Bryan Islip's Blog, page 18
December 27, 2013
On with the ironing
Apart from family's and friends' phone calls and the radio, Kirkhill House on Christmas Day and Boxing Day was strangely silent. No voice except possibly that of me talking to myself. Yes, I hear her talking to me all the time and if that is the firsdt sign of madness let me tell you it's of great comfort. Even now when I'm writing up my diary, ('blog' - what a dreadful word is that), I hear her telling me to get on with the sorting out - or "anything other than that computer", she says. "There's that great and growing pile of ironing", "There's all my clothes and my collections of china, handbags, shoes: what are you going to do with them? There's that nearly finished painting not touched since I went. Get cracking and don't you dare become a hermit. Come on, Bryan!" Her words are not unkindly. Quite the reverse. I've placed photographs of her here and there around the house, not that there's the slightest chance of me not remembering her face, her body, her looks or the times we had with dogs, our family and friends or all by ourselves. No chance of forgetting the fragrance of her, fresh out of the shower or all made up to go out or in the sweat-heat of some beach or sun-soaked garden. And I have in mind so well have imprinted the actual touch of her; all that charged electricity or whatever the hell it is or was, gone now but not ever forgotten.
One month ago yesterday the lady spoke her final two words. I needed to bend over the bed to hear them, my ear close to her lips. "Sorry, love", she said, and then no more. Even in the ultimate agony she had to apoloigise to me!
Sorry? "What for?" I asked her. "No greater gift could ever be bestowed on me than you, Dee, you. But if you mean you're sorry for dying, for leaving me, that's OK; that makes two of us who're sorry - and that's just one last thing for us to share." I like to think she heard me. I like to think that perhaps she even reads these words.
But right now I'm off to the kitchen. I'll crack on with that ironing, OK?
December 22, 2013
Spirits of Christmas
'Spirit of Christmas'? I'm having trouble finding it, this year. Sure I've read all the 'Xmas' cards, (how Dee disliked that X abbreviation), cards well-intentioned but overlapped in our postman's bag with the last of so many beautiful condolence cards. On TV I see the street gaiety, the shopping frenzy, the drinking / party-time extravaganza and all the notices of upcoming Christmas comedy specials. I hear and try to pay attention to the carols. I've always loved carols. In imagination I smell hot roasted birds and the spices and the sherries and port wines of Christmases past. But still the 25th of December doesn't mean very much, this year.
I think back to last Christmas when our lady friend Chris brought round a complete lunch because Dee was deep into that awfully aggressive chemotherapy so could neither move much nor eat much, and the one before last when I volunteered to cook and I won't comment on the outcome except to say that we had a choice between laughing and crying - and chose the former after her tongue in cheek, well merited reprimands! And all the Highlands ones before that when we had the dogs looking up at our loaded, steaming plates with longing in their eyes, and afterwards the long walks in the wildest places. Never long enough for Mati and Sorosh. Often cold and/or wet but who cared? We did not.
I would walk five hundred miles if I could have any one of those, over again.
And I think about before that in Laundry Cottage, Winchester, with our two families fast becoming one family. I see there the opening of presents and the wonders of excited discovery on grandchildren's faces as pretty papers and golden ribbons fell before the onslaught of small fingers. And B.D.B.G (before Delia before grandchildren) in Lee-On -The -Solent when I made the first of my two lifetime contributions to the Christmas cuisine. I cooked oysters manhatten as a starter using those oysters dredged up by my son Robert in his new boat, forgetting to properly scour the shellfish first. I hear the toilet being flushed all night long. My lovely Joan accused me of trying to kill her poor old father, Ted. Joan had that same ironic sense of humour as my Dee, see.
And before that, long before that, 1955 in fact when Joan and I and our four month old baby Kairen were tucked up in a tiny bedsit in Cherryhinton Road, Cambridge. We had literally no money left and the only food we had for those long days and nights until my next payday was a shot pigeon from my sister Shirley and her farmworker huspand and a huge fruity Christmas cake from father and step mother just back from their years living high on the vine out in Singapore. Oh, and we had our Silver Cross pram. All that Christmas day we walked ourselves and baby Kairen around the streets and the parks of Cambridge. I so well recall the bells and I so well recall how happy we were.
We had our faith in each other and our hope for the future and the warmth of our love. Whatever else do you need? Apart from life itself, of course.
.
