Ā I assert ownership of this work
Origin and definition adapted from Collins English Dictionary
Slang: Ā Out of oneās mind
Word origin: C19. Original military slang from Deolali or Devlali, a town near Mumbai, the location of a military sanatorium and the Hindustani word for fever, tap.
Every fourth Sunday, more or less, for ten years. Thatās how long it went on for. A four hundred mile round trip beginning after work on a Friday evening and completing back at home on Sunday around six. I was glad to do it. She had been the best of mothers and it was time to pay some of that care back but I am no angel and cannot say I was wholly selfless or always ungrudgingā¦but it would have been unthinkable not to have made those journeys.
And that ten-year span took her from a badly rheumatic old lady, with much left of what had been a very good mind, all the way to a cot chair, carefully positioned pillows, a ghoulish expression and the ālostnessā which is the most shocking thing. You greave in stages when someone has dementia, and by the time it comes to an end in death you are relieved. Or at least I was. That decade had been an ever-growing aberration of what she was.
There were midway points, such as when at the care home some of her self could be retrieved by a Frank Sinatra song or a babyās photograph, but once a month was not enough and careless carers could not be bothered to make the effort as evidenced by the dusty, cobwebbed corner where these things were kept for her. That time was not the before and after moment. It was earlier when she was still at home, in her own house. It was one specific weekend and I can remember it clearly. Everything changed after that.
I got there Friday evening at about half-past ten. All the lights in the house were on but mum was up in her bedroom. She shouted down āwhoās that?ā
I answered as always, āJust me mamā,
And she would come back again and say āwhoās that?ā
And this time I would say āJust me, Ryanā.
āOh love Iām glad youāve come. Itās a long drive for you, get something for yourself. Thereās ham in the fridgeā. Ā
Indeed I was hungry, Iād had a McDonalds on the road but that was like nothing ten minutes after finishing it. I opened the fridge, and all by itself on the middle rack was a little plastic pack of boiled ham. Nothing like the meat we got sliced from the bone years before when Iād lived at home. I reached over but then withdrew with revulsion at the sight of a green-silver coat growing on the meat. The pack only had a couple of slices left. She must have eaten some that day. I did not want to look at the bread or think about her eating it.
My elder brother had remarked one time that leaving her after a visit had felt like leaving a toddler in the middle of a busy road. She paid for carers to call in four times a day to give her meds, help with simple meals and to get her washed and dressed. That was the theory but some of these angels of mercy skimped and rushed in and out doing the least of what they could do. I had witnessed this when they did not know I was sat in the corner. It left me sickened and angry. The only regular caring face was that of my youngest daughter who did mums shopping on a weekend and gave her time and love.
This home-care charade was a sordid carry on and my mother was fading through neglect. There was no way it could go on but she was refusing to go into a care home and was furious anytime the subject was broached, accusing me of trying to get the house and steal her money.
I felt this state as a great inertia. I could not go one way and she would not move the other and in the middle was this nightmare being played out. I had a job which paid barely enough to fund my situation: getting both daughters through university and doling out a sizeable monthly amount to my ex-wife and her lawyer. Something was going to have to give. If I moved back up north I would not earn two-thirds of my present wage and everything would come crashing down.
A month previously the police had phoned and said they had found my mother in the shop-door-way of a Toys āRā Us shop in the city at almost midnight. Seems she had set out to buy presents for her grandchildren and was found braying on the shop doorway and screaming at the empty place to be let in. It had only been a few weeks earlier that he Tetleyās Tea man had sold her a bedroom full of Easter Eggs and commemorative mugs. It was all going to pieces and there were disgraceful scoundrels around who were happy to prey upon her.
The house was getting a tatty look and the brown mark on that cushion might be shit. It felt much like sleeping over in a house without an occupant, a place that did not belong to anybody. I would do a top to bottom clean through that weekend and fix the garden up to an acceptable standard but nobody was really living here. Mum was just occupying the rooms. I got a half-drunk bottle of brandy out of the boot of my car and poured a full measure into a faded yellow Tupperware plastic beaker which my father had once kept his teeth in. There was only one proper cup left and that would be upstairs at her bedside. She liked to sip water during the night when she woke with a thirst.
I let the spirit do its work. Relax me after the drive, give me a dose of wellbeing and prepare for sleep. I texted my girlfriend and told her Iād got here and things were as awful as always and wished her goodnight. Ā
I had to break this inertia and do something. It was like a free fall.
The thin, scratchy, woollen army surplus blankets were still there on my childhood bed. Their feel was my first conscious perception of the day.
Quick wash at the sink then I walked to the Mace store on the estate and bought some breakfast supplies in. Got back to the house and made a tray of toast, orange juice and breakfast cereal but by then she was up and she had it at the table. I knew her mental facilities were at their best in the morning so settled on having the conversation Iād been stewing on right away.
