BY MUDYARD KIPLING

I was twelve or perhaps just thirteen years of age when my great aunt died at her terraced house in Leeds, over fifty years ago. The year would be 1970, near enough. She was an old spinster who lived at home with her sister, my maternal grandmother, also of advanced years. Something had gone wrong with the great aunt and when I arrived with my parents she was regarded as beyond recovery, and so it proved to be.

What now strikes me as remarkable was the manner of her passing away.  The great aunt, having I assume been attended by a doctor at some point prior to my arrival, was settled in a chair in the cool of the dining room, darkened by having its heavy curtains drawn shut. The chair was an oak-built Victorian contraption having an adjustable tilt to its back, and fitted with large rectangular cushions covered in velvet the colour of a light tobacco.  For the comfort of its occupant the back-rest had been halfway reclined, and the old lady was well covered in blankets to keep her as warm as her fading energy might permit.  Her eyes were closed, the lids quivered slightly, and she had lost her power of speech.

The rest of us, my grandmother, my mother, father, myself and the odd passing relative, occupied the adjacent sitting room that had the benefit of deep, broad-shouldered armchairs, and a gas fire.  My grandmother would frequently smoke a cigarette of the Benson & Hedges brand and, with her daughter whom I rather disliked, pursued conversations about people I had never met and places I had never been.  When talk dried up, the adults read newspapers and old magazines or watched the television. My father, always taciturn, buried himself in crosswords, retreating as far as he was able from the chatter and the tension ever-present between the two women. 

That a boy must do nothing to stir his grandmother’s rather fiery temper seemed a far more onerous requirement on this occasion than on any other, and I suppose everyone was irritable. My only amusement it seemed was trying to establish how my grandmother’s mechanical ash-trays worked. They were of two kinds, both in the form of an enamelled metal bowl having a disc-shaped steel lid operated by a sprung plunger mounted above.  On one kind, the plunger caused the lid to fold down in two leafs, while the other had a lid that descended in the horizontal plane and spun at the same time. In either case, my grandmother would extinguish her cigarette on the lid, then depress the plunger to deposit the stub into the bowl. When the plunger was let up, the lid returned to its original position, sealing the bowl and confining any smoke or fumes within. I yearned to get my hands on these devices and dismantle them, but was of course forbidden from doing so.

From time to time, the dull tedium of the sitting room would be leavened as one or other of the adults departed to check on the condition of the great aunt.   Expectant faces would greet his or her return, only to be disappointed with the shaking of whichever head happened to be atop that particular neck.  My grandmother would sometimes ask explicitly: “Has she gone yet?” 

I was told to go through to my great aunt and report back on whether she was still alive. My instructions were to observe from the doorway and not to speak or otherwise disturb her. Quite how I was to establish the vitality or otherwise of the chair-bound and immobile old lady, heaped with blankets, to whom I was not allowed to speak, from several paces away across the thick gloom of the dining room and with a large dinner-table obscuring the view, was not within my ken, so with morbid fascination I defied one of these orders and crept across the carpeted floor to look closely at the dying woman and discover if she were still breathing.  From the parts of her that poked out from beneath the covers, I could see that my great aunt was dressed in her ordinary clothing, and wore her cable-knit moss-green cardigan, fastened with horn buttons.  After one of these visits, my mother asked “Is she plucking her blankets? They pluck the hem of the blanket you know, when they’re going to go.” 

After lingering for the remainder of the day and into the next, my great aunt died. I know not whether she plucked the hem of her blanket.

What strikes me now is the contrast between attitudes to death then, and in the present time.  Fifty years ago, an old lady, rendered helpless and totally dependent, had arrived within hours of the end of her life. By the standards of the day she was regarded as done for. I assume that a doctor had examined her and warranted her a lost cause.  All interested parties accepted this and awaited her natural departure from this world. There was no call for an ambulance or hospital admission; no injections of powerful drugs or attachment of drips; no artificial resuscitation;  no months of bed-ridden maintenance of the dwindling husk; no heap of pills to be cajoled down an uncooperative gullet; no paid strangers rostered in to change nappies and sheets and to feed by spoon and bottle.  There was not even a second visit by the general practitioner or travelling nurse. 

Looking back, I sensed no guilt among the living that my great aunt had arrived at the end of her life. She had lived, and had come to the end of her span. No one felt an impulse or obligation to contest that. There was no competition regarding who might attempt the most to extend her mortal existence. It was her time.

One notes that this little scene occurred only twenty-five years after the end of the Second World War. My parents and my grandmother were all certainly familiar with death, and my father had doubtless seen much of it at first hand, having fought the Japanese Imperial Army in Burma. My mother had as a girl witnessed her own father’s death, killed by pneumonia — not an unusual end for men whose injured lungs were their keepsake for tangling with poison gas during the Great War.

I wonder if it might now be regarded as a dreadful neglect, perhaps even a criminal offence, to allow an old woman to die quietly in an armchair without the futile gesture of bringing to her aid all the available resources of the state or such as the pocket might afford. She did not cry out once, nor did she appear to be much distressed at any time, which was her good fortune, and might have been otherwise. Interestingly, not one of us sat with her, held her hand, spoke to her or made any attempt at companionship or comforting.  She died on her own, in the cool quiet of the dining room of the house that had been her home for decades, without even the ticking of a clock to mark off her final minutes.

They were different days, and people had different ways.

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