Death Cleaning with Dad
Dusty cassettes, John Betjeman, Whirlpool drowning, Piefinches and Cuban cigars
i
“Oh little body, do not die;
You hold the soul that talks to me,
Although our conversation be
As wordless as the windy sky.”
So looked my father at the last,
Right in my soul before he died,
Though words we spoke went heedless past
As London traffic-roar outside.
From A Child Ill, by Sir John Betjeman. Recorded on the 1974 album Betjeman's Banana Blush. It was included on a CD compilation, Songs to Save Your Life, made by Morrissey for the New Musical Express and given away with the 19 June 2004 issue of the NME in the UK. On Songs to Save Your Life, poet laureate Betjeman appears alongside The New York Dolls, The Libertines, Sparks, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand and The Slits amongst others.
ii
To quote myself from my previous post:
I'm wondering if the object of connection is almost irrelevant, or at least incidental. A seemingly insignificant connection can be deeply meaningful to an individual. But also any connection can lead to another connection and build to a network of interconnections with far greater significance. Parts and patterns.
I offer to you that all you need to do is find a connection, any connection. It might be something that catches your eye, a phrase in a book, or a fleeting conversation. Then simply follow it with unrelenting curiosity.
iii
I was recently visiting my dad at his house in Shropshire. He's doing great, but he's getting on, so we are doing a clear-out and declutter. I didn't mention 'Swedish Death Cleaning' to him, but that's effectively what's going on. He's alive to his mortality. My partner brought my attention to the concept a few years ago when she wrote about it for The Conversation, an online journal for academic and journalistic dialogue.
Dostadning is a hybrid of the Swedish words for death and cleaning. Not at all morbid: a clearing, a letting go, a lightening, a time to review and integrate the many threads of a rich life. It's also creating the space for grieving. It's an honour to be doing this with him, an intimate procedure, we have never been closer. He has a large house, so it's going to take time. We are both happy with this as we fall into a regular pattern of two-day visits every six to eight weeks. We sift through mountains of paperwork, going back decades, from rows of filing cabinets. I'm the only one he can trust with some of the private information. We have a box for re-cycling and a box for the garden incinerator. Sometimes it is tiring. He pauses over each piece of paper, invoice, receipt, statement, letter, contract, deal, plan, map, article, and instruction booklet. His record keeping has been immaculate and detailed. He wants to explain it all. I get overwhelmed with information. And then I get a wave of love as I realise he's sharing his life with me. The complexities of his investments are not just about money, they are about the richness of his interests in life. The faded clippings from the Financial Times 1992, albeit outdated, show me the care he has taken in his decisions. The piece of paper with his scrawled, almost illegible, handwriting, has, he tells me, a list of restaurants he has been to over the years, home and abroad, with phone numbers, just in case he goes back. He asks me if I want a file stuffed with tourist brochures, restaurant reviews and maps from European Cities. Some of them are over twenty years old.
"They might be useful...for your travels...".
I ruefully decline. I'm aware of the subtext. Non-local travel is unlikely for him now. I myself have become environmentally dubious of flying and feel less inclined toward far-flung adventures.
"If you were able to travel, dad," I ask him, "where would you go?"
"I would love to re-visit Paris."
Part of me is tempted to take the file, not for their dated information value, but because they are part of him. But I have already started my own Swedish Death Cleaning, and anyway, my real inheritance from my dad will be something intangible.
Then I remember my mum telling me I was conceived in Paris.
iv
For lunch we just have blue cheese on rye crackers and half a glass of red wine. We sit and chat and look out of the window to his yard where he has a hanging, squirrel-proof, bird-feeder. The smaller birds - hedge-sparrows, various tits and a robin - briefly perch on the feeder, peck at the seed, eat some and scatter some on the ground below. A male and female pheasant turn up daily around lunch time. They look both bewildered and beautiful as they wait for the seed to fall. It is April, the sun catches the flank and wing of the male. We pause the cheese to take in the brief copper and bronze shimmer of his feathers. A blackbird shows up under the bird-feeder. It has a single white tail feather. My dad thinks it is the offspring of an adult who had the same genetic mutation. A chaffinch flits in.
