I. M. Clive Jones 1943-2011: Memorial Diary
IT'S FRIDAY 20th JANUARY 2012. We travel due east this lunchtime for Clive’s memorial service in Hunstanton tomorrow. It’s 160 miles to King’s Lynn and it rains heavily every inch of the way, for three and a half hours, without a break. The skies are lumpy, grey and dark as far as you can see, a half-light where proper daylight never really arrives. The M54 merges into the M6, that one into the A14 and the A47. Among headlights and spray there’s nothing to tell where you might be as the landscape is pounded by wetness on every side, and any view from those bleak commercial routes is obliterated. The only moment of valued, bright recognition comes when, along the A14, we pass the slip-roads for Wellingborough where we visited Clive and Julia during the couple of years they lived there before leaving for New York State. But those signposts will lead us now to nothing we want, just a town long past its best, no longer even worth a detour.
THE VAST GREY CEILING hangs so low that no line marks the horizon, the earth seamlessly giving itself up to the sky. Having driven this A47 before in such conditions, I know this is how to view the Fens at their most thrillingly characteristic: in continuous rain pouring down from a monotone sky on a drab chilly end of January afternoon. For the full-on unique desolation of these featureless acres, this is the time to see them. People do live out in these wide unhedged prairies of rich flat cultivation. There are their houses, each standing far from its nearest neighbour, each with its own infinitely uninterrupted view of nothing very much whatsoever. Narrow lanes follow the lines of the dykes, leading from nowhere to nowhere else. You may wonder what this does to the minds of those born-and-bred among the endless grain crops, brassicas and root vegetables. I think we know.
OUR B&B THIS TIME is Fairlight Lodge on Goodwins Road, and we’re there by four as the rain appears to be easing off. While Julie visits a friend, I slip round to Chase House to see Tony Ellis. We open a bottle of Belgian beer and examine the programme for the forthcoming Fiction Festival in some detail. Both back at the Fairlight by half-five, preparing then for a pint in the London Porter House before supper with Tony and Lizzie. We are warned by Lizzie about large quantities of what she calls ‘sloppy dog poo’ along Terrace Lane. It’s bound to be sloppy after a day of heavy rain. Are we to wait until it hardens, or go round the other way? In the event, we risk it and find her dramatic approach to it is a wild exaggeration. The Porter House is practically shaking with the racket of heavy music from the recently installed jukebox. There are friendly and very familiar faces here: Clive Faulkner, Dick Prescott, Steve Moore, and David Brentnall. There’s a warm feeling to be got from crossing the country from the far west to its very eastern fringe to find a pub with people you know, who are pleased to see you again. But we can’t stand this music and leave after a pint, making instead for the Lord Napier. Quieter music here but still a fairly naff pub. For something a little more civilised, we should have gone to the Stuart House, quieter though dull.
BACK AT THE HOUSE, there’s a substantial gin and tonic for everyone, substantial the operative word. Supper round the Ellis kitchen table was always a pleasure, and this one brings back good memories, helped along by some dark, red, almost black, Rioja. I’m trying not to drink too much this evening because I’ll need to feel as strong as possible for tomorrow. Julia has asked me to speak on behalf of Clive’s friends and colleagues and I know already that, having rehearsed it several times to myself, the first person to feel the emotion of what I want to say will be me. So I take it easy with the Rioja, though, as we sit by the fire later on, I am tempted by a drop of single malt whisky (from the same bottle that Mike Sexton gave Tony for his 69th birthday in Venice last year). Clive always appreciated single malt so I feel justified in indulging for his sake.
AND SO, FEELING SLIGHTLY LESS STRONG than I’d hoped for, we’re off to Hunstanton on Saturday morning. Mercifully, the rain has moved on but the wind off the Wash charges up from the cliffs, glacial, vicious and razor sharp, a true Hunstanton special, the kind of cold that once experienced you will always recognise again. As we park I’m greeted by other arrivals including Ron Graham, James Rye (at the better end of three recent heart attacks, I’m told) and Elaine Musker looking fine.
FATHER JOHN, still in civvies at this point, tells us that St Edmund’s Church, a Grade II Listed Building and the intended venue for the memorial service, is out of commission due to gas leak leading to central heating breakdown. Instead we are in the church hall next door, a long, low, plain building with blue plastic folding chairs that would never make it to Listed status but, as he tells us in his introduction, the location of this event is not really the point. What matters is why we’re all here and, as the proceedings unroll, we come to realise how right he is.
