We had been living with Dad having Alzheimer’s for a decade and a half. Perhaps longer. It's always possible that random lapses of mindedness going even further back were signs. In which case, I’ve got a grim future (one in eight of us - at least - will succumb to this cruellest of afflictions. Today there are 50 million people globally with the disease. By the middle of this century, that number is expected to reach 150 million).
We’re not entirely sure, either, what the trigger was, but a mini stroke some years ago followed by prostate cancer clearly contributed to a cognitive and physical decline that either caused the onset or contributed to it. Either way, it’s been a slow progression. From mild symptoms of forgetfulness, through the gradual erosion of both short and long-term memory, to an eventual end-stage when the brain and the body start disconnecting, functionally, and communication goes from barely verbal to just a hollow stare. This is Alzheimer’s: the progressive erasure of a life. I’m not being flippant by describing it in this way, but think of Marty McFly in
Back To The Future, except unsuccessful in preventing himself from vanishing from his own future. More starkly, think of
Die Hard’s Hans Gruber, falling away from John McLane’s grip at the top of the Nakatomi tower, only in even more, painful slow motion.
This time last year Dad went into Galsworthy House, the care home on Kingston Hill where, 12 months later, he would leave this world. His increasing immobility and a series of falls - probably brought on by the Alzheimer’s – brought us to the point where he was too much of a danger to himself and to Mum. When he fell, we needed an ambulance crew using a specialist device to lift him again. He wasn’t big, far from it, but he was a dead weight that fell at awkward angles (fracturing a vertebra, we later discovered, because it was never articulated at the time). The home was wonderful, a big old stately place. Dad had his own private room with a window looking out on his beloved Richmond Park. For the first few weeks, months even, however, he was more preoccupied with leaving it. “Are we going home now?”, he would incant, to be met by some plausible explanation-to-a-child as to why he’d be staying put, which would be repeated as often as the question it responded to.
Eventually the question loops ended as Dad accepted – mostly - his new surroundings. Occasionally, in moments of unbridled lucidity, they would surface again. Here’s where you realised that Alzheimer’s affects the brain like the CPU of an ageing laptop. The cabling between the brain’s various departments becomes frayed, forcing it to take shortcuts. Graphically, you can imagine these different sections closing down. There is compulsive, repetitive behaviour, which I always assumed was the brain trying to find a path that worked, like a guide rope leading out of a smoke-filled building.
Dad’s eventual death, in the early hours of Sunday, 18 August, was the first time in adulthood that I’d experienced the demise of an immediate relative. When we went to see his body that morning, it didn’t look all that different to his condition two days before, when I sat with him, sleeping peacefully, for the better part of an hour. I wasn’t to know he’d be dead 36 hours later, but perhaps, it wasn’t a surprise. On the previous occasion I’d seen him awake, there was no recognition of me. I could have been his son, or simply a shape before him. I thought, then, that the light was dimming. This forms the core of Alzheimer’s cruelty, the fact that you can see the physical manifestations of a lifetime, of loved ones and relationships, visibly disappearing before you. Without being too morbid, we do all turn to dust, along with our memories, but with Dad, living as he did until six weeks after his 90th birthday, it was something of a comfort that he had lived so long, even if his latter years were beset with such health problems.
Now his life is over we can reflect and recollect. In my case, even discover things for the first time, especially as we search through his fastidiously collated archives of paperwork, mementoes and obscurities which, collectively look like ephemera but by themselves carry vivid stories. We uncovered a cricket travel game called
Owzthat!, which came in a tiny tin and comprised two hexagonal metal die, one each for bowling and batting scores which were recorded on a piece of paper. Simplest of pleasures, but the appearance of
Owzthat!, on a wet afternoon, marooned in a rain-soaked Welsh self-catering cottage, was a bright, shining highlight of childhood. Along with Spencer, the glove puppet (another simple concept – namely, a sock with two buttons for eyes, which would generate hours of mirth). Dad was clearly someone who collected things. A holiday to a previously unvisited part of the world would necessitate the purchase of a new Ordnance Survey map for that particular area. A repeat visit would necessitate the purchase of the latest version of that map, just in case geography and roads had changed. These are just some of the adorable foibles from my own 51 years as his son, and I realise that these are just the tip of the iceberg of a life.
My elder brother, Martin, recalls even more: Dad selling his treasured old racing bike at Pitfields in New Malden to buy him a new one when money was tight; the bathroom at our old house - the one I was born in (and am here pictured outside) - which Dad, a keen photographer, turned into a makeshift dark room, complete with blackout boards for the window and a red light outside to keep out interlopers while he was developing film. My brother reminded me of just how creative Dad was: for the annual canasta 'tournament' between our parents and our aunt and uncle in Plymouth - a fiercely contested affair - Dad made a trophy out of a painted slab of Polyfilla, mounted beautifully on a piece of polished wood, with his impeccable sign-writing skills applied to the inscription. That trophy, much like The Ashes, would shuttle up and down the A303 according to the victorious participants. Dad would always be making things out of wood scraps. The garage still contains some of his tools, long since used of course. He once made a very good go-kart for my brother, fully capable of taking him around the block, using the slight slope from our road to the next for propulsion. Alas, a practical skill I've not inherited.