I think back to last Christmas when our lady friend Chris brought round a complete lunch because Dee was deep into that awfully aggressive chemotherapy so could neither move much nor eat much, and the one before last when I volunteered to cook and I won't comment on the outcome except to say that we had a choice between laughing and crying - and chose the former after her tongue in cheek, well merited reprimands! And all the Highlands ones before that when we had the dogs looking up at our loaded, steaming plates with longing in their eyes, and afterwards the long walks in the wildest places. Never long enough for Mati and Sorosh. Often cold and/or wet but who cared? We did not.
I would walk five hundred miles if I could have any one of those, over again.
And I think about before that in Laundry Cottage, Winchester, with our two families fast becoming one family. I see there the opening of presents and the wonders of excited discovery on grandchildren's faces as pretty papers and golden ribbons fell before the onslaught of small fingers. And B.D.B.G (before Delia before grandchildren) in Lee-On -The -Solent when I made the first of my two lifetime contributions to the Christmas cuisine. I cooked oysters manhatten as a starter using those oysters dredged up by my son Robert in his new boat, forgetting to properly scour the shellfish first. I hear the toilet being flushed all night long. My lovely Joan accused me of trying to kill her poor old father, Ted. Joan had that same ironic sense of humour as my Dee, see.
And before that, long before that, 1955 in fact when Joan and I and our four month old baby Kairen were tucked up in a tiny bedsit in Cherryhinton Road, Cambridge. We had literally no money left and the only food we had for those long days and nights until my next payday was a shot pigeon from my sister Shirley and her farmworker huspand and a huge fruity Christmas cake from father and step mother just back from their years living high on the vine out in Singapore. Oh, and we had our Silver Cross pram. All that Christmas day we walked ourselves and baby Kairen around the streets and the parks of Cambridge. I so well recall the bells and I so well recall how happy we were.
We had our faith in each other and our hope for the future and the warmth of our love. Whatever else do you need? Apart from life itself, of course.
.
December 19, 2013
Eulogy for Delia
A Eulogy for Delia Mary IslipAultbea Church of Scotlandand subsequently in south Hampshire
Late in World War Two a battleship of His Majesty’s Royal Navy put into Belfast docks for boiler repairs. On board was Warrant Officer Bill Smalley. By co-incidence his wife Mrs Wynne Smalley, at that time a serving WREN, had been posted to Belfast. And so it was that a baby girl christened Delia Mary was born on the third of December nineteen forty four.
The first twenty eight years of Delia’s life are known to me only at second hand. Dee, as she was and is known, was born and brought up in Gosport, a naval town just across the mouth of Portsmouth Harbour. She was christened on the Navy’s Whale Island in Portsmouth where her father was to occupy the highly prestigious position of Gunnery Officer. Her childhood was all Navy. In fact she had one of her early birthday parties in the officer’s mess on board HMS Duke of York, just as her elder sister Gloria had had an earlier birthday party on that other, more ill-fated battleship, HMS Hood. One of her grandfathers, a Sergeant Major of the Royal Marines, lost his life under Jellicoe at the Battle of Jutland in WW1. And this very year Dee was so proud of our grandson, who has himself been accepted into the Royal Navy to continue the tradition.
Perhaps because she was the child of a military family through a time of more than the usual teenage rebellion - or perhaps because her education was fractured by the serious illness of her father, Dee would often describe herself as a teenaged ‘wild child’. Knowing well her habitual self-deprecation and her rigid law abidedness I tend to take that with a healthy pinch of sea salt. Anyway she was definitely a follower, perhaps in her own local way even a leader of fashion, and this she maintained throughout her life. She loved her clothes and she loved getting dressed up when the occasion arose. One of the pictures on the front of your order of service shows the pair of us at Bahrain’s famous Poppy Ball.
At all events the girl Delia Smalley made the most of her teenaged years, hitching to the London jazz clubs and the rock and folk festivals along the south coast of England, even to the infamous mods and rockers con-frontations on Brighton beach. At one of those events she met and for a while went out with a shock haired lad of her own age going by the name of Rod Stewart. I believe that for some years Rod had on his guitar the title of the trad jazz number, ‘Delia’s gone’. How poignant is that, right now…
I am told that local teenagers in the sixties would gather in Portsmouth at either the Apsley and the Aukland, and it was in one of these pubs that Delia met Ian Perry, an apprentice coppersmith who was to become her husband and the father of her two sons, Max and Rudi. Whilst that marriage itself did not survive for many years there was no lasting bad feeling. Ian will not mind me saying that she brought her boys single handedly through those in those early years. Her sense of motherhood was always of the strongest. Even though in latter years Delia, Max and Rudi have lived far apart geographically, they would always remain the most closely bonded of family units.
