Love in adversity

This is a story of adversity, but also of love and dedication in the face of gigantic obstacles. It is an everyday story; but, more often that we are apt to think, the life of ordinary people is marked by heroic struggles which they face alone, unacknowledged by the rest of us.
I vowed that when my father died I would write an appreciation of him to be read at his funeral. But Eric Ernest Alexander is not dead; he is very much alive and is 84 years old. A glance around the geriatric wards of hospitals will reveal that relatively few people who reach such an age do so without trials and suffering. Eric Alexander recovered from a substantial heart attack when he was 59, and now he has had a stroke. This may mean that he is one step closer to the inevitable end, but it is perhaps more important to appreciate him while he is alive than when he has finally left this world.
He was born in 1923 in Norwood, South London, to a family wracked by poverty and dramatic struggles with adversity. Ernest Richard Alexander, his father and my grandfather, fought at the Somme in 1916. His tales of the awful butchering that went on there kept my young father spellbound, but the mental scars of battle were so great that Ernest passed them down through the generations. This ruined the mental health of his wife; it rendered his sons prone to depression and anxiety, it troubled his grandsons, including me.
One of my most enduring memories is of a visit to the vast First World War graveyard and ossuary at Amiens. We arrived at dawn on a fresh, dewy morning. The mist lifted as the birds began their chorus and, with infinite grandeur, in slow motion, the early sunshine gradually lit up Sir Edwin Lutyens's great memorial arch. Oblique shadows hardened to slate blue on the lush green grass behind the rows of crosses in white Purbeck marble that marked the soldiers' graves. And this was where my progenitor fought for his life and sanity. I have always felt the weight of that desperate and tragic conflict, felt an heir to it, compelled to read about it and unable to free myself from its subtle and pervasive influence.
Eric Alexander escaped from Gibbs Close, West Norwood, into a world of humanism and socialism. His prodigious intelligence was greatly undermined by lack of educational opportunity, and as a result he always tended to see the sufferings of humankind in the black-and-white terms of class struggle. Yet his ability to make political analysis was acute, and often impressively so.
Curiously, this rough, working class lad with humble prospects found his soulmate in a diminutive, pretty, dark-haired young woman from a middle-class background. Joyce Mary Cook, my mother, was the daughter of a master craftsman in the Italian quarter of Clarkenwell (though she had no Italian parentage). She was educated at the prestigious Camden School for Girls in North London and lived in a gentile house in one of the crescents that the speculative builders of Bloomsbury built, in yellow London brick, for the upper-middle class in the first decade of the 1800s. Thus my mother and I were from socially acceptable "north of the River", while my father was from the much less desirable neighbourhoods south of the Thames. Until the modern boom in property prices, things like that mattered. But these two rather different people fell in love and they married, despite some grumbling from her parents, in 1949.
And they have stayed in love ever since.
It is hard for a growing boy to understand his own parents and their attitudes to each other. There are too many barriers and taboos. I see this in my 15-year-old son and when I was his age I felt it myself. But I shall always remember that my father has never been able to speak to my mother without introducing a note of tenderness into his voice. For 58 years he has loved and admired her unwaveringly and with absolute consistency. And she has reciprocated.
His inner life has been marked by a profound political idealism and a faith in humanity that our benighted race probably does not merit, at least not to the extent of his beliefs. As a counterpart, he developed a love of cosmology and an abiding interest in the astronomical study of the universe, which he read about in popular science books. Though he had little understanding of the arts he had a simple, uncomplicated love of the finest music, and a good ear for it too.
But I am describing Eric Alexander as if he is no longer with us. This is perhaps understandable, for old age brings dramatic changes. Early this year, 2007, he twice fell and hurt his head. And then--suddenly and unexpectedly--came the blood clot to his brain. It fell like the sword of Damocles onto a man whose sight and hearing had deteriorated to the extent that he could no longer read books or hear most conversation. And now he is trapped in a world of terrifying smallness: solitary confinement in his own mind. The stroke did not affect his motor functions, and so he remains physically active, if rather arthritic. Neither was he reduced to mental vegetativeness, for the principal damage was to his vocabulary.
