Foreword
Intimations of Mortality is the first of Nevil Warbrook’s journals to be published by Avebury. The title was chosen in consultation with Edith Warbrook, Nevil’s ex-wife, and with Deedee Bowbells, Nevil’s colleague at Creative Havens and the acclaimed author of Calypso and Wine.
Nevil Warbrook is best known today for the restoration of Sir Tamburlaine Bryce MacGregor’s This Iron Race. Originally published in the 1860s, MacGregor’s work was subjected to extensive censorship by his publishers and Warbrook’s revised and restored text was an attempt to recreate the text as MacGregor intended for publication by Hare & Drum of Edenborough. Intimations of Mortality serves as a companion to the author’s restoration of Sir Tamburlaine Bryce MacGregor’s text and ideally should be read in conjunction with book one of This Iron Race.
Avebury wish to express their profound gratitude to Eurydice Glendale, and Sister Ethelnyd of the Iona Fellowship of Grace for saving Nevil Warbrook’s journals from destruction, and to Nevil’s son, Gerald, for agreeing to their publication. We also extend our gratitude to Hendryk van Zelden for his advice and constant support; thank Nevil’s agent, Desmond Catterick and Associates; his friends at Avebury and his colleagues and acquaintances at Creative Havens and Belshade College for excusing the sometimes unflattering opinions expressed herein. To all others mentioned in the text we request your tolerance and understanding.
Doctor’s orders
6 February; White Bear, Devizes
It comes down to this: if I do not lose weight, I shall die; if I do not curb my drinking, I shall die; if I do not take more exercise, I shall die; and, according to that ghastly inflatable contraption that measures your blood pressure, if they don’t get me a burst artery will.
Sobering news on the eve of a chap’s sixty-second birthday; especially so when Daddy didn’t live to see his sixty-third.
“Wasn’t your father a poet?” Dr Saunders asked (this was two hours ago) from behind her black-rimmed glasses.
“He was. Thomas Warbrook was rather well known in his day.”
“Died young,” she said, and just as I thought Dr Saunders might have an interest in poetry, she said the date of death was in my patient notes.
I said my father’s early death had robbed us of a significant voice among the late twentieth century poets, and we could only guess at what he would have written had he lived another decade or two, but my thoughts were already elsewhere.
Eleven is the age at which a child (boys, anyway) realises their happy state cannot last forever. Perhaps it’s the acquisition of that second digit (the zero in ten not counting); or wearing long trousers with attendant restrictions on boisterous activities that might scuff one’s knees; or that schooling suddenly seems to have a purpose, like a train with a destination and not a nice destination at that. Anyway, at age eleven I became aware of my waning childhood and symbolising that awareness was my father’s French, eggshell blue Aller motorcar.
I don’t suppose I ever thought of it as eggshell blue. Not then. If I apply an adjective I learned much later, to a childhood memory then what exactly am I remembering?
Stick to the facts. A blue Aller parked at Camber; a tartan travel rug spread on the sand (Mummy was proud of her Scottish heritage); Mummy and Daddy sitting on said rug; Mummy with her sunglasses on, even when it was cloudy; Daddy taking off his jacket and hat, though never his tie; and me playing on the sand and wishing it was Cornwall where there were rock pools to play in.
The only queer note in the entire day (apart from being dragged round Rye’s antique shops where Mummy’s eye for a bargain was matched by Daddy’s concern for expenditure) was Edwin, my imaginary friend, who refused to aller from the Aller and sat on the back seat waiting to go home. He was afraid that if he joined me on the beach we might hurry away and forget him.
The seats were a dark-blue, plasticky material. Absorbing the sun during the day they roasted the back of my legs all the way home.
I lost Edwin in Tonbridge when I was twelve. Probably that’s when all children lose their imaginary friends. It’s something to do with the growth of neural connections between the left and right hemispheres when the brain stops being two communicant halves and becomes one. I recall we had travelled by train to see Auntie Eileen—Daddy had had a bad year and the Aller was allering another family—and Edwin stayed behind when we all got off onto the platform. I think he was expecting us to return to the train later, as we always had to the Aller, and I last saw Edwin with his face pressed against the carriage window en route to Dover.
Dr Saunders was staring at me.
“Sorry. Mind wandered,” I said.
“According to your Well Man appointment six months ago, you drink approximately twelve units of alcohol a week. Has that changed at all?”
I admitted to confusing units with pints.
“Still,” I ventured, “twenty-four is hardly excessive.”
“Almost everyone,” Dr Saunders said, “underestimates how much they drink, but even twenty-four units is considerably above the recommended limit. Do you drink alone, Mr Warbrook?”
“Not in the pub,” I said.
“And at home?”
“Only a night cap before bed. And sometimes a glass of wine with dinner. So, what’s the verdict? You make it sound like I’m at death’s door.”
It was then she delivered the bad news which I paraphrased at the top of the page and having, somewhat tactlessly, said that if I didn’t take better care of myself I would soon be following my father, she instructed me to keep a daily record of my alcohol consumption and weigh myself weekly; both accounts to be presented at my next appointment. In the meantime, if I experience tightness about the chest or dizzy spells, I should call the emergency services.
I have never met a woman less ruffled, or more in need of ruffling, than Dr Saunders, whose starched white blouse is so unyielding it wouldn’t look out of place in the sculpture gallery at the Ashmolean, but her instruction had the desired effect and I walked straight into W B Jones, stationers, and bought this journal. The cover is faux leather in a shade of terracotta and each day occupies a generous two pages. That is far more than Dr Saunders requires, but it has reminded me of a conversation with Elfa Jonsdottír at last October’s Exmoor Haven.