When I met my Delia my own life was at a low ebb. The advanced multiple schlerosis of my beloved first wife, Joan, our four children growing up with that difficult family background through their teens, and the demands of a fairly high flying international business career made for pressure at times almost unbearable. But it became apparent that Dee and I, though from diverse backgrounds, shared so much in common: so much of a love of books and the reading and writing of them, so similar a life attitudes, so much of an adventurous spirit and so deep a contempt for those twin curses of our modern era, materialism and elitism.
Dee supported me through the difficult years leading up to the death of Joan, through the mental illness of my eldest son and all the usual teenage trials and traumas - as well as the joys and successes of our maturing offpring. She did her best to become surrogate mother to my own daughters, Kairen and Julie and my sons, the aforementioned Robert and Stuart. No easy feat in any second marriage as some of you will surely know and even more difficult when their natural mother had suffered so grievously for so many years. Nevertheless in the fullness of time a whole new family has developed, admittedly mostly at long range for by then our young people were no longer so young. They had grown up and moved on - soon to take wing and settle in various parts of the UK and abroad. Grandchildren followed; thirteen to date and presumably counting. Great grandchildren even. Dee loved them all. And she never forgot a birthday.
And so to Scotland. I have a photograph on the wall at home. Delia is standing, looking fresh and lovely by a lonely roadside somewhere just south of Fort William. It was taken one November day on the way to our first brief holiday up here in the Highlands. Not long afterwards, looking at this picture, she surprised me by saying that we would someday live ‘up there’. How prescient was that from a lady who had never until then been further north than Birmingham!
Eleven years ago came an opportunity to enact Delia’s prophesy. In September 2002 we packed up our Hampshire village home of thirteen years and followed our furniture northwards with our beloved pair of Hungarian Vizslas. We had rented Brenda Peace’s little cottage in Mellon Charles. I shall never forget our first evening here after a fourteen hour car journey in a malfunctioning Jeep Cherokee. Leaving our piles of stuff higgledy piggledy we went off to walk the dogs on Gruinard beach. It was raining a light rain and we were surrounded by midges. Dee could have been forgiven for wanting to turn around and head back south right there and then, but this lady was made of sterner stuff. We sat on a rock, looked at each other and just laughed and laughed. The dogs must have thought we’d flipped. We stayed in Peace Cottage for the next five very happy years then for the next four made our home in Kittie Wiseman’s beautiful Loch Ewe Cottage, just up the road a way. The owners of both cottages have become the dearest of our friends.
For a couple of early years Dee took a job as a cleaner in the Isle View Care Home. This helped us to get to know many of the local families and to adapt to the Aultbea way of life. She also enrolled herself into The Aultbea Ladies Club, going off on a regular basis to all sorts of exotic Highlands destinations, not to mention some apparently hilarious meetings up at the Drumchork Hotel. Now, for the three years past we have lived next door to this very kirk, and once more the owners - distant absentees this time - have become our very good friends.
Twenty five years ago, in anticipation of a time when we would be working for ourselves, Dee had reluctantly agreed to study at night school for an O Level in accountancy. Having been successful I pressured her into doing an A Level. This time she fell short. Not an ‘A’ - just another O! Anyway the qualifications did help when I began to bring in the pennies from writing and publishing novels, and creating cards and prints etc from my landscape paintings and verse.
Dee and I agreed recently that, even through these last two years of increasing pain, the years in Wester-Ross have been amongst the happiest of our lives. Certainly the most contented. With our pair of dogs, now so very sadly gone, we discovered dozens of unpathed walking routes across the hills, along the rivers and burns and down alongside the rugged, ragged sea shores. Walking for one or two hours every day of the year, rain or shine, we learned the whereabouts of, and thoroughly enjoyed the wild provender there for the taking; amongst it the cockles and the mussels and the berries and four kinds of edible mushrooms in season. Always on our walks we found a convenient rock or fallen tree with a view on which to sit to eat our sandwiches and drink from our flasks, often in a perfectly relaxed silence. How often at such times we were able to marvel at the wondrous beauty of this tiny corner of our world and, of course, at its wild life.
Delia has made so many friends, both here and throughout her years in Hampshire. In fact at her request I shall soon be delivering this same eulogy down there at a Memorial Gathering. Although we have become Highlanders by choice and adoption Dee had a great affection for the places of her childhood and more youthful years.
