Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [104]
But today he was negotiating tenaciously with me, like an ageing politician trying to strike one last bargain, pull off one last coup.
Easter Sunday, April 14th, Southwold
Drove over to St Audry’s after breakfast to bring Grandfather home for the day. (It’s nearly a month since he went into hospital.)
Took him some clothes and a box of chocolates for the nurses. They dressed him behind some screens, while I spoke to Mr Smy, the charge nurse. We were talking fairly softly, but when I mentioned to Mr Smy that Grandfather recently had been very confused there was a shout from behind the screen – ‘I’m not confused.’
Sun shining as we drove back to Southwold – the sharp cool wind at least had blown fogs and hazes away and the countryside looked fresh and green. A great day for colours, heavy dark shadows on the pine trees, and a vivid, almost luminous green on some of the fields.
We had a chicken casserole for lunch and he drank a glass of Alsace wine. Afterwards he pottered around the house, looking in all the rooms, trying to make helpful comments, but they generally came out as grumbles. His life is very much geared to his current obsessions, and these obsessions are nearly always anxieties and problems. There seems to be nothing that makes him happy any more. He told me he dislikes all the nurses, and clearly he is finding it very difficult to be told what to do by people who, as he says, ‘have an inferiority complex’ (a social inferiority complex, he means), which they take out on him. He even said they mutter about Mummy after she’s gone because ‘she’s well-dressed and well-spoken’.
At 6.30, Granny and I drove him back to the hospital.
Monday, April 15th, Southwold
After lunch, built a new piece of fence for Granny, whilst she and Helen sorted through an old chestful of Grandfather’s papers. Letters from Shrewsbury home to his parents, old school reports, Indian Railway timetables, dance cards from Poona, with the names of his partners for the evening marked.1 A fascinating collection – in the Shrewsbury and India days much evidence that he was quite a character, enjoyed life and was sociable: ‘always looks as though he has done something wicked, but never has’ – school report from Shrewsbury.
His later letters to the head of Edgar Allen’s,2 for instance, complaining that the £1,600 salary he was receiving in 1960 was hardly sufficient for a ‘public school-educated, university graduate’, have a much more hopeless air about them.
But Thomas and Willy love his old bundles of cheques and Thomas has taken to playing’bank managers’.
Tuesday, April 16th Southwold
Woke feeling refreshed, then suddenly my heart sank to my stomach as the full weight of work about to descend, the number of small problems, things to be done, things to avoid being done, hit me. A silly reaction, to be so bowled over. It will disappear when I am up and doing things, but the pleasure of being in Suffolk, remote from all phone calls, deals, confrontations, etc, etc, is just beginning to sink in, and I think the sudden realisation that the brief rest was over and that tonight I would be back among the pressures, hit me harder than usual this morning.
We had a superb little lunch, it being our eighth wedding anniversary, with a half-bottle of Bollinger, and delicious freshly caught cod with mushroom sauce.
Drove home via St Audry’s where we stopped off to see Grandfather. As I took him back after a short walk to the car park, he mounted the stairs to the ward with a heavy sigh and murmured, ‘Here we are … the via dolorosa,’ and he stood at the window, waving, trying to smile as Thomas (unconcerned of course by the fate of his grandfather) and I walked away in the late afternoon sun to our car. It could have been heart-rending, but I am trying to keep the whole thing in proportion, and