CLIVE'S TIME AT THE COLLEGE is further reflected by the presence of people called Tonkyn, Pols, Saunders, Pantling, (Mike resplendent in smart flat cap, gasping from a lung condition brought on by his lifetime of heavy smoking: ‘Haven’t had a fag for five years’, he tells me), Mike Breen (looking very well scrubbed up) and his new partner Christine (who did teacher training years ago in Shrewsbury), John Osborne from Reprographic, Robin Stevenson (much weightier than when I last saw him), Rose Merilees with Gaye Williams, Ken Winson (now without any teeth, ‘surviving’, he says), Gripper Clench (but not Mike Winton) and John McBride (aka the Scotch Git, who manages to arrive a bit late, ‘couldn’t find the place’). A few others I recognise from elsewhere: the Pattingales from next door in Tennyson Avenue, Linda Tansley, Julia and Nick Irving, Sharon the journalist (whose own partner Phil died this time last year). In all, I guess, some sixty people including family members. We’re given an order of service entitled Celebration of the Life of Clive Jones with a fine colour photograph of our fine-looking man, with his farewell letter on the reverse. Father John arrives at eleven precisely now wearing his official white clothing with Julia in black, composed and silent as she carefully arranges photographs of Clive at the front, including a monochrome of mine taken some years ago, himself looking studious and reflective with small beard, holding metal-framed spectacles. Perhaps it was during that photo session that we saw some of the first seeds of a friendship being sown.
FATHER JOHN LEADS US gently through, his contributions alternating with music specially selected by Clive and Julia. Whatever the music itself may evoke emotionally, it brings you necessarily back to Clive himself, listening to it during his life and, much later, choosing it for this occasion. Ed reads the poetry and speaks eloquently of the intensity of Clive and Julia’s loving relationship, nothing over the top but all most sensitive and fitting, on a level far above mere anecdote which is where most of the friends’ observations will later naturally position themselves. Following the complete reading of Clive’s letter to us, it’s time for ‘An Offering of Remembrances’ by family and friends. Men whose names I’ve known for years but have never previously met tell us largely of outdoor projects with Clive, walking, cycling, motor-cycling, climbing, staying in basic hostels here and abroad, drinking beer, playing practical jokes. These friendship tales from Geoff, Dave and Richard must go back to Clive’s thirties and perhaps even earlier, speaking of an active, hands-on person always looking for the next interesting thing to do, as they say ‘the man who never really grew up’, who never completely lost the capacity for ‘being silly’ but who, nevertheless, took the business of friendship extremely seriously. He may not always have managed it entirely successfully (who does?), but he did put much more effort into forming and maintaining friendships in his lifetime than many others ever do in theirs. Clive’s niece is seriously distressed even before she begins her contribution but battles her way through with the sort of tremendous determination that I know I could not have managed. Clive’s sister Steph sitting in front of me, at first comforts Julia but then, as her own grief swamps her in new waves, she herself is comforted by Julia.
EVER SINCE JULIA ASKED ME to speak here I’ve been making notes and rehearsing it to myself, working out what I can manage to say in a reasonable time, avoiding the terrible error of droning on and on, boring everyone to the wall. I have cut it and trimmed it down until I know what will do the job, attention mostly to a single focus that most present should recognise, though it won’t say all I would want to say. Without being aware initially, I find I’m intending to use phrases that already bring tears to my eyes. Even while walking along the river in Shrewsbury, turning them over in my mind, uttering them quietly to an unappreciative audience of ducks and swans, and to the bemusement of the dog-walkers. They’re true for me, and I mean them, but I’ll have to clear them out or I’ll be choked before I’ve even got going on the day.
