When it came to believing in God, my father always made me feel like a lickspittle liberal. His atheism was as much a part of his person as his backbone. It never occurred to him for an instant that he should show any respect at all for other people’s deeply held religious beliefs. As far as he was concerned anyone who believed in any god or any kind of divine involvement in the world was clearly deranged and deserved nothing better than scorn and derision.
My mother, who was a relatively devout Catholic, realised early in the marriage that there was no way in which father’s attitude might be softened by long years of togetherness. What was the point of even trying to talk to him about such critical theological matters as the crucifixion and the resurrection and the joys of heaven and the pains of hell when she knew only too well that he invariably referred to all such matters as “your mother’s muck”?
But although I’ve always secretly relished my father’s undiluted intolerance towards all things religious, it was only recently that I recognised another aspect of his militant atheism, which I’d rather overlooked. What prompted this realisation was a news item about research carried out at the Johns Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in the US, which showed that two-thirds of adult cancer cases were caused by random mutations in the tissue cells during the ordinary process of stem-cell division. In other words the principal cause of cancer was not this or that food or this or that lifestyle or this or that genetic background. It was chance. Even as I read that conclusion my mind raced back to my father’s profound hostility towards a radio programme called Have a Go.
Back in the 1950s, this programme, a folksy meet-the-people quiz hosted by the affable full-time Yorkshireman Wilfred Pickles, was a national favourite. Each week it would feature at least one elderly contestant and sooner or later our Wilfred would produce his catchphrase question: “And how old are you, luv?” Every listener also knew that the response, whether it was “65” or “86”, would be followed by a round of vigorous applause from the studio audience.
My father would sit in the back kitchen with the rest of the family and wait and wait. Every week, at the precise moment in the programme when the applause broke out, he’d turn to us all and point out that it was ridiculous to clap somebody for being 73 or 86. Getting old wasn’t an accomplishment, he’d protest. The fact that Wilfred’s contestants were still walking the earth had nothing to do with their upstanding character. It was just luck. Pure damned chance. “Watch your language,” Mother would say.
This, as I also now remembered, was the position that he adopted whenever anyone introduced a moral tone into any discussion of disease or death. So when mother talked sadly about poor Mrs Colbeck who’d died because she had nothing left to live for after Mr Colbeck had passed away, Dad would shake his head vigorously. “No,” he’d say. “You’ve got it wrong again, love. She didn’t die for any such reason. She just died. She dropped down dead.”
According to Dad’s amoral philosophy of medicine nobody developed TB because they were poor and artistic or caught cancer because they were unfit and indulgent or contracted migraine because they were stressed or hysterical. (I can readily imagine the revulsion that he’d have felt towards the idea that AIDS was a form of retribution.)
Now, of course, I’m sure he would have recognised such concrete material factors as contagion and malnutrition in the causal story of disease but only when they were shorn of any moral connotations. It was no surprise then to find that he regarded his own eventual death with an extraordinary degree of detachment. When I went to visit him in his late 80s he refused to talk about his infirmities or pains but, in almost a stage whisper, warned me not to listen to the rubbish that was talked about the wisdom of the elderly. “Don’t believe a word of it,” he cautioned. “The older you get, the dafter you get.”
As I was leaving he handed me a postcard which he said I might find useful. It was simply headed, in his meticulous hand, “After I’ve Gone”. Below this bald heading there were three carefully numbered points: 1) Get rid of the body; 2) No prayers or service of any kind; 3) No mourning.
I find I’m still having to work hard to respect that last injunction.