She truly had so much to give: understanding, loyalty, intelligence, all that honesty, sense of fun, that love for family and friends and our dogs and for all dogs and creatures great and small, I have to say especially the ones on Kittie’s and Ann’s Mellon Charles croft. Nobody deserves an illness like lymphomatic cancer, but if that is the card with which one is dealt no-one could handle it better or with more fortitude than she, and nobody could be in a better place to do so than Aultbea, in Wester-Ross, in Scotland. In a world that has in our lifetime become increasingly secular and bitterly self-seeking, the depth and breadth of care here and the genuine kindness, both professional and otherwise, has reached into the hearts and the souls of us both. ‘Thank you’ is not even close to a sufficient expression of gratitude.
Here is a postscript: a few years ago we were honoured to be invited to join the Wester-Ross Burns club, so please forgive me, fellow Burnsians, if in conclusion I transliterate an adapted extract of the words of the Bard …
Had we never loved sae kindly,Had we never loved sae blindly,Never met - or never parted-We had ne’er been broken hearted. Ae fond kiss, and then we sever!Ae fareweel, alas, for ever!
Ladies and gentlemen thank you for bearing with me today and for sharing in my sorrow. A very good woman called Delia Mary Islip has left us.
December 17, 2013
Walking away the past
I'm going to put away the past
into its necessary folder
but not just yet.
I'm going to walk our walks
by myself, with her
lest I forget
The other day I asked to be dropped off by Dee's sister and brother-in law at the farm shop at the foot of Bedfield Lane, Headbourne Worthy, near Winchester. The shop (and now cafe) had prospered since twelve years ago when we lived close by in Laundry cottage. Full of Hampshire Christmas cheer it was: rich cakes and confections, new cut baby firs, exotic coffees, money changing hands, high pitched voices over-talking, keen to overcome for the moment all those pernicious Christmas anxieties in clouds of well-intentioned goodwill to All Mankind. Well, perhaps not all.
I walked the three mile pavement
once a quiet country lane
into Winchester
Oh, how she'd walked there, looking
like a summer's day in winter ;
my lady, bless her.
Motor vehicles of all desciptions roared by, inches from my right hand shoulder,.vortexing the fallen leaves of autumn gone. Of life gone by. Looking out over the fields to my left I could see the riverside pathway so loved by our dogs for its sudden surprises; mallard, rabbits. And so loved by us for its quiet calm, glimpses of speckled trout finning the shallows beneath that ricketty footbridge, field of giant sunflowers, heads turned always pleading on to mother gold. I passed on my right the little side lane where once Lawrence Olivier had lived with the lady star of Gone With The Wind. Yes, Vinienne Leigh; ravishing beauty but mentally ill. There is no such thing in this world as something for nothing.
When reaching the city I sought out places
once such a centre part of us
and of our lives
The cafes, shops, pubs and streets, speaking
of things gone by and things to come
the lows, the highs
It had started to rain. My kness and hips, unused to hard concrete felt in need of a rest. I ducked into a Pizza Express, the one almost opposite our first Winchester office close by the river Itchen (several hundred pounds a day should you feel like fly-casting for one of its 'wild' brown trout.) The bruschetta with muchrooms tasted good, the lasagne less so. I paid up and left. No-one here would miss me. Neither would Dee and I miss it - not any more. Walking up the hill I passed through scurrying crowds of well shopping-bagged folk and by market stalls lit up and dressed up for their mammonomic Yuletide.God rest ye merrie gentlefolk!
My in-laws were waiting in The Eclipse
where I felt old Shakespeare
and the friends we once met.
I'm going to put away the past
into its necessary folder
but, please, not just yet.
Tomorrow I would awa' to the Highlands, there to walk our self-named walks once the ridiculous detritus of modern day post-death has been cleared away to the satisfaction of State. The secret river, the hornbeams, the caves, beaches four and five, the witch-rock, the chanterelle, the anvil, the waterwheel and the rest. She will be with me, I know, as she was with me in Winchester. And afterwards the past will be safely tucked away into its dusty folder and I shall be purged enough to face the future. Not 'how will I be?', but, 'what is it that I shall be trying to do?'.
For those 'I's please read 'we'. Imagination or not, I feel her presence yet.
into its necessary folder
but not just yet.
I'm going to walk our walks
by myself, with her
lest I forget
The other day I asked to be dropped off by Dee's sister and brother-in law at the farm shop at the foot of Bedfield Lane, Headbourne Worthy, near Winchester. The shop (and now cafe) had prospered since twelve years ago when we lived close by in Laundry cottage. Full of Hampshire Christmas cheer it was: rich cakes and confections, new cut baby firs, exotic coffees, money changing hands, high pitched voices over-talking, keen to overcome for the moment all those pernicious Christmas anxieties in clouds of well-intentioned goodwill to All Mankind. Well, perhaps not all.