āMam, we need to have a talk about what needs to happen next. Youāre getting frail and itās time to go into a care homeā. I am one of those people who cannot dress up a difficult conversation and if I was then she might have missed the point somewhere amongst all the fluff.
āWhat are you saying Ryan that Iām so old and decrepit that I cannot live in my own house anymore?ā
There was a temptation to temper but decided against it-
āI need to talk to you honestly now mum, this is getting dangerous. There will be a fire or something and that will be the end of youā
āAnd Iād bet youād like that, that sod of a brother of yours and you canāt wait to get your hands on this house and my money. Your bastards, the pair of you. Taking from your own mother. You ought to be ashamed and trying to dress it up as helping me. Well, how is stealing off me helping? Thatās wicked.ā
āI have got to be honest mam, this is probably one of the last times that we will be able to have a proper conversation. Iām not after your money or your bloody house or anything. I am only saying these things because you need taking care of.ā
āWhy do I need taking care of? Who do you think youāre talking to? I am not a child you can order about. So what is this big thing thatās wrong with me? Tell me that.ā
My mind spliced for a moment and one half of it was thinking how well she had kept her verbosity when dementia was stripping everything else away at pace. She had been an English teacher maybe that gave her some kind of buffer: an extra resilience against the fleeing away of words Iād seen before.
I was pretty brutal. āMam, you have dementia, you have coped well on your own since dad died but now we are at the point where you need care. I've got to start being honest with youā.
āHow dare you say things like that? You bastard. You bloody bastard. Get out of my house. Sling your hook and donāt come back. I can manage perfectly well without people like youā. She was on her feet now and screaming the words.
I tell folk, and I am open about it. No one gets as angry as the grown-up children of a parent with dementia. Even though you know itās not the āreal themā talking and saying things that sting and the not understanding on their part is not some spiteful refusal to understand. The rage was building up in me and so I moved across into the lounge which was one room with the dining room except there were sliding doors between them which I kept open. I sat in the threadbare high-backed chair facing across to where she was at the table six yards away. The curtains behind me were still drawn and the light was off so I was in the half-dark and I knew I would be effectively invisible in a minute or two. The best way of calming her was to become invisible and give her mind a chance to settle on something else. Ā So I sat still and watched whilst she munched on her toast and looked straight ahead but not registering me.
We can never truly know where we will end up, and that was probably for the best. How would it be if we did see such an end approaching? Ā All that life lived and encoded in the brain, stripped away and lost. She had been an exceptional woman whose life had taken her across the most extreme mental terrains and peaked in wonderful achievements, being given degrees, met prime ministers, won an elevated place in the memories of many hundreds of children but she was now someone trying to munch her toast sans teeth (they were always being lost) and so in danger of choking.
I thought it wise to get out in the garden for the morning and be yet more invisible. By lunch, it would be safe to come back in again. The memory of what had happened at breakfast would only last a few moments but the emotional weather in her head would linger.
There was a drizzle and in a normal situation I would have put the garden work off for another day, but now was the only option as tomorrow I would be heading back home. It was early spring so I gave the grass its first cut of the year, cut back on some overgrowth in the bushes and pushed bulbs into the ground. By 11.30 I was sodden to the skin and caked in slimy clay mud. I sneaked in the house and got a bath, went down to the high street, did her shopping and then got us fish and chips for lunch. That would shift her mood.
When Iād got back she had retrieved the ham and bread out of the bin and was chomping away on a rancid sandwich. One could not stop all these things but still, I felt like a thoughtless shit. Why had I not got the stuff out of the house? She accepted a few chips though and with a neat sleight of hand, I removed the remains of the sandwich. House cleaning was on my schedule for the afternoon but decided Sunday morning would do fine enough.
I know what happened to old people when they went into care homes. The progression downwards would accelerate, previously home and familiarity had been an anchor, but when inserted into the strange āout of placenessā of a care homeā¦well, that would cut her lose from life. Ā Maybe in a year, she might be in one of those chairs with a swing across lap-table which incidentally restrain the occupant and stop them from wandering.Then sometime later there would be a cot like bed, pillows placed strategically around her, and there she would lay for months or years āin second childishness and mere oblivion.ā
She and I needed to get out somewhere nice for the afternoon. We settled on the choice of Ilkley Moor, just half an hour away in the car. I knew then and there, in all likelihood, this was the last time she would take pleasure in such āseeing of thingsā. Mum was happy at the prospect of an outing, the argument of the morning and its thundery mood all gone. We stopped at a tea hut in the car park of a spot known locally as The Cow and Calf, a great rock standing alone and splendid, yards from a towering rocky outcrop that had once reminded people of a cow with its calf, on the downside of an escarpment looking out over the town.