Perhaps this self-reliance stems from the fact Dad was born in 1929, at the end of The Roaring Twenties in the year of the Wall Street Crash, which heralded The Depression; a teenager during World War II; a husband in the '50s and father to three babies between 1959 and 1967; an elderly man in the Digital Age. He never got the Internet, or mobile phones for that matter, but he always loved being shown photographs on ours, especially of our own life adventures. Photography was his thing. Few family pictures exist without a camera strapped around his neck.
He was no Luddite, though: a trainee electrical engineer at the age of 15 in wartime Birmingham, joining the Great Barr Telephone Exchange at the age of 16, returning to London from evacuation in 1946. With an aptitude for such things, Dad was called up for his National Service on 1st January, 1948, aged 18, where he was dispatched to Catterick Barracks in Yorkshire to train as a radio mechanic in the Royal Corps of Signals. Somewhere ahead of him at Catterick was Sydney Lotterby, later to become a BBC producer and director, with
Porridge amongst his many credits. While in the Signals, Dad worked on radio calibration for the Parachute Regiment, for which he managed to blag a coveted Paras' red beret, later hanging in the garage, covered in decorating paint. On being demobbed in March 1949, Dad rejoined the Post Office as a telecommunications engineer. It was here, while working out of telephone exchanges in the Surrey area, he met Mum, a telephonist at Elmbridge exchange. I have a romantic notion of Dad, up a telegraph pole, chatting up Mum, though neither ever corroborated such an idea. One thing she does remember, however, is Dad applying for a job at the BBC in 1954.
It was here, successfully employed from 1st November, 1954, that he began his 35-year BBC career, to our enormous pride and advantage as a family. It was here, too, that over the following years he earned a sequence of promotions, starting out as a ‘dolly operator’ in the camera department before becoming a camera operator full time. Eventually he would become the head of a camera crew – Crew 4 – at a time when, slowly, senior camera operators began to get credits at the end of programmes, though it wasn’t commonplace. Thanks to this, however, parts of my father’s BBC career are installed for the rest of time on the pages of the Internet Movie Database, IMDB.com, with entries for episodes of
Eastenders,
Doctor Who,
Last Of The Summer Wine (produced by one Syd Lotterby),
'Allo, 'Allo,
Hi-Di-Hi, and
Only Fools And Horses (for which he’d maintain was his most enjoyable studio experience due to the on-set camaraderie between cast and crew).
Inevitably, we’d benefit as a family from his work at the BBC, getting to visit Television Centre on many occasions. I, in particular, got to be in the studio audience of
Top Of The Pops (a much coveted ticket, in its day) a few times, and also met all the stars of BBC children’s TV when he was working on the
All Star Record Breakers, the end-of-year special version of Roy Castle’s gentle celebration of achievement. One year I filled up an entire autograph book with the signatures of people like the
Blue Peter presenters, Johnny Ball, Brian Cant and others from
Play School and
Play Away.
I’m buzzed by those encounters, even now, and that’s after I’ve met plenty of famous people in my time as a journalist. To the child-me they were my idols, long before I would make idols out of rock stars. In fact, early on in my career, there was a strange moment of crossover when, a couple of years before Dad retired himself, I went up to Television Centre to interview Philip Schofield (in his Broom Cupboard/Gordon The Gopher days) for
Smash Hits magazine. I seem to remember Dad not being that impressed, even though the interview took place not far from a production office where he himself had worked. In 1988 I joined the fledgling Sky TV, and the sort-of family footsteps progression was complete. I was, however, hardly a media brat. I was never encouraged to work in the media. But I know how proud - secretly, perhaps - he was that I’d carved out a career in the industry. When I moved into technology with Philips, we had something new in common, given his army and telephony days, and indeed the fact that the bit of Philips’ business I was responsible for in my PR role was the consumer electronics arm.
By the time I returned to the UK, in 2016 and after 17 years abroad (and now working in telecommunications, another link to Dad’s professional origins), Dad's Alzheimer’s was already advanced, though he still had some degree of stubborn mobility. Osteoporosis, a side-effect of treatment for prostate cancer, had rendered him bent-double. We grew used to this figure appearing at door handle height, still getting himself up and down stairs, vainly refusing to use his Zimmer frame. That period always struck me as profound. His insistence on still propelling himself, as stubborn and even as stupid as it was, indicated his state of mind - decaying, it may have been, but he was still prepared to fight.
