Aristotle firmly believed that tragedy in theatre should inspire pity and terror – and who am I to contradict him? One of my plays was performed for the first time at the Cecil Hepworth Playhouse, Walton-on-Thames, in October, with a solid dose of both – if you don’t like it, you can blame Aristotle.
I wasn’t always a playwright. Not so very long ago I was a moderately successful writer with eleven novels under my belt; six crime and five historical espionage. My wife and I were a team: I did the writing and Pat acted as critic – a weak smile and “yes, it’s very good” would send me back to my desk and consign my latest story to the waste paper bin.
When it was a stern look and “well, what happens next?” it was back upstairs to the study to hammer away at the keyboard. When finished she was my editor: ruthless but always right. If she said it had to go, it went. Finally, she was my proofreader. Once given the nod by Pat the manuscript was ready to go to the publishers. Unfortunately, our run as a writing team ended rather abruptly when Pat had a fall in the back garden; it triggered early-onset dementia and almost overnight I found myself a 24/7 carer – and nothing else.
I looked after Pat for three years until it became beyond me, and she went into residential care. I was pretty much her only visitor and built my life around the visits; it was fairly brutal watching her decline. For the last several years she was bedridden, incontinent and silent, but I could feed her. It wasn’t much, but at least I was doing something useful both for her and the staff. Then she stopped swallowing: the part of her brain which governed that faculty had gone. It took her three weeks to die, and I was holding her hand at the end. We had been married for 53 years.
Pat and I met when we were both teaching in Coventry and were married at St Barnabas’s Cathedral in Nottingham, Pat’s home town. I progressed in my teaching career, and by the time I became headmaster of a small Catholic primary school in Leicestershire we had two sons, Dominic and James. Another son, Joe, had arrived by the time I was appointed to a larger school in Shropshire – but I hadn’t been in post for more than two terms when the school was burned to the ground in an arson attack. Three years later we returned to newly built premises, but at a cost – I had to give up the PhD on which I had been working (when it was almost complete) and suffered from a bout of severe depression. But life went on.
Then the sky really fell on our heads. Dominic and his climbing partner, Arne, were killed by an avalanche whilst climbing on Mont Blanc in the summer of 1997. They fell about seven thousand feet and their bodies weren’t discovered for 20 days.
During that time James went to Chamonix to help join the search; he later had to identify the bodies, which had lain in the summer sun for 20 days after being smashed about in the fall. He never really recovered from the experience and had recurring dreams about the ordeal which led to mental problems, then alcohol and drug misuse – but he stayed in work and later got married.
As for me, after Dominic’s death I was given early retirement and Pat and I moved away to Berwick-upon-Tweed to put our lives back together. I needed to find work so, having been fairly successful at educational writing, we decided to have a go at writing fiction.
In the seven years of visiting Pat in the home I spent my mornings writing. It took my mind off the coming visit. What I wrote was for myself, a sort of “this might keep me sane” activity, not novels – that was Pat and me – but scripts. You can write quite a lot in seven years so, after Pat’s death, I emerged as a playwright with several playscripts and in something of a hurry.
Which puts me back in Walton-on-Thames, when, between 3 and 5 October, my adaptation of an original translation of Aeschylus’s <em>Prometheus in Chains</em> was unleashed on an unsuspecting public. They got pity and terror by the bucketful. I’m sure Aristotle was clapping his hands with glee somewhere.
After that – “well, what happens next?” as Pat would have asked. Will I become a moderately successful playwright? Perhaps. If so, I think Pat will be pleased.
<em>Prometheus in Chains ran at the Cecil Hepworth Playhouse in Walton-on-Thames from 3 to 5 October</em>
<strong><strong>This article appears in the October 2024 edition of the <em>Catholic Herald</em>. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent, high-calibre, counter-cultural and orthodox Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">HERE</mark></a></strong></strong>.