IN THE EVENT, as long as I don’t look again at the photograph of Clive on our order of service, it all works, and in the right order, with a noticeable involuntary fade just at the end. I recall how I only got to know Clive as a friend, after being merely colleagues, when we’d both left the college in King’s Lynn. On Clive’s behalf particularly, but also for myself, I assert that leaving the college was one of the best things either of us ever did in our lives, and that I’d wanted to say this publicly for nearly twenty years. Amid general laughter at this, some warm mutterings from former colleagues, most of whom have coagulated into a bloc of solidarity on my right. The timeline for our friendship ran from the very late 1990s well through the 2000s, to the time when Clive and Julia left England for Syracuse, NY. Clive was teaching part-time at Downham Market (‘I have to keep earning to cover my expensive lifestyle’, he told me once), an Open University tutor on the Arts Foundation course, a magistrate on the King’s Lynn bench, researching his PhD, and later working part-time at OU Regional Office in Cambridge. He also found time for walking, cycling, motor-cycling, changing his car quite frequently and travelling abroad.
OUR COMRADESHIP DEVELOPED partly through repeated and enjoyable visits to Cambridge to see interesting films at the Arts Cinema which we knew would never reach King’s Lynn. Those train journeys provided the ideal venue for conversation. We usually began with talking about what we were reading, making recommendations and comparing our impressions. We made our lists of desert island discs and of desert island DVDs, the films that would stand up to repeated viewing on the island. Journey by journey we would edit these lists as new, more promising candidates emerged from memory. On the return journey we naturally discussed the film we’d just seen and, in the case of one directed by David Lynch, wondered what the hell had been going on. ‘Mulholland Drive’, above most others, largely remains a mystery to this day, despite repeated viewings.
WHEN YOU GET TO KNOW SOMEONE in the middle of your life, say mid-fifties, there’s a huge back story on both sides. Years of life and experiences just lie there, waiting for excavation and analysis. And so we probed our childhoods, our schooling, parents, father’s job, our own first job, where we’d been and what we’d done. We surprised each other and sometimes surprised ourselves. The process yielded for each of us a richer biography of the other, a development of mutual trust as we divulged, in this special context, bits of our pasts that perhaps few others actually know or would imagine. Nothing necessarily secret or sensitive, but things that we never normally speak about, as well as plenty of anecdotes, doubtless embellished for the sake of telling the story, not all of them told for the first time. Learn a little more about another person and you may manage to understand better what makes them the way they are.
THE CAMBRIDGE JAUNTS gave us films, conversations - and lunch. Generally we went to what should be among the most perfect of small pubs in the whole of England, the Free Press. No music, no smoking and no mobile phone use here, but excellent home-cooked meals, including scrumptious pies. Clive never seemed very comfortable with pints of beer when I knew him. Not a guzzler of drinks anyway - like some of my friends - he seriously appreciated single malt whiskies and good red wines. The Free Press did a good line in both. There were London trips too, for the occasional photographic exhibition, more opportunities to show Clive some of the interesting pubs and places I’d known for decades, and bits of central London he hadn’t seen before. He once telephoned me at home on a Saturday afternoon. He and Julia were with American friends near Trafalgar Square and wondered whether there was a reliably interesting pub nearby that might appeal to them. My answer was immediate: The Salisbury, of course, St Martins Lane. It was just right.
MY BRIEF THEME, which everyone who has known Clive at all well will recognise, is his insatiable hunger for travel. It was as though a little gremlin, buried deep inside his psyche, woke him each day saying something like: Come on, Clive, you want to be somewhere else. Where are you going next? Get the maps and timetables out and work out the itinerary. Clive travelled the world, not all of it and never as much as he would have loved to do, but a good deal more than many of us. He’d always done so, emigrating to Canada in his twenties for a start. Location and distance presented no obstacles. If it could be done, he would do it, and he would often contact one of his friends to see who might want to share the next foreign experience with him.
SHORTLY AFTER MOVING to Wellingborough, with their boxes hardly unpacked, he telephoned me to say: We need to go to Granada. I’ve never seen the Alhambra. I’ll make the bookings. Are you on? We spent three excellent days there including two sessions in the Alhambra, photographing in both colour and black-and-white, enjoying comfortable early evening temperatures of 65˚ at the end of February as we went off for dinner. It was in the rather good bar-restaurant on the square opposite Granada Town Hall that, indulging Clive’s interest in good red wine, we encountered one of the most costly reds we’d ever spent money on, anywhere. Just wanting a glass before deciding where to eat that evening, Clive ran his eye down the wine list, eventually spotting a Rioja near the bottom of the page that he thought he recognised. Let’s just have a glass each of this one, he said. With merely a dozen useful words of Spanish between us we thought we’d ordered two single glasses. When the barman refilled our glasses we realised that we’d bought the whole bottle, which instantly made the decision for us about where to have dinner. It was tremendously expensive in pounds or euros but also utterly gorgeous, confirming for us one of the great lessons about travel: just do it.