I walked the three mile pavement
once a quiet country lane
into Winchester
Oh, how she'd walked there, looking
like a summer's day in winter ;
my lady, bless her.
Motor vehicles of all desciptions roared by, inches from my right hand shoulder,.vortexing the fallen leaves of autumn gone. Of life gone by. Looking out over the fields to my left I could see the riverside pathway so loved by our dogs for its sudden surprises; mallard, rabbits. And so loved by us for its quiet calm, glimpses of speckled trout finning the shallows beneath that ricketty footbridge, field of giant sunflowers, heads turned always pleading on to mother gold. I passed on my right the little side lane where once Lawrence Olivier had lived with the lady star of Gone With The Wind. Yes, Vinienne Leigh; ravishing beauty but mentally ill. There is no such thing in this world as something for nothing.
When reaching the city I sought out places
once such a centre part of us
and of our lives
The cafes, shops, pubs and streets, speaking
of things gone by and things to come
the lows, the highs
It had started to rain. My kness and hips, unused to hard concrete felt in need of a rest. I ducked into a Pizza Express, the one almost opposite our first Winchester office close by the river Itchen (several hundred pounds a day should you feel like fly-casting for one of its 'wild' brown trout.) The bruschetta with muchrooms tasted good, the lasagne less so. I paid up and left. No-one here would miss me. Neither would Dee and I miss it - not any more. Walking up the hill I passed through scurrying crowds of well shopping-bagged folk and by market stalls lit up and dressed up for their mammonomic Yuletide.God rest ye merrie gentlefolk!
My in-laws were waiting in The Eclipse
where I felt old Shakespeare
and the friends we once met.
I'm going to put away the past
into its necessary folder
but, please, not just yet.
Tomorrow I would awa' to the Highlands, there to walk our self-named walks once the ridiculous detritus of modern day post-death has been cleared away to the satisfaction of State. The secret river, the hornbeams, the caves, beaches four and five, the witch-rock, the chanterelle, the anvil, the waterwheel and the rest. She will be with me, I know, as she was with me in Winchester. And afterwards the past will be safely tucked away into its dusty folder and I shall be purged enough to face the future. Not 'how will I be?', but, 'what is it that I shall be trying to do?'.
For those 'I's please read 'we'. Imagination or not, I feel her presence yet.
December 8, 2013
Mandela and Shakespeare.
I have read somewhere that, when Nelson Mandela was consigned to emprisionment on Robin Island he was allowed to take one book. Just one. And that he chose to take the collected works of William Shakespeare.
Later on, having marked his own favourite passage on the page, he circulated the book around his fellow prisoners, asking them to do likewise. This, it is said, is the passage marked by the great man...
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
Clearly we can each interpret this choice in any of a dozen ways. Myself, I feel that Mandela was intent on conveying a 'sensible paradox' to his fellows. On the one hand he is pointing out the triviality of Mankind and his doings within the great scheme of all things, "Be of good heart, friends, for this that has happened to us means little or nothing", and on the other hand he is saying that Mankind (witness Wm Shakespeare) can sometimes, if very, very occasionally, see everything, expose everything to the pure white searchlight of truth, thus assuming to himself the stature of the Almighty.
Perhaps we can now say that Nelson Mandela himself became the embodiment of the latter.
Later on, having marked his own favourite passage on the page, he circulated the book around his fellow prisoners, asking them to do likewise. This, it is said, is the passage marked by the great man...
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing. — Macbeth (Act 5, Scene 5, lines 17-28)
Clearly we can each interpret this choice in any of a dozen ways. Myself, I feel that Mandela was intent on conveying a 'sensible paradox' to his fellows. On the one hand he is pointing out the triviality of Mankind and his doings within the great scheme of all things, "Be of good heart, friends, for this that has happened to us means little or nothing", and on the other hand he is saying that Mankind (witness Wm Shakespeare) can sometimes, if very, very occasionally, see everything, expose everything to the pure white searchlight of truth, thus assuming to himself the stature of the Almighty.
Perhaps we can now say that Nelson Mandela himself became the embodiment of the latter.
December 7, 2013
Old poems new therapy
I suppose partly because a lot of folk are now actually reading my unread poetry through this blog, and partly because I don't quite know what to do with myself now that Dee has gone, I've been searching my old files; the ones in the folder entitled 'POEMS'.
