Gentleness, Music and Laughter

Michael was my cousin – a year and a day older than me. Our two families lived far apart but in some ways we grew up together. We saw a lot of our Sington cousins – regular visits during school holidays, mostly spent in the Lakes at Cockermouth and Lorton; and we all trooped off to Quaker Summer Schools together when we were teenagers. Holidays in the Lakes took us repeatedly to our favourite haunts – Sandy Yeats, where we swam (only occasionally!) and rowed on Crummock, Rannerdale, where we built dams across the beck, and Lanthwaite Green, where the four eldest cousins – Michael, Marilyn, Helen and I – scrambled up the fellside feasting on blaeberries and coming back with mouths and fingers stained purple.

My earliest memories of Michael are probably from around 1960. Priscilla (Auntie Peach) would arrive, car bursting with children. One time they drew up in a tiny bubble car (how they all squeezed in I can’t imagine!); on another occasion they arrived in an elderly, rusting Vauxhall which more or less expired on the grass verge opposite our house after reaching Cockermouth from Cambridge. Visits from the Singtons brought a touch of cosmopolitan modernity to us country cousins up in Cumbria. As the monochrome 50s gave way to the rainbow-coloured 60s, Priscilla introduced us to such exotic innovations as yoghurt and biological washing powder.

At that stage in our lives, Michael and I weren’t particularly interested in Ariel; we were beginning to be aware of the world beyond our families. I have a vivid memory one summer in the early 1960s when Michael arrived with a record (or was it a reel-to-reel tape?) of a spoof outdoor broadcast, caricaturing an English village. I wish I could remember exactly what it was: the Goons or Peter Sellars, perhaps? He and I spent hours literally rolling around in mirth – and later on we had great fun exploring the potential of a tape recorder (they weren’t very common in those days), interviewing each other, putting on outlandish accents. Now I can see that this was an expression of Michael’s early fascination for the recorded voice – something which stayed with him and provided an outlet for his creativity all his life.

Music was also important to him. I envied his skill at playing the piano: it was second nature to him to pick up a tune, improvise, play chords. And he also loved listening to music – often the same Beatles track over and over again.

It is Michael’s sense of fun and laughter that are my immediate memories from when we were around 11 or 12. And his kind, gentle sense of humour – never malicious – stayed with him throughout his life. Those two words – kind and gentle – are the two descriptions so many people have used to describe Michael since he died. Life can be tough if you’re a gentle little boy and many become hardened in order to survive. Not so Michael: he found an inner peace which enabled him to continue to face the world with amusement and a smile.

A snatch of a doggerel poem from the 19th century has kept coming back to me in recent days:

Give me a man with the sun in his face
And the shadows all dancing behind;
Who meets his reverses with calmness and grace
And never forgets to be kind.

Michael often had a smile on his face; he met disappointment and difficulty with calmness and good grace – and he never forgot to be kind. In this he was more successful than most of us; and it is for that kind, accepting, good-humoured gentleness that I’ll remember him.