Peter Emmerson

Unlike the Tories, the Labour leadership seem paralysed by the outcomes of the Scottish referendum.  For me the highlight of the final weeks of the Scottish referendum was to see an old soldier return to the fray – Stormin’ Gordon Brown.  It was great to see him striding around the political platform having licked his wounds for long enough.  There was no posturing here, we could see it mattered.  He came out fighting with a passion, until then, only displayed by Yes campaigners.  His visceral performances arguably stemmed the flow of voters away from the No campaign sufficient to avoid defeat. 

The strident conviction deployed with such effect by the previous Labour leader contrasts markedly with the performance of his successor.  What I saw from Ed Miliband on the Tuesday of the last Labour Party Conference was the diffident, unconvincing display of a man totally out of his depth, short on charisma and the ability to put together a team that could develop the ideas needed to win an election.  Miliband is a man lost, leading a shadow cabinet who are for the most part as inept as he is.  Team Miliband have had four years to develop policies fit to send packing governors who have been on the back foot ever since their uncosy alliances were formed during the severe business collapse.  Subsequently, the governing partners have over-borrowed and over-borrowed whilst cutting and cutting and cutting: Labour as the only substantive alternative should by now be out of sight, preparing for electoral victory next May.  Instead they are playing for time executing what amounts to little more than a tactical defence focussed on exploiting government weaknesses or spewing out tawdry mantras of idealistic nonsense such as ‘togetherness’ (arguably just paraphrasing the Tory slogan of ‘we’re all in it together’), working the safe ground of the NHS, like a dazed boxer on the ropes hoping to throw a lucky punch – team Miliband look beaten.

My father died today in 1966 aged 44; he was too young!!  The dead don’t walk, the dead don’t talk – as far as I can see; they just disappear into memories that fade and fade as those who remember them die in their turn, having passed on ever fading memories and so on and so on and so on until we’re forgotten.  It’s those left behind who walk with and talk about the life that’s gone.  It seems easy to die, everybody does it; they’re here and in moments they’re gone; for good – from what I can tell.  It’s living that’s hard.  It’s living with the intangible bond that death brings, emptied of the habit of physical comfort that is hard.  It’s those who loved the dead who really suffer: not surprising then that so many find sanctuary in the supernatural, or some metaphysical dogma, or some fashionable, therapeutic, positive option: why suffer unnecessarily – good CBT.  Those for whom such strategies amount to self-deceit and for whom suicide has no merit, must learn to suffer, just suffer and suffer and suffer – living becomes bitter-sweet suffering, living with the damage that living brings, till dying comes.  When Dad died my mother was too young, I was too young, my brothers were too young, my sister was too young.  It’s easy to love when you’re young, love is for the young and yet, the young are too young for love.  Once you’ve found its joy you’re always too young for death.  So stay close to those you love, don’t waste one second of the joy their living brings and don’t allow them to die too easily, especially in someone else’s cause, for the suffering will never stop after their dying.  Those you love and the bitter-sweet suffering in memory of the dead are all there is; once you’ve learned to suffer – it seems to me.

Please accept my apologies for the late reply.  Part of the explanation for the delay has been my preoccupation with a medical problem.  However, the main reason for my inability to respond till now is my quandary over the two very contrasting feelings I have in relation to my time at QEGS.  Like too many of us from working class backgrounds who passed the scholarship, I was unprepared for my confrontation with the pseudo public school culture of the grammar school that was so alien and unsympathetic to my way of life.  Thus, on one level I associate the school with the pain of deep personal humiliation, guilt and regret; a place where I developed a distorted persona to counter something that until then had been foreign to me, the prolonged experience of underperformance and failure (the sports field apart).  During those years I became a stranger to myself, gaining self-respect from stupid bravado which sanctioned fooling about as opposed to working hard to get good marks.  The school (teachers) simply reinforced this process.  Thus, I was mostly at odds with those who were supposed to teach and help me: Jacky Dodds (biologist) is the only member of staff I recall with any respect or affection, the sting of the tube from a Bunsen burner apart. 

However, rather perversely, I also remember these days with great joy.  I was privileged (I must confess that at more sober moments I find this conclusion somewhat suspect considering the above) to find comfort in a profound camaraderie with a group of ‘lads’, reprobates all, (alphabetically by surname of course) from A to W, with whom I fooled around in class and corridors, played sport, frequented Smith’s record department and the Pit on a Saturday morning with the hope of meeting some birds.  These memories of our time together occasionally bring tears to my eyes: to paraphrase Dickens – they were the very best and the very worst of times – thank you all!  But nothing can bring these back.

Since those days I have gone some way towards putting the record straight and become more me, finding self-respect in less self-destructive ways, although scars from the damage done during those years at QEGS never quite heal.  However, unlike our self-imagery, those very best and worst of times can never be resurrected, and should perhaps be left to languish warmly in the past until some alcoholic night when they emerge without warning, amongst newer friends and strangers, to re-people the present with those of the past, those beautiful ‘unreliable memoirs’.