I've been looking especially for the verses about my girl - and there are plenty of them. Some are too personal but others like this one composed during her first hospitalisation a bit more than a year ago ... she had been given a 30-50% chance of survival but only if she undertook the most severe forms of chemotherapy. The ones with the cruellest 'side efffects'. Anyway I can share this one with you now. (Call it my own therapy) ...
She is not here, but
Yes! I see her in unlikely placesin the kitchen, ironing, watching raceswalking behind me through the tangle to our boulder seat, our secret river, swimming in her undies off the rocks;cold, cold sea, hot sun, laughing loving her dogs and loving me (‘though these not so unlikely)
I catch the scent of her on a pillowand on opening her wardrobe door and in the wild flowers she picked and the yellow chanterelle thatshe found ‘neath spaghnum vivid greenand in the soft bloom of her hairafter a shower, good rub, blow dryand why am I ashamed to cry?
In dreams, in dreams I hear her voicesoft female when she feels that wayphoning at the ending of a dayor addressing, caressing her children, her children’s children or any other young of any other kind.And I want to hear her footsteps coming home with the shopping
I touch the fabric of her clothes and she is here again and heaven knowsI miss her so, I miss the feel of herthe feeling saying I am not alonethat flesh is flesh and is not stone:I know that what will be will bebut love is love and she is Dee and still I swear that still she touches me.
And always will.
Bryan Islip at Kirkhill House, AultbeaSeptember 25th 2012For Delia Mary in Ward 2C, Raigmore
December 5, 2013
Dee and me and today
And now the cards. Beautiful cards to mark the death of a beautiful lady. So very many, so very moving their inscriptions both printed and personal. Thank you, senders, for making me proud, for making me stop (for now) with all that formulaic post death minutae and for the heat and the moist behind my eyes as I write this.
Today the funeral. I'll post out my eulogy afterwards. This is the reverse on the order of service ...
For Delia(a valediction)
So then this is the way it has to be. To live in sorrow waving my farewell; and now what’s left when nothing’s any more to say, to take, to give?
But true it is that, as it’s time to say goodbye, to you, dear Dee, I die myself a little; yes - (and ‘though in dry eyed silence yet a man may cry.)
I care so little for the months and years ahead, so harsh without your tender glance, your love, and mine for still we are in body and in spirit wed.
Oh, we have journeyed far together, side by side o’er Scotland’s banks and braes and oceans wild and wide and through the sunlit Hampshire woods with you my guide.
So many other joys we shared, and through the eyesof children, ours and theirs, who grow up straight and strong to walk this vale of sighs and say their own goodbyes.
Of late life’s urgent over-pace has been down-slowedthen pain curtailed at last at nature’s kindly hand, and nothing more’s to want and nothing more is owed.
I see you, Dee, within the stars, the sky, the sea;and I believe that we shall surely meet once moreto walk again together through that fair country.
Bryan Islip
Today the funeral. I'll post out my eulogy afterwards. This is the reverse on the order of service ...
For Delia(a valediction)
So then this is the way it has to be. To live in sorrow waving my farewell; and now what’s left when nothing’s any more to say, to take, to give?
But true it is that, as it’s time to say goodbye, to you, dear Dee, I die myself a little; yes - (and ‘though in dry eyed silence yet a man may cry.)
I care so little for the months and years ahead, so harsh without your tender glance, your love, and mine for still we are in body and in spirit wed.
Oh, we have journeyed far together, side by side o’er Scotland’s banks and braes and oceans wild and wide and through the sunlit Hampshire woods with you my guide.
So many other joys we shared, and through the eyesof children, ours and theirs, who grow up straight and strong to walk this vale of sighs and say their own goodbyes.
Of late life’s urgent over-pace has been down-slowedthen pain curtailed at last at nature’s kindly hand, and nothing more’s to want and nothing more is owed.
I see you, Dee, within the stars, the sky, the sea;and I believe that we shall surely meet once moreto walk again together through that fair country.
Bryan Islip
November 30, 2013
Rest in peace, Dee.
My lady Dee died yesterday. He breathing had become more erratic, shallower.. Under persistent, cruel attack from the cancer she called by the name of Thomas the Terrible Tumour her body had given up the ghost long since and now, finally, her spirit was preparing to follow. Hemingway wrote that, I quote, A man can be destroyed but not defeated. For man read woman. This woman. The one called Delia Mary Islip.
At precisely 13.41 her breathing stopped altogether. I had been reading to her from the scriptures whilst holding her unresponsive hand, but I swear I felt an answering pressure as she left me; as she left all of us. The talk is of a better place. I believe it. After all, this place has to be no more than a mere testing ground and, if so, Delia has passed her own test with flying colours. She was a good woman. A very good woman. I shall not meet her like again.
