Oh, the sadness of closing the door on a lifetime of memOries

How do you say goodbye to the idyllic home bereavement forces you to sell? In the last part of his achingly bittersweet memoir, HUNTER DAVIES recalls...

Oh God, what have I done? It was not just that Margaret had died. I now felt part of me was dying as well.

I had to quickly get rid of all the furniture and my treasures — or what I call my treasures. The real rubbish I dumped, lesser rubbish went to charity shops, while some of the choicer items I gave away, such as an 1810 guidebook to Lakeland, written anonymously by Wordsworth, which I gave to his home, Dove Cottage.

The ordinary domestic stuff went into Mitchells auction house in Cockermouth in their ordinary domestic weekly sales. That was agony, seeing items of furniture we so loved, comfy fireside easy chairs we had spent a fortune re-covering, going for piddling sums.

I don’t know why people ever buy new stuff when you can get excellent second-hand furniture so reasonably.

Yet the price fetched for one tatty item, a stuffed red squirrel in a wooden case which was falling to pieces, amazed me. I had kept it in the fireplace in my office and looked at it every day as I sat down to work, thinking I really should repair it or at least dust it. It must have been harbouring appalling germs. It went for £60.

I didn’t go to any of the sales. I couldn’t bear to see any of my beloved objects being brutally dismissed, going for peanuts or, worst of all, ending up with that dreaded word beside them — unsold. I SPENT the final two nights in an empty house, lying on a mattress on the wooden floor in an empty bedroom. All the contents, the domestic junk as well as the treasures, had gone.

Getting down on the floor was relatively easy — you just flop, collapse — but getting up, oh my God, that was agony. I had to roll over and somehow prop myself up with my elbow. I had not realised how low a floor is, and how high a normal bed is. Or how old I was. So I flopped back on the mattress again. I felt like a squatter in someone else’s neglected, forgotten home.

I stared round at the bedroom walls. I could see the faded patches where our prized paintings had been. I stared out of the naked win-dows at Grasmoor, the looming fell after which our house is named.

All 14 windows in the house have stunning views, back and front, of the fells and fields, lakes and land-scape. The curtains had gone as well, after the man from Mitchells pointed out they were Sandersons, in William Morris design, and would fetch some money. Good job Margaret never told me how much she had spent on them. I would have moaned.

Lying there, with my eyes closed, I could see the family and all the visitors to the house over the years. I could see John Prescott, whose autobiography I ghost-wrote, and his lovely wife Pauline both sitting in our garden, with two heavies in a corner, keeping an eye on him, as he was deputy prime minister at the time.

I could hear my fellow Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg admiring my conservatory, asking how I had got planning permission. I could see all our three children and grand- children at my wife’s 70th birthday party eight years earlier.

On my very last day in the house, our son Jake and his wife Rosa drove up to help me bring stuff back to London — the personal bits and pieces, photographs and mementos, nothing really valuable, just things I wanted to keep. We reminisced of course about their memories of the house and of Mar-garet in it, such as the time, on her 50th birthday, she had got up at five o’clock and climbed Red Pike.

The night before, when asked what she really wanted on her birthday, she said her special treat would be to climb Red Pike first thing in the morning with me. I said great, I’ll come. Alas, I slept in and never heard her getting up.

She brought me tea in bed at eight as usual and I remarked that her hair was wet.

‘Oh, is it?’ she said. ‘ Probably because I got up at five and climbed Red Pike and had a swim in Crummock. I nearly woke you, but you were sound asleep . . .’

I love this story, even if it is at my expense. It has become a family legend — the image of her going off on her own, enjoying herself so much, then gently boasting about it.

Jake now does not quite believe it. He recently got out the map and thinks she could not have got as far as the top of Red Pike and back in three hours from our house. But she had obviously been somewhere, I said. Her hair was wet. She must have had a swim. He still does not believe it.

Margaret did tend to ‘ improve’ stories, exaggerate, but then she was a proper novelist. I plan to believe that story for ever, that she did climb Red Pike and swim in the lake on her 50th birthday.

And that was the house sold, 30 years of our life cleared away, packed up, gone for ever. Only the memories remain. AS YOu get older, many things mean less. Money for example. I can’t afford any more time or energy to think about making money. Time is too short.

My only worry now, as I write and as I lie awake in the middle of the night, is that something awful will happen to my back, or my hernia will explode. So far, so good.

I don’t really worry, or get depressed, or not for long — half an hour perhaps. It is usually to do with my stupid computer playing up, trying to buy or book some-thing on the internet.

But if I become housebound or

bedridden, in constant pain and agony, i don’t know how i would cope. My cheerful-chappie character might prove a mirage.

i would never willingly end my life, which Margaret always said she would, sending regular donations to Dignitas. in the end, she did not have the strength to leave the house and go to Switzerland.

i am staying here in this house, whatever happens. i plan to finish myself off with an enormous amount of Beaujolais.

i had a drink recently with an old friend and neighbour who used to be the chief economic advisor at the treasury. he said that economic studies indicate people in their 70s underestimate how long they have to live — in other words, they fear they will pop off soon, so they start worrying about spending too much, saving hard in case they will be a burden and end up with a long and expensive and awful ailment.

in fact, most of the 70-year-olds today do reach their 80s, and then they overestimate — thinking, hurrah, got this far, got ages to live yet. And, of course, they have got this wrong.

We folks entering our 80s have to realise we will be lucky to reach 84. in fact, only a quarter of people in their 80s end up suffering a long and expensive illness, which is why people who die in their 80s leave more than they intended to, luckily for the treasury. i never really quite believe or understand these economic surveys, but i intend to take two morals from what i think my friend told me and intend to follow them from now on.

live, live, live. Spend, spend, spend. thank you.

you’ve been a lovely audience.

AdAPTEd from happy old Me by hunter davies, published by simon & schuster on March 21 at £16.99. © hunter davies 2019. To order a copy for £13.59 (offer valid to 28/3/19; P&P free on orders over £15), visit www.mailshop.co.uk/books