THE BOYS ARE BACK - SIMON CARR



I want to die and be with Mummy: A new film tells the story of how a father and his sons faced up to ultimate loss


'Did Mummy die last night?' It's a question which for me has suddenly acquired a new life.

It was asked of me once before by a five-year-old boy, and there it is in front of me again, 15 years later, very like it was the first time - except this time it's on a big screen in a preview theatre in Soho.

And it has come back with an appalling power.

In 1994, my wife Susie died after a hard-fought battle with cancer, leaving me to raise our son - as well as my older son from a previous marriage - alone.

I wrote a book, The Boys Are Back In Town, about us, how three males learned to live in a household robbed of a loving mother.

And now the book is a film. Seeing ourselves on the big screen is peculiar - not least because my character is played by handsome Clive Owen.

('It's what I look like on the inside,' I say, when asked.) But it's also harrowing to watch - not to put too fine a point on it, it turned us all inside out.

Susie was an exuberant redhead ('Not red, auburn!' she would tell you) who ran her own physiotherapy business.

She was endowed with beauty, rowdiness, sympathy, sex appeal, energy and, as it later turned out, cancer.

We had been married for two years, having moved to London, and our son Alexander was just one when she began to suffer from gripping abdominal pains, diagnosed as stress.

At 35, the doctor had told her she was far too young to have anything sinister.

But the cramps got worse, until one day she collapsed in the street and an ambulance took her to Westminster Hospital, where she was wheeled straight in for emergency surgery.

They found tumours, lots of tumours - two in her intestine and four in her liver. It was terminal, the doctors said calmly, and within a year if it was left untreated, but possibly another one with their latest technique.

There was no possibility of an error in their diagnosis, they said.

But we hoped. We moved back to her home country of New Zealand and pursued an aggressive alternative health programme for her.

But the doctors were right. She had two clear years before the cancer began to mobilise, and then it started in earnest.

She became weak - moving into a new phase of the illness. Whereas homes should revolve around five-year-olds, in ours, Alexander was moved out of the centre while we wrestled with an incommunicable sense of disaster.

As the end neared, the hospice varied Susie's medication to control her breathing. She went into a soporific condition, confused, absent.

Her body had been taken by illness; her face had collapsed around her now with enormous eyes, her arms had gone, her glorious flame was guttering.

On her last Sunday, I told her that I was not going back to work that day, as usual. She looked at me in a particular way: 'Are you worried I'm going to die?'


Did Mummy die last night? he asked with dead-eyed brightness

Evasively, I said: 'I've been worried about that for four years, darling.' But she knew, now; she knew what was happening.

Later, I led her on the three-step journey to her wheelchair. She stopped halfway there and said: 'Give me a cuddle.' These are the last words I remember her saying to me. That and 'f***ing doctors'.

We stood there together, holding each other, on the edge of the world. Shortly afterwards, she went to bed and lay down with her arms beside her, over the blankets, her head slightly to the right. And her lights went gently down.

The next day, Alexander came back from school, running along the path, through the dappled light of the garden, looking for me.

He started to say something, but stopped when he saw my expression. He stood very still.

I said: 'You know how Mummy's been getting more and more tired because she's been so ill?

We think she's gone into a very deep sleep now and it's so deep we don't think she's going to wake up.'

He was looking at me without saying anything. I took a deep breath and came out with it: 'In fact, we think she's going to die.'

I can still see the green grass and the river winding away beyond the poplars, and Alexander's red hair and green eyes, his mother's vivid colouring.

He said, more brightly than I'd expected: 'Is Mummy going to die? When?' It was impossible for me to say, so he produced some alternatives.

'Will she die by dinner time? Will she die by bedtime? Will she die by breakfast?'

I thought of her in our bed, propped up among the pillows, and couldn't say anything.

In the morning, he came into the bedroom where his mother and I had been all night.

She was wearing a mysterious smile that had developed in the night. It looked like a smile. It felt like a smile. It was a smile.

'Did Mummy die last night?' he asked with a curious sort of dead-eyed brightness. I said: 'Yes, little one, I'm sorry to say she did.'

Everyone grieves differently. For weeks, Alexander compartmentalised his emotions in a way that you hear is particularly male.

He would play happily and affectionately talk about his mother in Heaven. But then, every day, there would come a point when he would collapse into a sort of coma.

He'd sink to the floor in slow-motion and lie there, not crying, eyes open, registering nothing.

After an hour in this state, he'd come to and continue with his day. The appearance of grief was unpredictable. 'I want to die!' he'd say cheerfully, 'so I can be with Mummy. But don't worry, Daddy, I'll stay here with you for now.'

People say life goes on. And, to some extent, people are right.

It wasn't clear to me that I'd even be allowed to keep Alexander. A father alone with a five-year-old son - did social services allow it?

Little children need the tenderness of a mother's touch, don't they?

Children need a routine and constant attention, and a certain level of intrusion into their emotional life.