The weather that week was delightful, and it had prompted Elfa to be particularly adventurous with the Inspirational Walks. Icelanders are extraordinarily strong-willed people, and one does not say no to them. Hence a three-hour trek across the heather had left me footsore and stiff in the saloon of the Withered Arm in Porlock.
Elfa, who is half my age and frightfully athletic, took pity on me and began rubbing my aching calf muscles whereon I mentioned that I was soon to be sixty-two, the very same age my father was when he passed away.
“Anything more will be a bonus poor Daddy never enjoyed.”
Elfa paused massaging my aching calves, my stockinged foot resting snugly in her lap, and said, “You should make a saga. You can call it Nevil’s Saga and in it you must vrite all you do. Then you see vhat you do in the years denied your farzer. Yes?”
Elfa is probably the sanest and most down-to-earth of all my colleagues at Creative Havens—even if her crime fiction is far too macabre for my taste—and, as I said, one does not say no to an Icelander, but I had put her suggestion aside until Doctor Saunders’ prophecy this morning.
And so, the page fills.
Postscriptum: two glasses of house Merlot with lunch’.
Post-Postscriptum: I miss the eleven-year-old me. I miss Edwin. I even miss the Aller.
Filial duties
7 February; Tea Bush Café, Salisbury
As I have done every birthday, except one, since my father’s death twenty-two years ago, I set off early for Salisbury.
The skies were leaden as I drove over the Downs. According to the chirpy young woman delivering last night’s weather forecast there is a twenty-five percent chance of snow today. Quite how one prepares for a quarter chance of snow, I cannot tell, but I am taking no chances. I have a tartan blanket, a Thermos of tea, and a garden spade. Lunch’ and a bunch of daffodils—my father’s favourite flower—I bought in Devizes.
It was certainly cold enough beside Daddy’s grave and by the time I’d finished reading his poem, ‘The Reddleman,’ my lips were frozen. Even the daffodils shivered. Happily, clusters of yellow and lilac crocuses beneath the elm trees were just coming into bud so something is trusting in spring’s arrival. Jackdaws roosting in the trees kept up a fearful racket throughout. Couldn’t see what was disturbing them but I had the curious impression I wasn’t alone.
Observances concluded, I drove into Salisbury and parked on Cathedral Close. From there I passed on foot what had once been my father’s home—happily, whoever has care of the place has not ruined the garden, though the roses need pruning—and stopped at the Tea Bush to warm up before I drive to Amesbury to see Mummy. Ordered muffins and a pot of tea and grabbed the chance to scribble a few words while I wait to be served. Place is busy with shoppers taking their lunch’.
Next door to the tearooms is a small department store. They have a display of stuffed toys in the window. Mummy always kept cats and while a live one would be against the rules at Crossstones House they cannot object to a stuffed toy. Obviously, I don’t want to sit here with it, so I’ll pick it up on the way back to the motorcar. It’s bright yellow and cheering and God knows Mummy’s condition is pretty grim. Apparently, there is, as one kind, if not altogether cheering carer remarked last year, as much comfort in the visit of a stranger as in the visit of a son, and if I fear Mummy does not entirely know who I am, I am not to think my attendance wasted.
Muffins and tea have appeared.
Later; Cathedral Close, Salisbury
How deuced annoying. My own fault, I suppose, though it seems unfair to blame myself for something so unforeseeable.
The muffins had scarcely made an impression on my tummy and the tea did not have the warming properties for which I had hoped. So, I glanced along the menu board and noticed they had spiced parsnip soup. Knowing that was bound to put some fire in my tummy, I ordered a bowl with rustic bread. I did not have to wait long but as the waitress passed the shimmering golden bowl before me, I spotted something else golden-yellow enter at the door. It was the stuffed cat, or one very like it, in the clutches of a small girl. The girl was followed by her mother, and both joined the queue at the counter.
It was a moment before I realised the child was staring at me. I glanced down at my soup but not before she had tugged on her mother’s hand.
A maternal shadow had loomed.
“Is there a problem?” the woman asked.
“No. I don’t believe so.”
“Then why were you staring at my daughter?”
“I assure you; I was not.”
The girl emerged from behind her mother’s legs and glared at me.
“I was looking at the toy cat. It’s a very big cat.”
The girl reacted as though I had attempted to drag puss from her arms. Neighbouring tables had fallen quiet, and ears had turned my way.
“The cat?” her mother asked without trace of believing me.
“I saw the cat, or one like it, in the window of the shop next door. I was going to buy it after I’d eaten. I saw your daughter’s cat and immediately thought it might be the same cat. I was certainly not staring at your daughter.”
“Buy it?” the woman said.
“For my mother.”
Before she could comment with another disyllabic reply, I said that my mother had dementia and lived in a home where they didn’t allow real cats.
“My cat,” the girl said, having inherited her mother’s laconic habits.
“I hope it’s not the only one they had,” I said.
“They got it from the display,” the mother said, having mustered several words at once. “Come along, Alice. We’ll sit near the window.”
I finished my soup in silence then crept out and into the department store. Of course, the cat had sold and in desperation—I really did have to get to Amesbury—I bought a rabbit instead. Only hope Mummy likes it.