I helped my mother out of the car but her body had forgotten how to walk on sloping ground, so I brought the tea and cake to her in the car. She could not balance the paper plate on her knee or grip the plastic utensil so I passed the cake over on a plastic fork.
I took the car twenty yards forward so she could see out over the town and the Dales beyond. The drizzle had been pushed out by great swarms of windblown rain pellets coming in diagonally across the valley. The sun deflecting through every watery lens and making a wonderful show.
We stopped at a favourite baker under the old Temperance Hall on the way home and bought a few of her favourite things. Vanilla slices, ham off the bone, a small brown loaf and the special pork pies. Individual jellies and custard trifles. These had been our regular Friday treats, which it had been my task to pick up after walking from school over the Engine Fields.
Sat around the Formica topped table we were about to set about the Vanilla Slices when mum said. āRyan, am I going Dolally Tap?ā
I heard her but asked her to repeat it.
āI want to know off you Ryan if Iām going Dolally. Will you tell meā?
I thought about lying but just as quickly rejected it. There has to be a bloody good reason for not being truthful if someone asks you a question like that. āYes, mum you have Dementiaā, I hesitated and then decided to leave it at that.
Then she looked over and in her old way said āOh buggerā and then carried on with her Vanilla slice.
I donāt know if it was the invigorating effect of going out or just the natural ebb and flow of her mental clarity, but I knew she understood what she was asking and what I said in reply. And it was back to what was typical of the old lass to accept my answer without fuss. I felt it very brave of her. Over the coming years, that moment stayed with me and became a kind of badge of what she was. By the next morning, it felt like the woman was already closing down. She either did not remember the conversation or chose not to speak about it.
Over the next weeks, I spoke to a Social Worker and arranged for my mum's admission to a dementia care home in Idle outside of Bradford, which in time let my mum down badly and all the things I expected happened even sooner than I imagined.
Iād got her there by saying we were going out for another ride but I think we both knew what I was doing. I wonāt be hard on myself about that. I had to do what was necessary but I wonāt dress it up as something it wasnāt.
More years went by till she reached the cot bed stage. A new care home took wonderful care of her and I cannot fault any of her time there. In all the fall into oblivion took ten years from first mistaking the radio for hearing voices in the wall to the last, very hurried but too late Friday evening drive up the A1.
Itās always been my nature to quietly stew on things and then bring the stewing to a close with some gesture to myself. And then move onto the next thing. I donāt get to choose (at least consciously) what the full stop will consist of. It just sort of drops into my head then I feel released.
Two years after her death I woke up one morning and decided to go to Deolali in India and do āThe Dolally Tapā. That needs two kinds of explaining.
Firstly, what is the Dolally Tap? When the British were in India they brought items of linguistic culture back home but did not spell them correctly. Deolali or Devlali was a permanent British Army of India camp about six (modern) train hours from Mumbai. It included a military hospital which treated soldiers evacuated in with dangerous fevers of one kind or another, which were as a group termed the Dolally Tap. Tap being Hindi for fever. Then the meaning of the words morphed with use by British army lads like my great-grandfather and came to be the words used to describe the act of going bonkers with the heat and boredom of the camp. The term evolved some more and became about mental illness, and by then the people who used it had no idea where it came from. Growing up in Yorkshire we learnt that there were two kinds of mental illness. Being balmy, equated to very odd and or even floridly eccentric behaviour, whilst Dolally Tap meant you were totally going off your head. Itās lovely how we used these words as commonly as we spoke about anything but never thought of whence they came.
So my mum, at the moment when she needed to ask about the fitness of her mind, opted for words she would have heard spoken, in childhood, by her grandfather. This was a woman who had gone all the way from mill hand, and cleaner to be an MSc in Education and a Head of English in a middle school, but when the time came she chose a homely word. I liked that a lot. It summed up the person she was. Some would have gone the full drama, or have hidden behind intellectualisation but she used the language of her home and where she started from. Her choice of words was a marriage of humour and dignity.
She liked to do things like that. Pass a binding rope between past and present, and the threatening and the funny. She did a lot of thinking about words and how they could best express something. At that breakfast table, she was asking if there was a cliff edge under her toes, and she would have certainly felt the fear of that potential fall but she chose a form which was so wonderfully brave.
So thatās why I went to Deolali/ Devlali. Of course, I added other experiences and visits to the trip: Delhi, New Yearās Eve midnight trains, Gandhi, Rajasthan, but at its core was the ride to, Deolali. I was making a statement of respect, remembrance and gratitude in my mind, and I hoped such actions would complete a necessary circuit and then I could go back home, and be content.