Thact is a new word as far as I know that is part of a project to jettison inadequate yet still hugely influential philosophical (anti-scientific) practices that distort our understanding by separating thinking and doing as though we have a mind that can function by disconnecting itself from our bodies upon which it can then sit in judgement.  Such ideas go back to the ancients such as Plato who believed in pure thought as the true reality, the body being something perishable and therefore less real, i.e., less true.  The separation of thinking and body is reinforced in the modern era by Descartes who believed that human identity was defined by our ability for pure thought (pure mathematics par example) untainted by sensory experience.  If we take a scientific approach and abandon these specious but still dominant models of human functioning which portray people as some sort of automaton, we can talk of a process of thactivity where actions and thought are linked as interdependent processes.  People don’t think or act they thact.  Such a conclusion is not absolutely true, it just a more realistic, scientific answer.

Today I re-connected briefly with who I am: thank you to my brothers, sister and cousins, especially John, for taking the time to remember me and invite me to re-vitalize bonds that after today I see as permanent, forged in the shared identity of blood, that only we as family (all of us) understand.  Whilst the period since I became aware that Auntie Muriel had died has been full of emotional turmoil and sadness, my heart goes out to my cousins who have lost their mother, I am listening and dancing to Benny Goodman, Gene Krupa, Harry James in painful yet beautiful remembrance of those now gone, who to the background beat of the American dance bands gave us life: we know who we are!

Precious Time! 

It was a beautiful, shiny, freezing cold morning, January 31^st 2005.  In one sense this date is not the appropriate moment to honour the death of my mother because it does not resonate properly with the rhythm of life associated with the typical Sunday night and Monday morning on which she died.  Thursday the 31^st does not have the same capacity to re-engender the emotions of a dreary Sunday night at the back-end of January.  It was a Sunday night on which Dad’s death began, just as it was a Sunday night when I received the phone call from Pauline, my sister in law, that roused me from sleep with the news that Mam had been taken to hospital having collapsed at home.  Pathetically my first thoughts were optimistic: Mam might now have take the help she so badly needed.  Not long afterwards the phone rang again, interrupting my dithering and disabusing me of any thought of the positive: my brother Richard said that I should make the 170 mile journey to Darlington right now!  What should I wear, what should I take?  I needed a list or something; precious time that should be spent with her was being wasted, time to offer her comfort, possibly my last time with her.

The journey was too long, even in my beautiful estoril coloured M3.  I arrived at the hospital only to get lost in the car park.  I found her breathing heavily and desperately into a mask supplying oxygen, unconscious, in one of the places she most feared, the hospital, where too many catastrophes had already befallen her.  I got close to her so that she could feel me and hear me.  I spoke to her words of comfort just as she had done so often for me.  I sang to her the songs that she had sung to me, so tenderly and joyfully when I was little, to make me feel safe-enough for contented sleep; songs that Grandad Maffham had sung to her – not smart, sophisticated music but music of home, loyalty and love.  I rubbed her cold feet with the bunion that had always fascinated me, which had made it difficult for her to find shoes that would fit.  I didn’t need to think about what she needed, I just knew.  It’s what you know through love and common sense; she taught me that.  It’s one of the ways you know what love is; knowing what was needed without needing to ask.  Some time later I went to find the doctors to see what they knew, only to find when I got back that they had removed the mask to let her take her last breaths: she had apparently had some sort of seizure which they thought signalled the end.  In these circumstances they had the better of me – I just acquiesced to their judgement.  I clasped her hand for the last time, clinging to those beautiful, slender fingers that had made me what I am, fingers that scraped my face on school mornings, chapped and cut by too much housework.  I held her hand till it was time to let go.  The nurse removed her hair clips: I put them somewhere safe, they were sacred and ours.  At least now she would no longer have to suffer the pain of her disintegrating body and the accompanying frustrations that drain the fight from even the brave and indomitable.  It’s never easy for those who know love to give up; she would never give up.  It’s never easy for a young woman alone, the two men she relied on, father and husband, dead far too soon.  She exhausted her body on all she had left – her four children; such humble honesty unusual for a beautiful woman.  Now she can rest having given it all.  I am truly privileged!

Jean Mafham was born 88 years ago today, on September 15^th 1924.  She is my mother and I never needed another: I have been bathed in the sacred because I am her son.  No son has loved his mother more than I.  No son has loved his mother more than I – no mother has been loved more than mine: that is the measure of her.  No mother has loved more than mine.  No person has understood what life is for better than her – to suffer in love!

On the morning of Sunday, September 4^th 1966, I was chatting to Mam while she was doing the dinner about Dad and what was wrong with him.  She announced that he had cancer.  At some point she must have mentioned the possibility of his death and I retorted that ‘the Emmersons don’t die at such an early age’.  Something like 14 hours later he was dead.