That fight ended last week, peacefully and painlessly, from what we can gather. To the end, Dad maintained his famous reserve, a quiet dignity. The lights may have been flickering, but the looks he’d give Mum, in particular, showed that his love for the woman was undiminished after the better part of seven decades together. It was hard, at the end, to know what he recognised or acknowledged, even with Mum sat beside his bed. She, for her part, has been brilliant. As painful as these last 12 months of separation have been, Mum has been stoic, accepting even. That doesn’t ease any pain of losing your husband, a week and a half short of 66 years of marriage - but I’d hope her knowing that Dad’s final days and hours were peaceful and in comfort would at least be of comfort to her.
They say you only appreciate how someone shaped your life after they’ve gone, but I’ve always known what Dad has instilled in me. Firstly, and perhaps foremost, a sense of humour. Actually, I get this equally from both parents (Mum’s remains robustly intact, I’m happy to report, despite her 89 years and various challenges to health and wellbeing of her own). Dad’s sense of humour came partly from the things he found funny. Even as the first signs of dementia were showing, he could still lose it watching a
Tom & Jerry cartoon, or a
Pink Panther film. Slapstick was clearly his thing, but thanks to his curation of tapes of old radio comedies like
The Goon Show,
Hancock’s Half Hour and
The Navy Lark, and our gathering around the dinner table at 6.30 each weekday evening to listen to
I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue,
Just A Minute or some such comedy in Radio 4’s ‘funny half hour’ before
The Archers, I gained an appreciation for ‘the theatre of the mind’. Dad once took me to see Jacques Tati’s comic masterpiece
Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, one Saturday afternoon. I would have been 13 or 14, so being dragged to see some black and white film featuring a French actor with little if any dialogue sounded like the absolute worst, uncool thing he could possibly take me to. I ended up loving that film, and still do.
There are many moments of mirth that I could recount here, but would take an entire book, not a blog post, to record. Indeed, in a life of 90 years, there’s so much about Dad that could be retold, largely to convey who he was, but also to provide therapeutic process. There’s no space for the holiday recollections, those annual visits to Devon and the gales of laughter that blew up the stairs from the living room below during that canasta tournament; being stuck outside the pub in Tolworth with a packet of crisps and a lemonade while he and my grandfather shared a beer; damp cottages in Cornwall and rain-soaked fortnights in Wales (yeah, while the rest of Britain turned brown in the drought of 1976).
Every family has such memories. It’s what’s called normality. The cruelty of Alzheimer’s is that Dad’s memories were washed away as the disease progressed, along with name recognition in the latter stages. And then the eyes grow hollow and you have no idea as to whether you’re a son or just a noise. Others’ experiences will, no doubt, differ.
Strangely, though, my dad’s incarceration over the last twelve months has been mostly without any heavy drama. I can’t speak for other family members, but even the sight of him in his wheelchair, parked up in the care home dining room like Operation Stack lorries on the M20, for enforced viewings of old black and white films, didn’t upset me as much as I thought it would. But twelve months is a long time. In recent weeks the contraction of various infections and illnesses, all symptoms of the body’s gradual disconnection from itself, moved him from unwilling participant in the Cuckoo’s Nest to being bed-ridden and struggling to communicate (or not at all) and slowly creeping up on Death’s Door.
Dad’s passing has been my first true experience of family bereavement, other departures not withstanding. You find coping mechanisms, the self-reassurance of saying to yourself “He’s comfortable” when, in truth, he probably wasn’t. And later, “He’s still got his dignity,” when the reality is somewhat less. But still you remain stoic. You know the worst is coming, but it’s just too convenient to recognise. And then you go and see Paul Carrack at the London Palladium, and he performs
The Living Years, the Mike + The Mechanics song he leant his sublime, blue-eyed soul vocals too. And then you realise that you are tearing up. Properly moist. Beads of tears down the cheeks. The voice as wobbly as a resigning prime minister on the steps of 10 Downing Street. And you feel winded, not because you’ve involuntarily started crying in public in your 50s, but because reality just caught up with you like a mugger in a dark alley. But it’s a warning sign. A sign that you’re vulnerable to emotion, even if you’re rationalising things simply, it's still the sore throat heralding the full-blown bout of flu that is fully grieving. That is still to come.
Now, today, I’m still in a strange place. Perhaps due to being more mentally prepared for Dad’s death than I’d realised. And whether that’s a good thing or not, it has allowed me space to appreciate what a wonderful life Reginald John Poulter had in his 90 years, the fun and laughter we had as a family, the cool stuff we got to experience through his job, and the profound, enduring love he had for his wife, consciously or not, right up to the very end.
While going through his things, my brother found, in his wallet, three tiny photographs. One, of (we presume) a family gathering not long after Dad had met Mum; the second, one of my mum, brother and sister when the latter were still in single figures; and thirdly, one showing the infant me, together with Mum and my siblings. An enduring reminder of what we meant to him. And what he meant to us.