They need to be kept clean and ordered, and tended in the way that mothers generally, stereotypically do. Isn't that what children need?

My answer to that is simple. It's yes. Did that happen with my boys? That answer is also simple.

Little children need the tenderness of a mother's touch, don't they?

It's no. Has it damaged them? And before I start in with the justifications and evasions, I would say probably.

Having said that, an all-male household does have its upside. So much so that my elder son Hugo from a previous marriage, who was living with his mother, came to live with us as well.

He was 12. He came to live with us in Auckland, 250 miles away from his mother back in Taupo.

So there we were, two boys and a father, home alone. We lived among pizza boxes, videos, newspapers, takeaway cartons, toys and machines. But to our minds we were not slobs. We were too athletic, too active.

There was the 40-foot swing in the garden that made mothers tremble. The football in the hall. The running around outside at night playing the screaming game (with me grinning 'Come here, little boy!' and them fleeing in mock horror).

It was a world of sudden ecstatic bursts of unconstrained energy, and infused with the sense that we could do anything we liked.

There developed around us a 'Just Say Yes' culture. It is true that, generally, mothers do the 'No' thing. It's why the human race has survived, I agree, but it easily gets out of hand.

Can I ride my bike in the hall? Can we go in the surf at night? Can I ride on the bonnet of the car? Mothers say no to these questions. And so do most fathers, but only because they've had mothers.

So we had in one sense an exhilarating time. But there is a downside to undiluted testosterone. There's a lack of care in it. There can be closeness, both physical and emotional, there is contact, support, love.

But it tends to be implicit. Unspoken. Or, just as easily, misunderstood.

The lack of a female presence permeated our lives. When Susie was alive, she used to say that a tidy house created a force field.

You walked into her well-ordered environment and you got a charge off it.

The plumped cushions, the magazines squared off on the table, everything in its place.

You were energised by what had been prepared for you. If you wanted to do something, there was nothing else you had to do first.

But after she died, that secure homeliness disappeared. Hugo, Alexander and I were two sons and a father living in a household without women.

We were like an experience free of normal influences (such as guilt, bleach and sock drawers).

Despite all this, death - I felt at the time - was both easier and harder to cope with than divorce.

Divorce is a wound that stays open. Death is final; it's an end in itself. Death is short, divorce is long.

That's what I thought then. But I don't think that now. Those grieving stages - you don't go through them automatically. Boys need help.

And seeing the film of our lives played out in front of me has made that clearer than ever. We were shown on screen how we lived - and I realise some of the things I could have done better.

Above all, I see now that children need two parents. Nothing is clearer than that. However inadequate, two are better than one.

Divorce is a wound that stays open. Death is final

For while Hugo and Alexander have turned out brilliantly - Hugo, 26, is doing a PhD at Imperial College in London, and Alex, who's 20, is taking the summer off before starting his degree at Brighton University - there's no doubt that they would have had an easier ride if Susie had stayed in all our lives.

In a way, it has been deeply cathartic for me to watch this film because it has helped me to understand the impact Susie's death had on all of us.

What I saw in the film matches what I remember of those days and months leading up to Susie's death and the terrible aftermath.

How do I get through this, I asked myself every day. And the answer was: 'One foot in front of the other.'

Visiting the film set was unsettling. They were filming on Paddington Station. The child playing Alexander-at five years old came up and looked at me. It sent a tremor through my soul.

'Simon Carr,' I said holding out my hand. 'How are you?'

He looked back with an objective look and, with breathtaking precocity, said: 'Yes, you're not bad for a Simon Carr.'

I looked at him a little more intently. If we hadn't been in public, if he hadn't been a film star, I wouldn't have let go of his hand. I would have leaned in and I would have said something.

The real Alexander didn't do that. When this boy made the same confident approach, Alexander laughingly picked him up and turned him through 360 degrees like a propeller.

The child made a quick decision to enjoy the treatment and squealed and made faces.

He has dash like that, Alex has. He has valour. His mother would be proud of that, for sure.

Above all, watching this film has made me realise that however much we tried, and however much we told ourselves we had got over Susie's death, we haven't.

But that's the thing: people don't get over tragedies like that. Maybe that's what character is, how we deal with the things we don't get over.

Once, 14 years ago, I made some toast for Alexander. He was four. I had cut the crusts off and he sank to the floor with a despairing cry.

He lay face down, whimpering.

It wasn't any sense of impending disaster, it was the fact that he liked toast with the crusts on, and I didn't know.

Little boys live with a tape rolling in front of them five or ten seconds into the future. If something unexpected happens, the tape breaks and the world collapses.

The only solution is to go back and fix it. I went back, made more toast, and didn't cut the crusts off. The world was restored. It wasn't easy, but we did it. That was the way we lived our whole lives.

The trouble is that when a mother dies, the world is ruptured in a way that we can't go back and fix. And that's what we have had to live with - and without.

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