"In Shropshire we call them piefinch," my dad informs me, "and a wood pigeon is a queest."
Later he gives me a print out: 'Shropshire Names of Bird and Beast Glossary.' Might be useful.
My dad goes a bit meditative looking at birds. He has a bench in the garden where he sometimes sits in the early evening. When he's not thinking, he's a mystic.
v
In the afternoon we move on from paperwork. On top of the filing cabinets are a mish-mash of items. There's a broken flat-bed scanner, some empty plastic wallets for traveller's cheques and cash, a couple of big boxes of continuous feed printer paper, 3.5 and 8 inch floppy discs, a loose pile of cut out recipes from magazines and newspapers. Right at the back is a square box with a label indicating an assortment of ten Christmas Cards. I open the box. It contains eight Parejo shaped 4 7⁄8" Cuban cigars. He's never smoked. He can't remember where they came from. He's not sure what to do with them, so I offer to take them as a talking point for visiting friends. My dad is sure they are still smokable. I know they are not. They are completely dry and odourless. They could be decades old.
When I get home, I do some research. The cigars are a well known high quality Havana brand, 'Romeo Y Julieta', produced by Rodríguez, Argüelles and Co. Named, of course, after the Shakespeare romantic tragedy, the brand goes back to 1875. The 'Rodríguez' of the company is Jose 'Pepin' Rodriguez Fernandez who took over the company in 1905. He was so passionate about the Romeo and Juliet brand that he tried to buy the Palazzo Cappello, widely known as La Casa di Giulietta, in Verona. There's no historical proof that the Capello family are the same as the Capulets although the names are similar. There is no clear historical record of a Juliet Cappello. The Veronese mayor and council refused the attempted purchase, the city authorities themselves buying the property from the Cappello family in 1905. The 'Juliet Balcony' on the outside of the palazzo, is a tourist pull, constructed in 1936.
On returning to Havana, Jose Rodriguez built his own palace/cigar factory, based on the Veronese palazzo, on Calle Belascoaín (now Padre Varela), near the famous Malecón esplanade. Built in 1905, it was subsequently demolished in 2011 and is currently, in 2022, still a car park, adjacent to and in the shadow of, the Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital.
A good friend of mine had been to Havana in 2006. He might even have walked past the decaying factory. I knew he had walked along the Malecón, so I asked him what he remembered of the area. He had vivid memories:
People walking, chatting, fishing, flirting. 1950s American cars. Weather worn colonial houses. Sea air, big waves, everything open to the air. I remember a particular building that was in quite good condition compared to those around it - when I asked our guide, he said it was rumoured that McDonalds had done a deal to acquire it in case the Cuban economy opened up to US influence.
As of 2022, thankfully, there is no McDonalds in Cuba. My Dad thinks Fidel Castro was a very bad man.
vi
The final job of the day is the garage. There's not enough time to clear all the hardened half-empty paint pots. But on the window-shelf are spider-webbed boxes of cassette tapes. They belong to my dad's estranged wife. She's happy for him to get rid of them. They are mostly classical music but there's an odd few that seem out of place. A Beatles best of, Miles Davis Bopping the Blues, a Green Goddess exercise tape and poet laureate John Betjeman's 1974 Banana Blush. The Betjeman album was released on the progressive rock label Charisma and John Peel regularly featured tracks from it on his eclectic Radio 1 night time show.
Betjeman's poem A Shropshire Lad, set to music by Jim Parker, was a New Musical Express single of the Week. The poem is about the Shropshire born English Channel swimmer Matthew Webb.
Captain Webb from Dawley,
Came swimming along the old canal
That carried the bricks to Lawley.
Swimming along—
Swimming along—
Swimming along from Severn,
Paying a call at Dawley Bank while swimming along to Heaven
In 1875 Webb was the first person to swim the Channel without any artificial aids. He died in July 1883 after drowning in a failed stunt attempt to swim across the Whirlpool Rapids on the Niagara river, leading to the Niagara Falls.
Jarvis Cocker is a fan of Banana Blush and made a BBC radio show about the album in 2014. Suggs of Madness, British Sea Power and Nick Cave, have all said they find inspiration in the album.
This is stunning Roger. So evocative, moving and intimate. Beautiful to read.