Let me write now as the spirit moves me, and as memories crowd the mind, about a good man through and through, and a citizen of incomparable quality. He was a good, reliable, interesting and necessary friend for nearly fifty years. Our lives did not run together every day or every week but Makepeace was there, he could be called upon, he was instructive in detecting pretentiousness and uncovering fallacy, he set the standard of how “to live in truth”. Once when real trouble loomed in my life for a while he was one of the first at my door, his presence and support strongly and calmly assuring when confidence was shaky and the future uncertain. What is completely and firmly upright is easy to lean upon.
It is hard to maintain perfect integrity. That involves throughout a life unswervingly making thousands of decisions which opt always for telling the truth, choosing difficult right over easy wrong, giving up tempting personal advantage in favour of what one knows is honest, rejecting popular causes which lead a country astray and exposing ignorance, bad faith, half-truths and hypocrisy as a matter of course whatever the personal cost or majority opinion. In the nearly fifty years I knew Makepeace Richmond I never knew or heard of him failing the many tests of integrity.
That may give the impression of a severe, humourless, even harsh man, unrelentingly disapproving of human weakness, uncongenial in his determination to be right and do right and take credit for it. He was in many ways the conscience of his country but it is ridiculous to think of Makepeace in such terms, a sort of Cato the Elder, Censor of his times and his people, stickler for a stricter and simpler life, single-mindedly set on stemming the tide of current un-Roman slackness.
His company and his conversation were simply too interesting, entertaining and utterly dismissive of pompousness to categorise him as a sober-sided Cato the Censor. His letters to the press were famously entertaining as well as famously disapproving of falsehood, fatuous bureaucracy, bullying authority and driveling and turgid excuse-making – letters compressed to the essential, cutting to the heart of the matter, scornful of pretense, devastatingly truthful. All editors must yearn for such a correspondent – a short letter from Make-peace was worth a hundred columns and a month or two of editorials. His short, ironic letters were one of life’s pleasures.
He was our family dentist, wholly professional, sternly insistent on punctuality, ridiculously inexpensive, master of the art of gagging the mouth with instruments while teasing you with deliberately outrageous remarks impossible to refute except by incomprehensible gargle. “So you agree that Sampras was better than Federer.” “Strange how completely wrong Einstein turned out to be.” “Would you not agree, Ian, sugar is a sunset industry?”
As well as my teeth and root canals, Makepeace and I had tennis in common. He loved the game. He played virtually to the end of his days. He kept marvelously fit. He was always trying to improve. “How is the backhand coming along, Makepeace?” “Terrible, terrible, I can’t seem to get it right.” Well, deep into his eighties, he could be forgiven. But there were days when the swing was sweet and grooved. Once, long ago, playing doubles against him I remember coming into net and he passed me clean as a whistle, a perfectly placed shot down the line. “You see, nothing to it, just give me the slightest opening!” I can still see the small smile of contentment.
I regularly got notes from Makepeace which I looked forward to opening. We didn’t have poetry, one of my great loves, as a mutual source of interest and enjoyment but we exchanged communications on any number of other subjects over the years and decades. I have always been fascinated by the huge mysteries of infinity and the origins of the universe and the start of life and the end of time and the possibility of God and the ultimate question which the great philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich used to ask his seminarians: “Why is there something when there could be nothing?” Makepeace also was fascinated and he regularly fed my interest in such mysteries with articles and views he found and shared with me. We once discussed whether the mind of man would ever evolve to the point when he would know the First Cause and the Final End and we agreed, no, such mysteries would remain eternal, more is the pity. We would have liked to think that answers might be forthcoming.
At eighty-eight I have got used to losing old friends. But that does not make the losses any easier to accept. What such losses do is create a surrounding emptiness, old echoes gradually replacing young voices, a deficit in uniquely shared memories in friendships matured until they deeply matter. When Makepeace left the scene the deficit significantly increased, the emptiness became more noticeable.