The odd pilgrimage started out from my little ramshackle hotel at 4 am. The man who manned the desk and all the other staff who worked in the small hotel were asleep across every surface in the reception area. The night clerk stirred himself and called a taxi that took me across town to the Chhatrapati Shivaji Railway Terminus. I walked the last few hundred yards from the drop off point but in the road as the pavement was carpeted with sleeping bodies including what looked like whole families with babies and small children. Ā
Ā India has ten types of first-class carriage but only one designated second class and the authorities take care to tell foreigners that the latter is not recommended. I took it anyway, in part because there was nothing else but also I could see orderly, comfortable trains at home. This was India and if oneās eyes are a school we have to look to learn.
Ā As expected it was standing only in Second Class and we were crammed like matches in an overfull box but at the same time, we were also an incrementally creeping mass that (irresistibly) pushed me toward the door of the traditional squat toilet where I spent most of the six-hour ride. I did have another view out between the legs of a hostile looking youth who had wedged himself tight within the four angles of the open door of the carriage. And indeed I videoed the parched, red dusty hills from that perspective as young women sang and somehow danced to the tinkling tune of their finger cymbals further down the carriage.
Ā I had once taken my mother on a rural bus journey in Swaziland, a small country in Southern Africa. We, the passengers, were similarly on top of each other for that journey. It was the intense, infringing, vivid, loud, brash and jarring unfamiliarity of our surroundings that was most upon her. I watched from sideways on as an old man with chickens and no teeth asked if she needed a husband and simultaneously a goat licked the space behind her knee and she shrieked a little and the lecherous suitor laughed well naturedly. She looked at me, grinned bravely and said she would never complain about the 55 Leeds bus again. That became our line about anything difficult from then onwards and I suspect it was the best bit of her slide presentation to her friends at the Wesleyan Methodist Ladies social. Her kidney stones had given her jip but she had conquered that bus journey and I suspect she would have done at least as well here on this train to Deolali.
Ā I stood at the open door to the toilet all the way, averting my eyes from the scene: men crouching over a hole set in a circular, inwardly sloping floor, whose contents spilt out and washing around the floor. Six hours of holding myself still and facing resolutely away left me with a tortured back and feeling like I could never move with ease again.
Ā It was a long train, and when we stopped my poor carriage was beyond where the platform finished. Most of my fellow passengers made off through the thick undergrowth towards a broken fence but I turned the other way and headed in the direction of the military checkpoint where a railway employee was checking the tickets and soldiers were watching out for likely terrorists. Nationally, tensions were up again about the dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, and there had been some dreadful killings in recent weeks. As a military base, nearby Deolali, the camp had to be a target, and the security at the station serving it was understandable
Ā The soldiers waved me through. Eccentric Englishmen like me did not fit the profile of interest even if they were carrying an outsize rucksack on their back. Foolishly I had not considered the possibility of a military presence and it was not just on my platform. A machine gun was mounted within a nest of sandbags at the end of the next platform across and formed the third point of a triangle with a spot where I was standing.
Ā I had to find a clear station platform sign displaying the true name of the town, stand beside it and do a brief and discreet tap dance. It was plane though that such a thing might be mistaken, by the many soldiers, for a nervy suicide bomber about to detonate himself, so I risked being splattered by a machine gun or shot through by a lone pot shot of a soldierās rifle. But not ādoing the danceā, after all this effort, was unthinkable. Of course in more normal circumstances, when we are about to do something which might appear odd, we explain ourselves first. āSorry, pardon me, I know this is going to look odd so am just quickly forewarning you that I am about to do a tap dance in honour of my dead mother. Please do not mistake this for a suicide bomber attackā.
Ā No that would not work. I walked to the very end of the platform hoping for inspiration. There was a trolley parked there stacked to waist height with brown, cardboard parcels. They would be sufficient to block the line of sight from the military checkpoint on my platform but would put me directly opposite the machine gun nest on Platform 2 which was just yards away across the first track. I needed something to block the view from there whilst I performed my dance beneath the sign next to the parcels. Then just like an apple might fall into your hand from out of a tree I heard the approach of a local train from my left. That was it, the timing would be crucial but it was probably a winner. Something which would legitimately block the view from platform 2 and allow me to perform my dance, if only from the waist down so the soldiers on my platform had no clue.
Ā And thatās what I did. I pretended to be a tourist filming the arrival of a typically overcrowded Indian train, and when the train draws level with me I pointed the camera downward and recorded a film of my feet doing a little tap dance for around ten seconds. The upper half of my body mostly but not entirely still. The men crowded at the windows of the train and hanging out the door and are watching me. They wave, and laugh and cheer and call things out I cannot understand.
Ā And that little dance in the shadow of a train in the station at Doelali closes my circuit. I can say āBye Kathā, and now itās all done and you are put to rest.Ā
The author is very tall and local people kept asking to pose for photos with him
