knee of my jeans was slightly torn, I walked slowly and carefully back up the pathway until I was opposite our lane. The cat was nowhere to be seen and, thankfully, was not a flattened mess on the road. I was already thinking about my Dad who died trying to cross a busy road, a victim of his own impatience and the speed of a driver who was fined £120 for his pains. I waited until it was clearly no sort of gamble to cross over.

My partner persuaded me to apply a pack of frozen peas (which we keep for such eventualities) to my knee and to my wrist. The cold diminishes the swelling. It was not until the next day (today) that I noticed that my watch, which has always kept impeccable time, was running ten minutes slow, evidently a product of the knock it must have received. It, like its owner, is lucky not to have been smashed beyond repair.

In the colour magazine of the Saturday edition of The Guardian, called ‘Weekend’, there is a regular questionnaire feature called ‘Q&A’, an exercise based on the so-called ‘Proust Questionnaire’ in Vanity Fair. One of the standing questions is: “What is the closest you’ve come to death?” I always think it’s an absurd question (although, of course, I find all the questions absurd). We walk constantly in death’s shadow. At the edge of a road (or a garden pond or a high window or a river or a cliff), we can be literally one step from oblivion. We are but a bottle of pills or a kitchen knife away. The heart attack, the brain haemorrhage, the murderer or the accident could strike at any moment. Or, like Phil Silvers and Ian Richardson and Sheridan Morley, we could just drift into sleep and never return: merciful for us, horrible for our close ones.

Linda Grant catches this very well in her novel The Clothes on Their Backs: "You take a misstep, you turn your head the wrong way when you cross the road, you gargle with bleach instead of mouthwash, it's just ridiculous the doors that are slightly ajar between life and death. Life's extreme fragility is all around us, as if we are perpetually walking on floors of cracked glass" [p 48, Virago 2008].

Four weeks ago today, there was an incident outside a local community centre. Two men old enough to know better got into an altercation. The older knocked the younger down. In falling, he cracked his skull on the pavement and, as he lay there stunned, he suffered a fatal heart attack. The attacker was detained by the police and later released on bail. The local paper, as the media are apt to do, used the lurid phrase “murder probe”. Clearly, though, manslaughter will be the charge if any is preferred.

The man who died was the local builder, universally known as Micky the Brickie. Round our way, he would have met with few opportunities to work with bricks because almost everything, even the new builds, is fashioned from stone. He might better have been known as Jason the Mason, but Micky was his actual name – he was not of the generation to be called Jason, being only six years younger than me. As the police held onto the body, his family could not bury him for three weeks, plenty of time for everyone to discuss the case. For Micky was indeed known to everybody and, I should have thought, liked by everybody. He was always full of fun and a great talker, with the down side common to that condition that he wasn’t much of a listener. But you forgave him anything because he was instinctively generous. Ours is one of scores of local houses containing some perfectly chosen item or material rescued for recycling and gladly handed over, offers of payment waved away. My partner accounted Micky’s great quality “generosity of spirit” and I think that gets it exactly.

Micky’s death genuinely shocked people because it was sudden and, as his widow remarked, “so unnecessary”. What she was alluding to has subsequently become clearer. It seems that the man who knocked Micky down and who is out on bail was her first husband. This has brought a noisome overtone of soap opera into what had seemed a small but affecting tragedy.

We do walk always in the shadow of death. In the bath this morning, I found myself reminiscing about a trip to Scotland with two pals from university. One of them, John, was an experienced climber. He had scaled several of the major peaks and had lost several friends to the enthusiasm, one of whom (his best friend) fell to his death while roped to John, leaving the survivor the melancholy (and dangerous) task of climbing down into a crevasse to retrieve the body. John was a lovely guy, a big golden bear of a man with a melodious Barnsley accent.

In Scotland, John contemplated the other two of us – Neil, a level-headed geologist, and me, capable sometimes of behaving sensibly – and decided that we could safely drive to Glencoe and go for a clamber. It wasn’t a proper climb but it was strenuous work. We then walked the length of a ridge high above the glen. I no longer recall our route – it’s more than forty years ago – and whether it can have been the legendary Aonach Eagach I somehow doubt, but it was certainly a testing scramble and it took several hours.

At one point the ridge grew very narrow, a row of jagged rocks with a 200-foot drop on either side. Radiating calm, John led the way and we gamely followed, me bringing up the rear. I suddenly managed to trap one leg under the other thigh and was stuck, perched on a sliver of rock and with no space in which to improvise. It occurred me that I was in genuine peril. I saw the others were moving on so I hollered. Neil turned, saw my predicament and started to panic. This, it turned out, was a lifesaver because it forced me to be ice-cool and logical. I lay back, gripped the rock beneath me with both hands, arched my back and lifted my thigh so that I could pull the other leg clear. Then I managed to raise myself to a crouch and inch along until I was on a wider part of the ridge. I saw John’s grinning face up ahead. “All right?” he called. We continued our ridge walk without mishap.

John, I remember, used to fret about my smoking, which was beginning to get heavy. “You know, I’ll be very cross with you if you make yourself ill with cigarettes” he told me one day. After he graduated, he went back to the north and married a woman whom he’d met on the same occasion that Neil and I met her. A few years later, he had surgery for a brain tumour. He and Sue came to London and met up with old pals including me. John showed off the huge scar on his skull that he generally kept covered under a woolly hat. I never saw him again. He died of a recurrence of the tumour. He was 33.

This week, it will be 29 years since I gave up smoking for good. Another friend grew stern with me one day concerning my drinking habits. I was getting through rather too much at the time. He warned me that it might undermine my health. It’s more than 15 years since he died, in his mid-40s from Aids. I don’t make this or any other observation in this posting to, as it were, “score points”. Some of us make our end inevitable by dedicated application: George Best to alcohol, Simon Gray to cigarettes. But for most, the end either comes as the culmination of illness or suddenly with little or no foreshadowing.

As one grows older, inevitably, the proximity of death nudges one more often. It brings no certainties, though, save when it comes wrapped in incurable disease. In his 90s, John Gielgud agreed to a television interview with Jeremy Paxman. In his forthright way, Paxman pressed the great man on his attitude to and preparedness for death. Sir John was visibly distressed to be obliged to contemplate the subject. I wanted him to point out that there was nothing to say that he would not outlive Paxman and that, unless the BBC kept the programme untransmitted until after his death, it was a certainty that some of those watching the interview would pass before Sir John did. And I remember a wonderfully feisty comeback from Katharine Hepburn when asked somewhat imperiously by her interviewer, Barbara Walters: “do you actually own a skirt?” “I’ll wear one to your funeral” Kate shot back. I like to think I too can take that attitude to the grim reaper.