Auberon Waugh
‘Have they sacked Dominic Lawson yet?’
Astor waking to find her bedside
squad to ‘Take a step forward, lads. It will be easier that way.’
There is an irony to both Oates’s and Childers’ last words that borders on the humorous. Indeed, the most popular of all recorded last words seem to be those that are, intentionally or otherwise, amusing. William Palmer, a ruthless murderer, was applauded for asking, as he stepped onto the scaffold in 1856: ‘Are you sure this damned thing is safe?’ We admire Gen Ethan Allen, on being advised that the angels were waiting, for snapping: ‘Waiting are they? Well—let ’em wait.’ And Lord Palmerston’s courageous, but sardonic response to the bad news that he had not long to live is also much quoted: ‘Die, my dear doctor? That’s the last thing I shall do.’
There is, of course, enormous pressure on comedians and others who have made a name for themselves as being witty to devise something memorable. Oscar Wilde certainly achieved it. First, he came up with: ‘This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us must go.’ Later, as he sipped his final glass of Champagne, he is reported to have said: ‘Alas, I am dying beyond my means.’
One also admires W. Somerset Maugham for using his last breath to offer counsel: ‘Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.’ Richard Harris, the actor, apparently couldn’t resist quipping, as he was being carried out of a London hotel on a stretcher—he had pneumonia: ‘It was the food; don’t touch the food!’
In fact, food seems to receive frequent mentions as the end looms. Just before William Pitt the Younger expired he said ‘I think I could eat one of Bellamy’s veal pies’ and Walter de la Mare remarked: ‘Too late for fruit. Too soon for flowers.’
There was also a mention of food in Robert E. Howard’s moving last words: ‘All fled—all done, so lift me on the pyre;/the feast is over, and the lamps expire.’
For my own part, I rather prefer last words with a bit of eternal mystery to them. Not necessarily quite as enigmatic as those of Henry VIII (‘All is lost. Monks, monks, monks!’), but perhaps more along the lines of Crowfoot, chief of the Blackfoot Nation tribe of Canada, whose haunting last words were: ‘What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of the buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow, which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset.’
If we can’t have wisdom, then we like bravery