Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [235]
We return to the hospital just after two. His condition is the same. I wait beside the bed, and after a while find myself becoming quite accustomed to the rattling gurgle of deeply drawn breaths which had so unnerved me when I first saw him.
As we really don’t know how long he will survive, it’s decided that I shall go back to London and Angela will stay with Mother, at least until Monday. Tomorrow I have to travel to Durham and on Monday morning the first of the last three Ripping Yarns begins filming.
On the way back I stop at the hospital. Father has been moved up to one end of the ward. He’s breathing as heavily and noisily as before. The nurses still wash him and turn him regularly. He lies in a clean and comfortable bed. In the background the news and the football results. What a ritual Sports Report always used to be on a Saturday. At about 6.25 I leave.
I’m 33 and he’s 77 when I last see him, an emaciated, gravel-breathed shadow of the father I knew.
Say goodbye to the nurses, knowing I won’t see them again. One of them says he’d really grown to like my dad, which is nice, because it didn’t happen that way often during his life.
Into the car and down the A12 to London. Beyond Ipswich, a colossal rainstorm. I must have been passing Colchester when Father died – at 7.25. Mother and Angela were almost at Blythburgh, slowed down by the heavy rain. He was dead by the time they got there.
Sunday, April 24th, Durham
Preparations for departure. Packing cases, writing last-minute letters, regretting lack of time and feeling of unpreparedness for the weeks to come.
Swimming – always good for calming the troubled breast, then a roast beef lunch, and am driven down to catch the three o’clock train at King’s Cross.
Settle into the seat, armed with unlearnt script and the Sunday papers, and it’s only as we pull out of King’s Cross and are rumbling through Hertfordshire that the pressure of events in the last few days hits me with a wave of depression. Fortunately I only feel such depression very rarely, but it intensifies as the train nears familiar stations like Sandy and familiar views like the fields beyond St Neots. I miss home and family. I feel unutterably sad that I am going away to the grey north having seen so little of them for the last two weeks. I feel, too, the sadness at my father’s death which eluded me yesterday.
It’s a feeling of loneliness. A feeling that I am speeding away from the familiar world, which for some reason I need at the moment, to an unfamiliar world of new faces, new people, new work. And the skies turn greyer too. Increasing the melancholy.
Fortunately this despondency does not last even the length of the journey and I’m a little more phlegmatic about things as the train edges round the curving viaduct with the splendid mass of Durham Cathedral looming across the River Wear.
To the County Hotel – an old, probably Georgian building, which has been expanded, in the process becoming rather airport loungefied. Met by Eddie S, Liz.1 Aware of the slight awkwardness with which they bring up the subject of Father’s death. No mention of death, just ‘Sorry about your news’. They’re kind people, though, very straightforward.
Decide not to eat that night, still feeling metabolically maladjusted. A few drinks in the hotel bar with a smattering of wardrobe and props boys. Put on as cheerful a face as possible.
Friday, April 29th, Durham
Tonight Jim [Franklin, the director] has laid a car on for me to return to London, for tomorrow is Father’s funeral, and we film again on Sunday.2
Say my goodbyes to all, including Ken Colley,