BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN
Recently I was thinking about a close relative who died two summers before the turn of the century. I was remembering his personal loo which, on account of being a boy, I was advised to use during family visits to his home in Surrey.
I can still picture the room clearly…
I recall the hard ‘bumf’ Izal loo paper, which was fast losing vogue and market at the time – it had a slight whiff of disinfectant to it and, better for damp outdoor water closets, did not seem to absorb water. There was a neat pile of boxed Cussons Pearl soaps on the window sill towering over a worn pipe stand. The relative was a Major and I recall – standing on that same windowsill – a cartoon drawn by a friend of his of him dressed in military uniform on D-Day, sporting the same moustache style he would wear for the rest of his days. I recollect too a framed picture of a house on the wall and, placed carefully into one of the frame corners, a message from a rather macabre set of Christmas crackers:
‘We are born crying, live complaining and die disappointed’
In my university years I wondered whether perhaps my relative had acquired the crackers from the Fabian Society. Then again, in that part of Surrey – a place of hard work and pragmatism, then fat off Thatcher – I do not recall there being any socialists, except perhaps for the odd, sherry-addled vicar who had failed to understand the parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, mistaking involuntary wealth redistribution, in typical and short-cutting Marxian style, for a voluntary one.
It must have been a tough Christmas the year that message arrived. It almost makes one grateful for the Christmas Cracker groan tripe of today. Last Christmas’ cracker joke What did Adam say on the day before Christmas? It’s Christmas, Eve! suddenly has a ring of joy to it.
I don’t know how old I was at the time, but I remember disagreeing with that message on the loo wall from the get-go. Not the ‘born crying’ part – I could well believe, since babies cry, and as number two of seven I should know it, that we are all born crying. I simply refused to believe that we humans were destined to live complaining and then die disappointed. What on earth (or any other planet for that matter) would be the point of that?
The quote on the wall of my relative’s khazi had been lazily misattributed to a ‘twelfth century nun’ by the cracker company. So, for years, before discovering that it was a quote from Thomas Fuller, the 17th Century English Clergyman and prolific author (pictured), I put it down to a lack of sex. The poor nun was clearly struggling with the vow of chastity, and each cucurbita she handled and every candle she placed in the chapel candle holder must have been a torturous experience, not dissimilar to the puberty I was going through when I first read the message, when one’s passions and excitements would run riot at the briefest glimpse of Sabrina or Belinda Carlyle in a D.E.R television rental shop window. Same Satan. Same misery.
These days Fuller is considered for his writings, particularly his Worthies of England, published posthumously in 1662. At times, especially on strategy, he writes as one might imagine a clergyman writing – like a pound shop Sun Tzu:
One may miss the mark by aiming too high as too low.
It is madness for sheep to talk peace with a wolf.
A fool’s paradise is a wise man’s hell!
Then, like a stopped clock, every dozen sayings/‘worthies’, Fuller comes out with something memorable and useful like the ‘born crying’ example above:
There is more pleasure in loving than in being beloved.
He’s my friend that speaks well of me behind my back.
If an ass goes travelling he will not come home a horse.
Occasionally conjuring something of beauty:
Light, God’s eldest daughter, is a principal beauty in a building.
Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune.
But back to the quote on the loo wall…
It should be obvious that those who spend their lives complaining are not worth being around. Their negative souls steal one’s light and there is a contagion in their words which fast reduces a Daisy to a Karen. Those who die disappointed see life as all and death as the end – let’s hope there is another, better chapter for their souls.
My relative died soon after squeezing my hand so tight that it went as white as his hospital sheets, even whiter than his last moustache. He certainly did not die disappointed, nor did he live a life of complaint. He was a striving, honest, pragmatic, military man with a profound love for his wife and burgeoning family. Nor do I believe that he feared death as he knew it well from years gone by and saw post-war life as a generous loan from it …
For in that loo room on the wall opposite the framed picture of the house in which the Fuller quote was placed, I remember another picture. A framed photograph of the man who drew the cartoon of my relative on D-Day, who was killed in France just a day later.
In the corner of that frame my relative had placed a small, hand-written note:
Don’t complain; just work (and pray) harder.
Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine.