More about David

On the last day of February - while the wind still blew, the rain still lashed, and I continued reading Ian Bostridge’s vast and absorbing new study of Schubert’s Winterreise - my friend David Shaw’s sister Christine came to supper with us in Edinburgh.

She had returned a week previously from Hull, where she had organised David’s funeral with the greatest care and love, said my wife Sue, who had driven down with Cosima, the second of our three daughters.

The deaths of good friends are one of the recurring penalties of old age, but our supper with Christine avoided sadness.  We looked back with cheer. Inevitably we spoke of old times, as David and I had often done, but also of the present.  Though still conscious of how much I shall miss him, I talked with pleasure of his gifts as a mimic - something of which other people, even Christine it seems, were scarcely aware. But in my experience, with sudden and complete adroitness, he could evoke the visual tics and and gestures, the vocal mannerisms, of those we had known up to half a century ago.  Not even Philip Larkin, his boss at Hull University Library, could escape his warm attention.

It was an accomplishment which, of course, he shared with Larkin’s friend Kingsley Amis, a famous and priceless imitator, whose funniness could be more malicious.  David’s - like that of the conductor Alexander Gibson, another brilliant mimic - was always kindly, with none of the edge of cruelty personified by, for example, Herbert von Karajan, whose mimicry of his fellow conductor Otto Klemperer was not only embarrassingly inaccurate but also positively nasty.

Our evening with Christine was one of fond anecdotes, of good times remembered, which had been eloquently evoked by my youngest daughter Marcella who, on the day of David’s funeral, had said to me, “Don’t be sad that David is dead, be glad that he lived.”

I had been sitting with her, on the afternoon of the service, playing recordings of the music that was being heard in Hull - The Lark Ascending, Ae Fond Kiss, and Elgar’s Cello Concerto, chosen by Christine, along with that splendid hymn, To Be a Pilgrim.  The vicar, a portly and not unjovial man,  was a member of the  Church Army, an institution I know nothing about. But he was clearly a welcome presence, possibly in some ways faintly like David himself.

Christine resides just down the road from us in Edinburgh, so her journey, even on a stormy night, was perhaps not too daunting. The thought occurred to me that in childhood the Shaw family also lived “just down the road” in a different house.    It seemed a nice thing to remember on Saturday.
1 March 2015