Her funeral service takes place in Aultbea's Church of Scotland, 13.00 hours on Thursday 5th December. Her Memorial Gathering takes place at the Anglesea Hotel in Alverstoke, Hampshire, at 17.00 hours Wednesday 11th December.
Rest in peace. my Dee.
At precisely 13.41 her breathing stopped altogether. I had been reading to her from the scriptures whilst holding her unresponsive hand, but I swear I felt an answering pressure as she left me; as she left all of us. The talk is of a better place. I believe it. After all, this place has to be no more than a mere testing ground and, if so, Delia has passed her own test with flying colours. She was a good woman. A very good woman. I shall not meet her like again.
Her funeral service takes place in Aultbea's Church of Scotland, 13.00 hours on Thursday 5th December. Her Memorial Gathering takes place at the Anglesea Hotel in Alverstoke, Hampshire, at 17.00 hours Wednesday 11th December.
Rest in peace. my Dee.
November 29, 2013
Not saying goodbye
Thursday 29th November:
since mid-day Monday Dee has not been able to open her eyes nor has she been able to utter any words. Pain killing drugs are being pumped automatically into her body. District nurses come twice daily in pairs (they are with her as I write) and the doctor visits every day. In between times I sit by her bedside listening and watching the rise and fall of her breathing and thinking of all the good times, doing my level best not to feel sorry for her or for myself. As Bob Dylan said; 'It's life and life only'. And I think of that other Dylan, Dylan Thomas, addressing his father; 'Do not go gently onto that good night.'
There is nothing gentle about lymphatic cancer.
Sometimes in the dead of the night I speak to her and to myself. I talk on and on about Gosport and Alverstoke and Lee-on-the-Solent and Hayling Island and Titchfield and Sopley and Micheldever and Headbourne Worthy. I talk about our dogs Seth and Chloe and Sorosh and Mati and our adventures with each and all of them. I talk about the magic of our children growing up and their children growing up and now their children growing up and the world we are leaving to them. I am not proud of that legacy. I hope the light will shine again at some point.
I talk of things we know but that I cannot write of here. I can only hope/believe that she hears me.
I refuse to say goodbye. She's going no place that I any all of us can not follow.
since mid-day Monday Dee has not been able to open her eyes nor has she been able to utter any words. Pain killing drugs are being pumped automatically into her body. District nurses come twice daily in pairs (they are with her as I write) and the doctor visits every day. In between times I sit by her bedside listening and watching the rise and fall of her breathing and thinking of all the good times, doing my level best not to feel sorry for her or for myself. As Bob Dylan said; 'It's life and life only'. And I think of that other Dylan, Dylan Thomas, addressing his father; 'Do not go gently onto that good night.'
There is nothing gentle about lymphatic cancer.
Sometimes in the dead of the night I speak to her and to myself. I talk on and on about Gosport and Alverstoke and Lee-on-the-Solent and Hayling Island and Titchfield and Sopley and Micheldever and Headbourne Worthy. I talk about our dogs Seth and Chloe and Sorosh and Mati and our adventures with each and all of them. I talk about the magic of our children growing up and their children growing up and now their children growing up and the world we are leaving to them. I am not proud of that legacy. I hope the light will shine again at some point.
I talk of things we know but that I cannot write of here. I can only hope/believe that she hears me.
I refuse to say goodbye. She's going no place that I any all of us can not follow.
November 21, 2013
Dee and me and some cherries
On Tuesday I drove Dee back home across the hills after her stay in the Highland Hospice, Inverness. She now has weeks or even days to go according to best advice. The best there is. She wanted to spend it with me. Shades of old times, the miles unrolling, swish of tyres, sometimes touching or holding hands, often in a contented silence. But this time we had a passenger, for that bloody pain was ever with us. For ever and ever, amen.
The first of our wintertime snowfalls had occurred the night before. As the empty road wound upwards, me driving with great care and excessive slowness in deference to the lady's wishes, the panorama rolled out and up on all sides black, grey, brown and (mostly) white, over-topped by a pale blue sky. Blue-grey lochsand lochans lay like flat mirrors between the hillsides along the way. I wondered how the maker of this incredibly beautiful part of a speck called Earth, one body amongst the billions that roll through the vastness of space could have been made by the same hand as that tumour now eating the life out of my beautiful girl.
