Some years ago I had a job writing a weekly article which appeared under the title of “It’s Your Funeral”. For it, I had to interview celebs and ask them how they would like their obsequies conducted.
It was a rum sort of way to earn a living, and occasionally I felt about as welcome a visitor, flapping into the room on my leathern wings, tape recorder in hand, as the angel of death herself. A celebrity chef fed me an exquisite lunch but declined point-blank to contemplate the possibility of his own mortality, and as I sidled out of an interview with a sensitive lady singer, I heard her exclaim furiously to her hovering PR, “Well, that was fun!” It had its moments, on the other hand, particularly with interviewees who regarded their eventual demise with interest rather than dread.
The very young Jamie Oliver, to whom death must have seemed a most distant and unlikely possibility, addressed the subject with touching seriousness and the biographer Michael Holroyd, when I began my shifty preamble about how odd it must seem to be talking about all this, offered me a homemade lemon biscuit and said, not at all. Not after the experience he’d had some years before when, lying rather ill in a hospital bed, he had been startled to be rung up by a keen young newspaper obituarist who said that he was sorry to bother him but he had heard that he wasn’t feeling too lively and wondered if he’d be good enough to clear up one or two details of his life story before pegging out.
A strange calling, the obituarist’s is: moving among the living, but always with an eye to them as shades; constantly measuring up (I imagine), like a kind of literary undertaker, the precise dimensions of the verbal sarcophagus in which their post-mortem fame will eventually be contained.
For the great and good, the exercise seems — to the onlooker, at any rate — more or less straightforward. The obituary is the symbolic foundation stone for the great narrative monument of biographical endeavour in which their reputations will eventually be enshrined. As a reader one is dimly aware of a certain amount of behind-the-scenes manoeuvring — the acerbic courtesies and telling reticences of the obituarist’s art embalming his subject for future biographers to work on with their sharpened scalpels.
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I am not sure that the melancholy pleasures of the obits page are necessarily a young person’s taste. They grow on you as you begin to apprehend your mortality. There is, of course, a jolly game of obits bingo to be played once you reach the age at which contemporaries begin dropping dead. Indeed, I suppose you might place the starting-point of middle age at the moment when you stop turning first to the news or features pages and turn directly to the obits to see who else you have outlived.
I haven’t quite arrived at that point, but still it is to the obituaries that I tend to turn first — not to read about the freshly expired famous but, on the contrary, to catch up with the gossip about dead people of whom I have never heard.
“Nobody wins Big Brother” was The Sun’s mordant headline on Chantelle from Essex’s reality-show triumph, and “Nobody Dies” might be the headline above the obits of those figures who fill the space left over once the great of the day have had their turn — the gallant old soldiers, eccentric aristocrats, circus performers, pigeon-breeders, bibliophiles and long-serving huntsmen whose deeds and characters were unknown except to their immediate circle, until momentarily stripped of their obscurity by the searchlight of the obits editor’s attention.
“How these curiosities would be quite forgott, did not such idle fellowes as I am putt them downe!” wrote John Aubrey in his collection of biographical anecdotage, Brief Lives.
I like to think that they have the sentiment inscribed in pokerwork, hanging on the wall of the Times obits office. For how else, other than by reading his obituary, would I have made the acquaintance of Aylmer Tryon, the gallery owner and beekeeper who named his first queen bee Boadicea, and kept her in a matchbox when she died?
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Were it not for my diligent study of the obits pages, I should never have known about Eileen Fox, the self-styled Queen of Soho, who took British Airways to court, claiming to have been bitten on the bottom by a flea in a 747, or Frieda Pushnik, the spirited “Armless and Legless Wonder” of Ripley’s “Believe It or Not!”, who died after a long showbiz career at the age of 77.
I should have remained ignorant of the existence of West de Wend-Fenton, the owner of the smallest stately home in England, who joined the French Foreign Legion when crossed in love and threw his dentures at a waiter in the Ritz. And I might have gone to my own grave never knowing that Fred Winter won the Grand Steeplechase de Paris in 1962 on Mandarin without steering or brakes when the bit broke in the horse’s mouth at the fourth fence.
How these curiosities would be quite forgott . . . But not now, not by me, nor, I suppose, by the countless readers of the obituaries pages who find there the bittersweet pleasure of making the acquaintance, a little too late, of the brave, the fascinating, the amusing, the eccentric and the interestingly wicked, and carry away from these brief lives all sorts of lessons in how to live — of which perhaps the most valuable of all is that nobody is really nobody. Everyone has a story, if you know how to look for it.
Last Word begins tomorrow on Radio 4 at 4pm
Visit the Times Online Obituaries page