In Episode Four of his new book, author Julian Roup speaks of his late friend, Simone Deschamps who would have welcomed Covid-19.
In case you missed Episode 3, click here.
Life in a Time of Plague
Sussex, 12th April 2020
By Julian Roup
How can I best describe my late friend, Simone Deschamps? She was in many ways both lucky and brave. Like so many people in my life I met her through a mutual love of horses, as she stabled her black gelding Lucero at the DIY livery yard next door to our home.
She found him in Spain, written off and due to be put down because of leg issues. She bought him anyway and nursed him back to health, and he served her well for many years in Spain and then in Sussex.
Simone was lucky for many reasons. A free spirit, she led a long, healthy life lived well in France, America, the Caribbean, Spain and England, with horses and dogs and her own skill at capturing them in paint. But finally, she was lucky for dying in her 90th year, just a month before the Coronavirus struck, killing so many residents of our nursing and old age homes. But, I suspect, she would not have minded, in fact she would probably have welcomed the virus for she was desperate to go, tired of a life without animals and constrained to one room in a care home.
When she was 78 and her horse died she stopped riding, and then, when the last of her beautiful English Pointers died two years ago, she no longer wished to continue. But her indomitable heart was not yet ready to pack up and go. Simone tried her best to stop it herself, swallowing some forty sleeping tablets and a cocktail of other pills. Ruefully, she admitted to having the longest sleep of her life, some 14 hours, and waking up very much alive, but angry. Looking back, she was amused, but felt strongly that we don’t manage the end of life at all well. The loss of independence and dignity, she felt, should mean an exit strategy was on offer.
Today, all across the UK, the elderly are alone with a skeleton staff in these care homes, and the residents do not have to wait long or struggle to die like Simone. The Coronavirus is having a ghastly kind of ‘spring cleaning’ of our most vulnerable old. It is a tragedy and a disgrace and when this horror is over I do hope there are political consequences.
In Spain last week, the police found whole nursing homes filled with the dead, just lying in bed, their carers long fled into self-isolation. With no relatives allowed in to check how they were doing, they died alone. This horror has brought lonely deaths to so many. And we watch it all on the news, potential victims ourselves. It is no comparison but there is something of Auschwitz about this time. Each of us is metaphorically behind barbed wire, all potential victims, each day waking to the roll call of the latest dead as the police patrol our empty streets and the charnel houses fill to bursting.
Just a month before this horror arrived, Simone died in the night of a great storm that blew some tiles off our cottage roof. When I heard in the morning that she was gone, the thought came to me that she had needed that storm to get enough wind beneath her wings. And I was glad for her. She had endlessly said that she wished to go.
Simone was an acerbic bird-like figure, she could not have weighed 100 pounds, but she did not suffer fools gladly and she feared nothing. Now and then I would complain of my horse misbehaving and she would shrug and say: “That is what horses do! You WANT a bit of spirit!”
She was born in France and went with her family to America when she was a child of seven when her father, a talented landscape gardener, found work on the East coast with a wealthy landowner whose estate gardens he designed. There Simone learned to ride and jump and race and hunt. She found work selling houses and moved to the Bahamas, where she continued in the property business. And when the Government told the expats to leave in the 1960s, she relocated to southern Spain, near Marbella. She loved the heat.
I would bump into her regularly at the stables and also as she walked her Pointer down our lane in the evenings. She spoke at first in her early years in Sussex of returning to France, somewhere on the Loire Atlantic coast like La Baule, but in the end her many friends kept her in the UK.
In her prime, she hunted with the Galway Blazers in Ireland. Now that is a statement that tells of the quality of rider she was. It is like saying about a race-car driver that he raced at Formula 1 level. And even as she crossed that fearsome bank and ditch country in the soft rain of Ireland, her keen eyes found time to observe a man in a green coat who rode across that testing country as though he was part of his horse. She always smiled at the memory. She definitely had an eye for an attractive man, although she never married. There was some talk of a pilot fiancé whose plane went down into the sea, and that was it for her.
Knowing how much she had loved hunting in Ireland I took to reading her extracts from The Diary of a Fox Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon, and also Some Experiences of an Irish R.M by Edith Somerville and Violet Martin. She would sit in her favourite chair and smile a smile of pure mischief.
She was birdlike in her physical appearance, but she was no sparrow, more a sparrow hawk, and I am reminded of her each time I see a kestrel hovering above our fields or one of the pairs of buzzards that haunt our woods or, at night, the hooting of owls. The sound of owls as they quarter the fields around our cottage always thrills me, giving as it does a sense of the tapestry of the dark being pulled back for a moment to provide a glimpse into another world.
Some of her closest friends organized a 90th birthday party for her at the care home up the lane. She got a good turnout. When Jan and I got there, we were the last to arrive and the room was packed with her friends. The party table was heavily loaded with food and drink brought in by everyone who thought so much of her. Simone sat quietly, chatting now and then, a faraway smile on her face. She gave me the impression of Gatsby, not really wanting to be present at this party at all, tired out but making the best of it, trying to honour those who had come to honour her. It was a bittersweet event. And not too long after she was gone.
Simone did not want a funeral, nor anyone to attend her cremation, just a few friends to spread her ashes under a Rowan tree that commanded a view of the South Downs from the heights of Ashdown Forest where she and her dogs and horses had spent so many happy hours. And where the ashes of her dogs were sprinkled. So on a cold and blustery morning, 11 of her friends gathered in the Hollies car park on the forest. Jan and I joined them, and we made our way to the Rowan tree and there her ashes blew around the base of the tree and we knew she would be glad. Nobody spoke, just the sound of the wind, and silently we slipped away. In its way it was one of the most moving funerals I have ever attended.
She was lucky to miss the virus, which would have meant an end to all visitors for months, and she had an endless stream of them. Once she entered her bed sitting room at the residential home, she never left it, other than to go for medical appointments or to the hospital. I tried to coax her out of her room to join the other residents in the lounge upstairs but she was having none of it. She was happy to be taken for drives or to come to tea; meals were not on as she ate barely anything but chocolate ice cream.
I invented a Scotsman, a Mr McCracken, another resident of the home who wore a tartan waistcoat and who kept threatening to pop down to see her. She just smiled. She knew I was teasing.
What gave her the greatest pleasure was the loyalty of her many friends who filled her room with plants and flowers and sweets and magazines. And she watched horse racing right up to the end.
After spreading her ashes, we made our way off back to self-isolation, experiencing something of what Simone had, locked into our homes. But we promised each other that when this terrible time has passed we would all gather again at the Foresters Arms in Fairwarp to have a meal and to raise a glass to her memory.
This Easter Sunday, April 12th, I wake at 7am and go downstairs to get coffee and out into the garden to look for the swallows. They are still not here. Just one fat, reckless wood pigeon, pecking at the lawn, closely watched by Gus our rescue dog, biding his time and willing the bird to come closer.
Click here for Episode 5.