But home again and all the local kindnesses at once kicked in, both professional and otherwise. The pain is best managed as a result of the Hospice's ministrations. The reverse side of that of course is that she sleeps much more, which is a mercy all by itself.
I have been thinking of all the good times and browsing the hundreds of poems I've written over the years, many of them in celebration of our lives together, Dee's and mine. Poems like this one, composed six months after a certain holiday in France ...
JUST SOME CHERRIES
Waking early we look on that Dordogne day And dress and let ourselves out. We take the narrow road that curves downhill Through bursting early summer woods. Dense green branches often meeting over our heads. It is quiet. We talk quietly as we go. When you talk to each other not at each other There’s no need for other than quietness.
This seems a bigger place than Hampshire. As you walk, the hill lasts longer, Distance across to the next hillside is greater Trees are crowded together more closely; Light is lighter; shadows darker hiding more. The rainstorm when it overtakes is bigger, too. But we walk on, not bothered by the size Nor by the drum-intensity of its warm drops.
I can feel the penetration of that place and time Into senses obfuscated by thirty years of fifty a day By loud noises in small rooms only some of it music By seldom being challenged naturally by things natural (Except by the panic of the natural passing of the years;) By the senseless cycle of earning and paying By unnaturalness between all the caught-up people.
Finally at the bottom of this valley On the outskirts of a village still sleeping Walking by an ivy covered wall of stone Overhung by the branches of a cherry tree. Swollen fruit hangs tempting in front of our eyes. Bunches of cherries droop, still rain-globulated Butter into high-lit blue-red into magenta, cerise, Framed by shining leaves of that life-green. Tight-smooth the cherries are to my fingers. I taste the free rain, bite to the stone And the eye-closing sweetness of this valley Spurts Into every corner of my mouth . Floods over me and over my memory.
I remember looking and drinking in the beauty And the comfort from her rained-on face, In her straight eyes, reflection of this shared awakening. In her hand, too, were just some cherries.
Bryan Islip November 95
He who made the hard high hills also made the fertile, sun-kissed valleys.
The first of our wintertime snowfalls had occurred the night before. As the empty road wound upwards, me driving with great care and excessive slowness in deference to the lady's wishes, the panorama rolled out and up on all sides black, grey, brown and (mostly) white, over-topped by a pale blue sky. Blue-grey lochsand lochans lay like flat mirrors between the hillsides along the way. I wondered how the maker of this incredibly beautiful part of a speck called Earth, one body amongst the billions that roll through the vastness of space could have been made by the same hand as that tumour now eating the life out of my beautiful girl.
But home again and all the local kindnesses at once kicked in, both professional and otherwise. The pain is best managed as a result of the Hospice's ministrations. The reverse side of that of course is that she sleeps much more, which is a mercy all by itself.
I have been thinking of all the good times and browsing the hundreds of poems I've written over the years, many of them in celebration of our lives together, Dee's and mine. Poems like this one, composed six months after a certain holiday in France ...
JUST SOME CHERRIES
Waking early we look on that Dordogne day And dress and let ourselves out. We take the narrow road that curves downhill Through bursting early summer woods. Dense green branches often meeting over our heads. It is quiet. We talk quietly as we go. When you talk to each other not at each other There’s no need for other than quietness.
This seems a bigger place than Hampshire. As you walk, the hill lasts longer, Distance across to the next hillside is greater Trees are crowded together more closely; Light is lighter; shadows darker hiding more. The rainstorm when it overtakes is bigger, too. But we walk on, not bothered by the size Nor by the drum-intensity of its warm drops.
I can feel the penetration of that place and time Into senses obfuscated by thirty years of fifty a day By loud noises in small rooms only some of it music By seldom being challenged naturally by things natural (Except by the panic of the natural passing of the years;) By the senseless cycle of earning and paying By unnaturalness between all the caught-up people.
Finally at the bottom of this valley On the outskirts of a village still sleeping Walking by an ivy covered wall of stone Overhung by the branches of a cherry tree. Swollen fruit hangs tempting in front of our eyes. Bunches of cherries droop, still rain-globulated Butter into high-lit blue-red into magenta, cerise, Framed by shining leaves of that life-green. Tight-smooth the cherries are to my fingers. I taste the free rain, bite to the stone And the eye-closing sweetness of this valley Spurts Into every corner of my mouth . Floods over me and over my memory.
I remember looking and drinking in the beauty And the comfort from her rained-on face, In her straight eyes, reflection of this shared awakening. In her hand, too, were just some cherries.
Bryan Islip November 95
He who made the hard high hills also made the fertile, sun-kissed valleys.
