SNOWMAN AUTHOR’S UNIQUE MEMORY AID
In a bid to stave off dementia Raymond Briggs has taken to writing lists of words around his kitchen door to help him remember
THE author and illustrator Raymond Briggs is best known for a story entitled The Snowman. It has sold 8.5 million copies worldwide, a TV version is shown every Christmas and it has even been turned into a stage musical.
This success is all the more remarkable given that it is a book entirely without words, the narrative driven purely by Briggs’s bewitching illustrations.
Which makes it even more ironic that as Briggs fights the onset of the dementia that affected both his mother and his partner, it is to words he has turned to stave off his decline.
Briggs, who celebrates his 83rd birthday today, has written dozens of them in felt-tip pen around his kitchen door in the hope that they will jog his memory and help keep the past alive.
They range from medical terms such as osteoporosis, diabetes and vertigo to the names of friends. Some words are more obscure than others. “Narcissistic psychopath”, for instance, is a reference to an unnamed publisher. Nuthatch is the name of his favourite bird. And “Katie Price – Jordan” was prompted by a sighting of the pneumatic blonde outside his village shop.
“It gets longer every day,” says Briggs of his list. “I get a mental block about things. It is nothing to do with ignorance, sometimes I just can’t think of the word. Even my favourite wine (merlot) I forgot the name of.”
Two of the most significant names on Briggs’s list are Brenda Blethyn and Jim Broadbent, for these are the actors who voiced the title characters in the animated version of his 1998 graphic novel Ethel And Ernest.
He produced it as a tribute to the modest decency of his parents, a lady’s maid and milkman respectively, who brought up their son in a rapidly changing world.
It depicts the most defining moments of the 20th century through Ethel and Ernest’s eyes: the darkness of the Great Depression, the build-up to the Second World War, the trials of the war years, the euphoria of VE Day and the emergence of a generation from postwar austerity to the cultural enlightenment of the 1960s.
ETHEL and Ernest’s story was turned into an 85-minute animated film for BBC One which attracted four million viewers when it was shown over Christmas.
Its magic lay in its charm. Take this exchange between Ethel and Ernest as they watch the 1969 Moon landing on their primitive black and white television. Ethel: Perhaps they’ll have a picnic – that would be nice. Ernest: I think the tea would blow away when it came out of the Thermos. Ethel: Why? there? Ernest: No, it’s gravity dear. Look, he’s going to pick up some pebbles to take home. Ethel: Just like kiddies seaside.
By now Ethel was already in the early stages of dementia. She later contracts leukaemia and towards the end of the film there is a moving scene between Raymond and his mother at her hospital bed after Ernest has left the ward. It’s one that will resonate with people who have dealt with elderly relatives stricken by what was then known as senility. Ethel: Who was that man in here just now? Is it windy at up the Raymond: Oh mum, that dad. Ethel: Who? Raymond: Ernest, Ethel: My husband? Not Victor McLaglen? I thought he was dead.
Ethel died in 1971, aged 76, and Ernest struggled to cope without her. He would unthinkingly lay the breakfast table for two and talk to his cat Susie who would sleep on the pillow next to him at night. Diagnosed with stomach cancer, he died nine months after his wife.
Both parents had worried about their son’s ability to make a living as an illustrator and it was not until two years after their death that he had his first your was husband. big hit, a children’s book, Father Christmas. This was followed by Fungus The Bogeyman in 1977 and The Snowman a year later.
But Briggs’s wife Jean, whom he had met at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in the 1950s, did not live to see his success. A schizophrenic who was “in and out of the loony bin”, as Briggs puts it, she died of leukaemia in 1973.
Shortly afterwards Briggs met a teacher called Liz in a pub near his home in East Sussex and they were together until her death from Parkinson’s disease and dementia in 2015.
These days Briggs’s routine is appropriately geriatric. He makes daily visits to his elderly neighbours, works on a book about old age and writes regularly for The Oldie magazine. Rather eccentrically, he also amuses himself by collecting high-heeled shoes that he buys from a local charity shop – 14 pairs line his staircase.
Meanwhile the ravages of time are catching up with him. He finds he can no longer walk for more than 45 minutes without losing his balance and takes blood pressure pills.
“Oh, what a life,” the selfconfessed “miserable git” said in an interview this week.
“On we go – for a bit. I’ve probably, at the very most, got seven years left to live if I’m lucky – if you can call that lucky. I am certainly coming near to the end.”