My father Monty Booth died at peace after a restless life. With my brothers Michael and David, and accompanied by close family, I wished him goodbye this weekend.
John Montague Anthony Booth - ‘Monty’ (1938-2024)
“Picture a chilly spring morning at the Pearly Gates. St Peter is on duty again, of course – that’s the job he signed up for, and while his boss is loving, he has high standards. Peter rubs his hands to warm them up a bit – there are a few more degrees in the sunlight now, but you wouldn’t want to be taking off your winter halo yet.
There’s a knock on the gleaming metalwork. St Peter opens the gates to reveal one of his angelic deputies holding the hand of a new arrival, Monty, who is a little tired by the journey, blinking in the bright light above cloud level, slightly disorientated by all the unusually fresh air. After some cursory paperwork, they leave St Peter to deal with the next arrival, and the angel leads Monty to one of the beautifully appointed common rooms, where men of a certain generation – and they are mostly men – are glued to an action film on a big screen.
“Do we want this?” Monty asks. It is not a question in the strict sense of the word; rather, a rhetorical device. It is a version of Queen Victoria’s way of referring to herself, and makes it clear that ‘we do not want this’. So Monty marches towards the television - and switches it over to the golf.
I don’t know what Dad is watching today on the big Sky Sports in the Sky, but I imagine he has made himself at home by now. Nobody up there worries terribly if you choose Bournville chocolate for breakfast every single morning - or if you confuse the freely flowing Fanta for orange juice. The irises are in constant bloom, requiring the lightest of attention; the TV remote never runs out of batteries; and the cats, just as they do on earth, groom themselves. Oh, and the lawnmowers start at the very first tug of the starter cord.
Gradually (and the process has almost certainly begun already) Dad will be becoming the best and happiest version of John Montague Anthony Booth once again. That is one of the wonderful things about heaven – the return to your true self. After all, it wouldn’t be terribly heavenly up there if the place was some sort of dowdy geriatric home, stuffed with muttering biddies, vaguely smelling of UTIs, however comfortable the adjustable cloud-based seating. So I think he may be heading towards his mid-to-late thirties. Roughly the age at which Michael and David and I think of him as being at his most content.
That’s also a good time to picture another scene. Run your eye from the plug in a socket in the sun porch that connects to a heavy duty orange cable snaking across the lawn. At full extension, it connects to another, with the joint in a wooden fruit box to protect it from the dew and a possible short circuit – it is still quite early on a day that promises to be hot later. The series of cables runs for almost a half kilometre to the bottom of the privet hedge where Dad and Grandpa are finishing part of the annual Sisyphean gardening pentathlon – cutting the hedge, pruning the orchard, digging the vegetable garden, clearing the woods and mowing the lawns. Grandpa is pushing a rickety ladder into the hedge to assist reach for the furthest bits. The ladder is on an incline of about 40%. Dad is on the top of it. He is, as he would put it, in a muck sweat. Our job was to help – ranging from raking up the bits, using wooden ‘clappers’ to dump them in a trailer, to driving the tractor to the bonfire patch, and to in some cases flouncing indoors to watch television instead, in some cases without sanction. The health and safety regime of the times began and ended with the boxes for the cable connectors and the cord of the trimmer looped round his neck. Dad did the job in office shoes and an old Van Heusen collared shirt.
Lunch that day would have been based on the things Dad grew in the garden. Fresh, full of vitamins and, in an oxymoron of the times, over-cooked to perfection. ‘But it melts in the mouth,’ he would say of courgette, which we steadfastly refused. Who then knew we would later end up willingly paying through the nose for the stuff in Waitrose?
Who also knew that we would not keep a solemn promise we made to each other as brothers picking up pruned twigs in the frost with only knitted gloves for protection. (Well, two of us brothers anyway.) That if any of us had gardens when we grew up, the other two would come over as a matter of urgency - and concrete them over.
Dad should – would – have been a gardener, not a financier. And his love of the practice was something he passed on to us. Not just in a kind of Stockholm syndrome way – but a genuine pleasure in attending to the natural pace of things outside the hothouse of the office, warzone or airport departure lounge.
The same passion, in different measures, and for different sports, comes from Dad. He didn’t pretend to care a jot for football – a welly-booted kick to get the ball as far away as possible was as far as he involved himself in our games. But he’d spend hours bowling at us on the cricket strip, late into an evening – the only restriction being that a six into the flower beds meant you were out, and so could do no further harm to his achievements. He would encourage us to play snooker at our neighbour Louis Alexander’s place, and would carefully mow a circle for clock golf if guests were coming. A sudden flare of temper at a missed putt is another inheritance – genetic or learned, it’s hard to say. But the phrase ‘shit to the thing’, aimed at a two-stroke Stihl chainsaw that inexplicably refused to start, was the first time I ever heard an adult swear at close quarters.
Like most Booth boys, Dad was also perplexed by women. It may be true of all men, at least according to the repertoire of the old-school comedians Dad liked, but I think our breed has it especially hard. A look of utter terror flashed over his face at the threatened approach of a belly-dancer in a restaurant in Istanbul. Other customers were popping banknotes into her underwear. He knew it would be his turn soon. A final enticing shake of her embonpoint was the final straw: ‘No!’ he bellowed. Dad would almost certainly have preferred to have been checking the earwig traps on the chrysanthemum canes, or pulling apart wireworms in the vegetable patch.
It is unlikely he would have enjoyed the food out there much, either. It being foreign, and therefore by definition, ‘mucked about’. Thinks: “Why can’t you get a tongue sandwich in Turkey? Is there something wrong with them?”
Do I get my hair-trigger intolerance of unexpected change from him? Probably. Have I told my children, messing about on the back seat, that they can ‘jolly well get out and walk’? I don’t think so, but there are better persons to ask here in the room today. Ultimately, what do we take from our parents? And what remains when they have gone? What should we expect of each other in families? We say we tried our best, but what is good enough? What should I have done to be a better son?
Questions like this pile up, do not sit easily with each other. Tentative answers evaporate in the heat of more intense scrutiny. Perhaps that is the only lesson of death – that there is no answer except that we must strive to ask better questions. Because while we devote many hours worrying about things that may never happen, we spend very little time on the one thing that surely will.
Dad’s death is a reminder – literally: a prompt to return something to mind – of the glory and the brevity of it all. And perhaps, too, of how the one depends on the other.
It is probably getting late up in heaven. Time passes differently there. You can choose the moment, and live in it, as we are encouraged to do on earth, and so rarely manage. The celestial Mouton Cadet has been warming nicely by the fire. A log is spitting cinders on the Persian rug, and there’s a vague scent of singed wool, not unpleasant, quite evocative. The serving angel has anticipated a need for ‘any nuts or anything’, as she always does at this time of the day. Monty makes himself comfortable: there’s another episode of The Two Ronnies coming up soon and neither has aged a bit.
So this evening, and tomorrow, and for the days that follow: all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.
Dad knew a thing or two about gardening. He knew that out of the compost of a spent life, unexpectedly beautiful things may grow. They must be attended to, if we wish them to take root, of course. But ultimately they are out of our control. In accepting that not everything happens exactly as we design, we begin to realise with something approaching relief that not everything is up to us: and then we come to be grateful.