Don’t stop all the clocks – my dad’s died

On his deathbed, he was still fixing antique timepieces

Doubts persist as to whether my father’s last words will join those of Oscar Wilde (that wallpaper) and Bognor-buggerer George V among the most memorable yet uttered.

For one thing, my dad’s last words weren’t uttered. For another, they were not, in fact, his last words.

Nonetheless, he was absolutely convinced that the words he committed to paper one early-july afternoon, some seven weeks before he did die, would be his last. And they deserve, I feel, to be remembered.

My son Louis and I didn’t realise this at the time, when we were stricken by disbelief at their apparent incongruity in the context. On reflection, I realise how remarkably perfect they were.

My dad was a most unusual man with a most unusual working history meandering over six and a half decades. He started out as a solicitor, when his clients included the Rolling Stones. He had to drop them when less exotic customers recoiled from the scent of weed in his office. Soon enough, he dropped the law itself, going off to run the family firm when it completed its classical Jewish-immigrant odyssey from East End barrow to public company.

But talented as he was at both, neither the law nor commerce consumed him. He had too many consuming passions for that.

One was learning for the joy of learning. Close to his 80th birthday, he began an Open University philosophy degree. The only one of his myriad achievements of which he seemed genuinely proud was achieving the outlandish mark of 100 per cent in a pair of essays on the Enlightenment.

Another passion was horology. He adored all manner of timepieces all his life, and mixed business and pleasure by pioneering the manufacture of reproduction carriage clocks in the mid-1970s.

Auden’s Funeral Blues is the most frequently recited of all interment verse, thanks to its cameo in that Richard Curtis film. But for no one in sepulchral history would ‘Stop all the clocks’ have been more wilfully inappropriate. If there was one thing my father hated, it was a stopped clock.

Last Christmas, at 87 and a half, he was still running his clock-repair business, schlapping all over town in his Jag to fetch the broken and return the restored.

When his illness progressed in the New Year, robbing him of his balance until he could no longer walk, those 65 unbroken years of work gave way to the final months of virtual paralysis that were excruciating to so active and naturally athletic a man (he broke schoolboy mile records, and might have been a professional cricketer but for a teenage bout of polio) – but about which not once did he complain.

He was a sweetly deafening echo of that lost English paradigm – the strong and silent type. Pincered by two worldranked hypochondriacs in my mother and me, he was so insouciant about his health that he never mentioned the polio (or several painful decades of psoriatic arthritis) until a few years ago.

Where most would have raged and sobbed and howled against the horrors of a brutal terminal illness, the most melodramatic my dad became, when things were at their monstrous worst and I asked how he was doing, was ‘I’m a bit pissed off, chap.’ Never for a moment did he lose his dignity or grace. He died utterly, unimaginably undiminished.

He also died later than he expected. That July afternoon, a throat infection burst through his weakened immune system with startling suddenness, until he was choking on sips of water and unable to speak.

I was in the kitchen hanging on for the GP when Louis walked in, looking grave. ‘You’d better come now, Dad,’ he said. ‘Grandpa’s mimed a summons for pen and paper.’

In that wickedly ominous hospital bed, my brave and beautiful dad was painstakingly writing in his antiquely elaborate hand.

Alarmed and fearful as we were, I can’t deny a frisson of intrigue as to what was occupying his mind in what he believed was his end.

The details of a secret second family in Jakarta, Toronto or Willesden Green he wanted informed? Better still, the number of a secret bank account on Grand Cayman? A deathbed confession to an even worse crime than the forgery he committed long ago in Portugal, when he doctored my temporary passport (google it, young ’uns) to make me 18, and so eligible to gamble in the casino?

‘Dear Mrs Franklin,’ read those supposedly final words, written in my voice.

‘My father, Brian Norman, has asked me to write to you about your aunt’s clock.

‘My father is seriously ill and ceased trading some time ago, but wants you to know it is here and in good order. I would be grateful if you would arrange to collect it…’

In death, my dad was as always in life. Kind and conscientious beyond compare. Thinking of another, rather than himself. Waging that timeless war of his against the anathema of a stopped clock.

An echo of that lost English paradigm – the strong and silent type