It is very very strange how you can live so close to somebody who is fatally ill and not know it.  Christmas 1965 had been rather strange.  There was a coldness about the place that had never been evident before: Dad was rather subdued – he wasn’t himself.  Not long after, I think it was February, the doctor arrived to see Dad.  This was something that had not occurred before.  The outcome was that he went into hospital to have an operation.  He’d been into hospital a few years earlier for an operation on his nose but this was different, he didn’t return to work.  Dad always went to work, even when he had severe hay fever during late June.  Even so, it didn’t occur to me that anything serious was wrong that could not be cured, and anyway, he was indestructible.

The operation seemed to work and although he had a series of post-operative visits to Middlesbrough General for radiotherapy, he returned for a while to his old ebullient self.  Even so, I can’t understand why I didn’t put two and two together.  Then one fateful evening he suffered an attack of pain in the side of his face and head, which subsequently was accompanied by the loss of tension in the muscles of his face.  The doctor was called and diagnosed Bell’s palsy, possibly caused by a draft from the car window.  Again I didn’t read the signs correctly.

More time went by.  I can’t exactly recall when, but he spent some time recuperating at Grandma’s back home in Darlington to give Mam a break: I remember this because I visited him after my first day at work in the foundry.  He subsequently went back into hospital for more treatment, this time at Sedgefield.  The severity of the situation still did not dawn on me, even when so many of my aunties and uncles turned up for his birthday in hospital.  He returned home, as I later realised, to die, supplied with plenty of Brompton’s cocktail.

The events of that final Sunday are dominated by two things: Mam’s terrible news about his illness and our last Sunday tea as a whole family.  Now that I knew what the stakes were I could join the fight.  At around 5 ‘o’ clock I went upstairs and encouraged him to come down for tea: we nearly always had tinned fruit and Carnation milk.  He sat in his chair by the television as I helped him eat accompanied by It’s a Knockout, a programme that I became extremely aversive to, for a long time.  On going back to bed, I had to support him up the stairs by having him put his arm around my shoulders.  I was devastated by how light he was.  I have never forgotten the experience; a man who had fired railway locomotives, flown war planes and policed the streets of Durham County had been wasted in 6 months and now weighed no more than a child.

I don’t remember anything of the evening.  However, at around half past midnight Dad had asked for some tea in his white pint pot.  Mam and I were at the bedside: David, Richard and Victoria were asleep.  He struggled to drink.  The next thing I remember was him trying desperately to tell us something, but he was so weak that the words he was attempting to vocalise were undecipherable.  A short time later he gave up and lay on his left side,  Mam soothing him, while I clung to his back in what I realised were his last moments of life.  His body made sounds like a great ship coming to grief on rocks.  It was not long before he took his final breaths and all was still.

Why did a man I loved and revered choose not to share the agony of his fatal illness and death and leave me, and my brothers and sister, so unprepared for the desolate times to come?

Herbert Edwin Emmerson, my father, was born 90 years ago today.  He is an enigma to me, probably because I have so little knowledge of him.  He was born and brought up in Middlesbrough, Hartlepool and Darlington.  Granddad worked on the railway as a guard.  Both technically and culturally they were a respectable working class family.  As a boy he collected cigarette cards of aeroplanes and racing cars: Grandma told me about the models he made of aircraft.  When Dad left school I am fairly sure he joined the railway as a fireman, which was effectively an apprenticeship to be an engine driver.

During the early part of the war as a fireman, I guess he was essential to the war effort, because he did not join the RAF till March 1942.  He wanted to be a flyer and the war offered the opportunity.  His training took him to Canada which he loved: I have a feeling that I would have been a Canadian if he’d had his way.  Nonetheless, the process of gaining his wings (September 1944) was frustrated by rheumatic fever which Mam reckoned was the reason he flew bombers rather than fighters.  Whatever the explanation, it delayed his entry into the war and may well have saved his life, unlike so many of his heroic comrades.

The RAF record shows a last entry for September 1946.  By the time I was born in October 1948 he had been demobbed, got married and was a policeman.  A question that has always bothered me is why after achieving his great ambition of becoming a pilot he abandoned it so quickly for a career that was not even second best.  There is one thing for sure, he was remarkably unsuccessful at policing: after leaving the RAF as a Flight Sergeant it took him a further 18 years to make Sergeant in the police – what a waste of a brave and brilliant man who achieved what most people from his background did not and could not, i.e. learned the skills needed to fly a war plane and become a pilot!

He wasn’t a father in the hands-on way some fathers are.  But my mother loved him – nothing says more.  I loved him and love him.  He was just there and I knew happiness.  His life was too short for me to know him – hence, so many questions.  Tragically he died of cancer at 44 in September 1966.  The devastation for me was catastrophic – no more happiness in the wreckage that is my adulthood.  He knew the answers to everything and made me feel safe.  He shared his love of music and films, especially westerns.  He was incredibly creative and had joyous enthusiasm.  I am so fortunate to be his son.