SHORTLY BEFORE THEY LEFT for the States, Clive telephoned to say that he needed another quick trip to Europe before putting the Pond for ever between him and the Continent. He said the train journey from Wellingborough to St Pancras took no time at all and, once arrived there, we need only change platforms to board the Eurostar. We’d be in Brussels in two hours flat. How about a few days there? This time I made the arrangements, finding a good hotel near the Place de Luxembourg for a very enjoyable long weekend with these good friends. Fine food and wines were featured, bottles of Belgian beer at lunchtime, the Museum of Modern Art one afternoon, jazz in the park near the Palais Royale on Sunday and glasses of Leffe blonde at a café on the Place (only two blocks away from where I worked in Unilever House in 1961). I’m sure that if Clive had seen a small window with not much activity in it just before leaving England, he’d have had yet another little trip up his sleeve, and all it would need would be a phone call.
AND NOW I'M NEARLY FINISHED. This will be the hardest part of all. I can feel it all welling up, and I know I’m going to lose it. My earlier thoughts had led me to a conclusion where I would remind them that the whole world, some of which Clive knew, was all still there for us and, if we were at all interested in it, we should follow his example and get out there and see more of it. We wouldn’t find it quite as it had been because Clive was no longer in it. We would find a world slightly diminished for that reason but still always worth the effort, as he knew well. But my voice is choked now and the strength needed for those few sentences has deserted me. It’s falling apart. I just manage: ‘It’s all still there for us to see but it won’t be the same. We’re going to miss Clive.’ Julia has been sitting right in front of me, nodding and smiling at times as she picked up on different aspects of Clive that she recognised so well. But if she had offered me a million dollars at this moment I could not have uttered another single word. Back in my seat, most of what follows – more music and more official pieces from Father John – passes over me, shaking, every fibre tense and strained, trying to restore a regular breathing pattern but more than anything desperately wanting to just let it all gush out in a long incoherent stream of excruciating regret.
THE SHORT WALK down the hill to the Town Hall in this biting wind sharpens us up. It’s after mid-day now and people are ready for tea, sandwiches and cakes. Former college colleagues are pleased to find this is an unexpected reunion of people who, despite living in or near the same small town, rarely see one another now. Apart from a couple of the less sociable ones who have disappeared already, they collect in small animated groups, catching up on their lives, exchanging details about the present and recent past, reminiscing about the time they all worked together, in touch every single day of the week. Other groups occupy tables in the hall and Julia moves among them, busy talking to many people. Bubbly is served and a toast is proposed for ‘Remembering his concern for social justice, to Clive’. We raise our glasses and speak his name. It suddenly occurs to me that most people would only ever need to hold one memorial event to celebrate the life of their recently departed loved one, but there have been two for Clive, on either side of the Atlantic. Many simply wouldn’t have the strength to manage the aching emotional strain of taking part in two of them. It’s ages before I manage to speak to Julia for the first time today, but when I ask lamely how she’s getting on, her reply confirms that I’m talking to someone who can manage two memorials. If anyone I know has the strength for that, it is Julia Minoia. It’s an act of utter unselfishness, to bear it all over again for the sake of Clive’s memory and for his family, friends and former colleagues in England.
PEOPLE SCURRY OFF NOW to their warm cars and away. Julie and I, McBride and Tony make for the Rose and Crown at Snettisham for some drinks in the quiet Saturday afternoon, to unwind there from the morning’s tensions, and talk, in time, of other things. We are exhausted. Later, as we walk to the Thai Orchid for dinner, the town centre streets are empty to the point of total desertion, shops shut, tills silent, most lights out. Flickers of litter rattle on the bitter wind. That same wind brings us the distant whoops of feral North Lynn youths howling their way to the weekly mayhem at the Globe Hotel.
WAKING NEXT DAY my immediate thought is to send Clive an email to tell him how the memorial service had gone, how superbly his constant Julia had managed, and of the friends and colleagues who had attended.
THEN, I remember.
Graham Brown, January 2012