Woman in a Car

My father took a year to die from the day they told him. Before that he had gone to the doctor for a long time and been sent away as a hypochondriac, which is a word this country uses for working men who describe symptoms in the wrong register.

He drove an old Cortina over the Falkland hill to the sales at Ladybank. He decided late in life that it was wrong to eat duck, and would not say why - maybe it's just a personal thing - and i cannot now sit down in front of a duck without hearing him say it. i keep a passport photograph of him in my desk in which he looks like Burt Lancaster in Valdez Is Coming, and there can be no greater compliment.

When he died i went out and worked. Not a little - enormously, for years, tours stacked against tours, until i had hurt myself by working too hard for too long, and four years after that i had still not recovered from it.

What i actually did, apart from touring, was develop a habit i have never mentioned to a doctor. In bars - in any bar, anywhere, for years - i would find myself looking round for him. Not thinking about him. Looking for him. Checking the door, the way you do when somebody has gone to the gents and is taking a while.

In the summer of 2004, at a party for my fifty-fourth birthday, somebody gave me a Minoan double axe - a heavy thing, a proper object. And a friend from Carlisle who i had not heard from in thirty-five years posted me a fig tree. So i planted the fig against a south wall and i put the axe in the ground at the foot of it, and that is a shrine to my father, and i did not decide to build it. i looked up and it was built.

My mother, meanwhile, was three miles away.

She had come south when they both did, and after he died she was near me - sheltered accommodation first, then a home. We used to sit in the Osborne View with the Solent in the window and the Isle of Wight lying out there like a whale, and she would tell me about Blyth when she was a girl, the Dutch sailors coming off the boats in wooden clogs, and about walking out with my father along the banks of the Wey, the two of them going from pub to pub arm in arm, which is a thing i can see so clearly that i sometimes think i was there.

She could not drive. When he died she kept his car anyway, so that she could sit in it alone and remember. That is Woman In A Car, and it is the only song of mine i have never been able to introduce from the stage without doing something with my hands.

In the home she said she was being, and she was right, literally bored to death. A man in that town was taking money off her, and i thought seriously about going and finding him and doing something that would have ended in a court, and instead - i wrote in the column at the time - guess i'll write some songs instead.

And then in the autumn of 2004 she died.

At the funeral i sang Bobby Shaftoe. Her song. The one i put at the end of A Little Voice In Space, years before, without telling anybody why.

The nurses gave me her wedding ring.

Clearing her few things out of that room was a pitiful task and i did it badly. i left the shoes. i left most of the clothes. And in among it all i found the postcards - every card i had sent her from every tour, from Vienna and Bergen and Beausejour, kept in order, kept the way you keep something. i had thought i was sending them into a void, out of duty, the way you do. She had been reading them the way you read a letter from the front.

Her long slow decline had wrapped itself round me like an anchor for years, and when it let go the sea above me got lighter, and i have never yet found a way of putting that down which does not shame me while i am putting it down.

What i did afterwards will tell you what four years had taught me. i cancelled. Our Christmas show at the Milford Social Club, which we had done every year and which was the fanclub's one night and about as Jackie Leven a date as the calendar held - cancelled, because when my father died i had worked myself into the ground and i was not going to do it a second time.

And then ten days after burying her i went and played two nights in Münster, in Germany, in a small gallery, because it was the most healing thing available to me and i knew it would be before i got on the plane. It looks like a contradiction and it is not one. Work can be a place to hide in and work can be a hand on your back, and by fifty-four i could tell the two apart, most days, by about four in the afternoon.

She is at rest on the coast west of Portsmouth now, with the sea coming sideways along the shingle.

An overweight middle-aged Scottish dreamer, whose mother always insisted had the sexual dash of Rudolf Valentino.

She would have liked seeing that sentence in a book, and liked it a good deal better had it been true….