I caught the plane to London, hired a car at Gatwick Airport, collected my mother and drove to Worthing General Hospital. There he was; shoulders bent, hair grey and thinning, face lined by suffering and shock. Who we are, what we are, is there in our faces, the visible testimony of our life's experience. His blue-grey eyes, milky with age, stared out of the wrinkled skin as he struggled to recall who I was. They implored, as if I were about to let him drown in a cold, cruel sea by failing to stretch my hands out to a non-swimmer from the side of the raft. For the first time in my life, I grabbed him in a quick, impulsive embrace and held him as if he were a woman, overcome by emotion, murmuring the sort of reassuring phrases that one mumbles to a child who has woken up in the night frightened by imaginary monsters in the darkness.
I have no way of knowing what beasts and ghosts roamed in his brain. He could not remember who I am (thankfully, it later came back to him). He will never again be articulate enough to confide in me. A man who prided himself on his choice of phrase, whose ability to theorise about complex social processes was renowned, had been exiled into a corner of his own brain, trapped in a labyrinth in which the desperate need to communicate leads him always into blind alleys where the instructions are written on the wall in a language he does not understand. And so it will remain for the rest of his days.
Joyce, my mother, is blessed with a character that combines sensitivity and wry detachment, a rare and precious mixture indeed. No wonder he admires her: so do I. Next to her refinement and erudition, his blundering love seems out of place; a blunt instrument in the face of overwhelming need for delicacy. But surprisingly they fit together rather well, because people who are unalike often make a good, complementary match.
On that day in Worthing Hospital he was both a different man and the same one as ever. The shock of the stroke had completely unnerved him. He clung to his wife as if the maelstrom of a world grown suddenly incomprehensible would suck him into oblivion. Every two minutes he told her he loved her, and this time his tenderness was seasoned with dramatic anguish.
The female bosom is our rock. We men start life deriving sustenance from it and, no matter how hard we try to deceive ourselves, we never lose that heady mixture of attraction and dependence. We begin life as small boys and we end life in the same way. Women learn to develop autonomy and independence, but men with those characteristics are rare indeed. Arnold Bennett's great Edwardian novel Clayhanger was a fine meditation on this, and he was quite right to explore it. So my father journeys on into the gloomy forest of his Third Age. If he cannot hold that small, feminine hand, now wrinkled by old age, he will be completely lost. Couples that are very close usually die synchronously. They invest their reasons for living in each other and when one goes, the other must follow.
When we left he clung to us in desperation. The autonomy of his adulthood had suddenly been taken from him, and it was a cruel theft. His protestations of love were a cry for help, an expression of fear that he might be left abandoned in this new, fearsome, incomprehensible world which he was sure he could not master on his own.
I took my mother to a good restaurant and we dined in as serene a manner as we could. I worked as hard as possible to distract her. Exhaustion, shock and sadness had taken their toll on this 81-year-old woman, but in conversation it was clear that beneath the surface the girl of half a century ago was still there, with all her faculties intact: wry observation of life and people, sound judgement, autonomy, realism. When combined with sympathy and delicacy, these are a selection of the best feminine virtues. And that is why I admire my mother. She expresses her love for my father not by tenderness, but by loyalty. Now he can only repay it with his tenderness, and it is touching to observe. He struggled to protect her, the most precious thing in his life, and his power to do so has completely gone.
George Eliot, who was of course not a man but a lady who had to conceal her female identity in order to get her works published, was the acknowledged genius of the Victorian novel. In her masterpiece, Middlemarch, she explores the male and female sides of people. E.M. Forster did so as well in his works, most powerfully in Howard's End. To write convincingly about the feelings of men and women the novelist must have both male and female traits in his, or her, character. In some of the greatest works of literature this spills over into the novel itself and becomes its raison d'etre. It may be that women must have something masculine in them in order to excel, it is hard for me to say; but it is abundantly clear that men must have something feminine in their characters to be great. Yet, as Oscar Wilde wrote, "All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That is his."