Joe Bennett: Death never loses its power to shock

Joe Bennett says death is time's last prank. Photo / 123rf

Opinion

First week at university and my only pan went missing. I’d left it in the little shared kitchen and it had gone. I waited a day but it didn’t come back, so I went looking and found it in the kitchen on the floor above. It was a quarter full of hardened rice.

There were only two rooms on that floor. One seemed unoccupied. The other had a hand-written notice taped to the door. ‘This animal bites,’ it said. ‘Do not rattle the bars.’ I hesitated, then knocked.

A deep voice called me in. Its owner was sitting at the desk by the window, working. He looked up then stood up. He was older, taller and substantially wider than I was. He had cauliflower ears, asymmetrically deformed. I held out the soiled saucepan. ‘Did you…’

‘Yes,’ he said, emphatically, and then, to my surprise, ‘sorry’.

Which was, as it turned out, typical of Mick. Everything he did was emphatic. In my second year, he captained the college rugby team from lock forward. He led us with a fierce, medieval siege mentality, which was apt because his subject was history.

He led the singing in the bar and the drinking. And though he was never a cricketer, he came on a cricket tour just for the revelry. He also performed in satirical revues.

After university, I saw him only the once, some 25 years later when I dropped in on the school where he was teaching. I wrote about it at the time, describing how I stopped a boy at random on the school grounds and asked him what he knew of Mick. ‘The boy grins. ‘He’s a laugh,’ he says, ‘hard but fair. He’s really into rugby and theatre.’ In other words plus ça change…. The railway lines of our lives are laid down young.

Anyway, this morning the annual alumni magazine from our former college arrived in the mail. It was indistinguishable from any other alumni magazine - pictures of grinning students and teachers, tales of achievement in assorted fields, awards of scholarships and so on.

Slipped inside the magazine were two separate sheets of paper. One was a donor form, which is of course the reason for an alumni association. The college hopes that we have grown rich with age and feel indebted to the place that taught us. (Neither is true in my case. I had a happy enough time there but the college authorities and I never quite got on. My fault, I’m sure, but there we are.)

The other paper was a list of deaths, organised by year of matriculation. My eyes went straight to my own year, naturally. Two names, neither of which meant anything to me. Then to the years on either side. And there was Mick.

Death never loses its power to shock: the severing finality of it, the sudden blank where there had been something. The mirthless joke of it. Time’s last prank.

One way to defy it is to have children. Another is to teach. When I typed Mick’s name into the internet I found that he had taught at the school I visited for 30-something years. That’s several thousand children passing through his classroom, and with him being so forthright, so emphatically himself, they remembered him. Many paid a tribute of words.

A colleague wrote an obituary: ‘Michael was unashamed of his determination to do things the old way and found that his genuine charm and warmth meant others wanted to accommodate him. His reluctance to use a computer was warmly indulged by the school secretary who typed his handwritten pupil reports for many years after the Common Room embraced a computerised report system’.

Mick had retired a few years ago and in May this year he went on holiday to the Baltic states. While there he died ‘in his sleep’, though whether that means what it seems to mean I can’t say.

I learned much about him. He was the son of missionary parents. He’d been brought up partly in Africa. He collected art, filling his house with brightly coloured modernist furniture and large, emphatic abstract canvases.

This whole collection was auctioned off last month. The catalogue was still online. The stuff that he’d accreted, that reflected his tastes, that he chose to live among, sold for close to half a million dollars. And now the collection is a collection no longer. It is scattered like thistledown. It will not be put back together.

And, of course, it seems like yesterday that my pan went missing.