Open Writing

When did you last let your eyelids down and enjoy a really good cry? Not just a moist, prickly flicker, but a shoulder-shaking, tension-relieving, not to mention medicinal, weep.

Although we are all slapped to tears the moment we are born, a dry-eyed status seems to be a desirable asset as we mature, as if a trembly chin and bubbly eyes were something to be ashamed of.

But tears are not all antiseptic eye-wash, they also lubricate and beautify – according to an ancient keep-fit manual I refer to from twinge to twinge. I have had my share of practice but I have yet to see them enhance my appearance. Mine are definitely the ugly type, featuring blood-shot eyes and blotchy cheeks.

I notice most TV heroines not only manage to expel one elegant salt-drop at a time, but each one is perfectly trained to follow the same trail and after a gentle blot with a tissue the eyes and face resume their original glossiness.

So it gave me supreme pleasure to note the nauseating weeper messing up the screen recently. One hero had to kiss a tear-soaked, runny-nosed damsel in ‘Another Bouquet.’ Even when he broke away she was still unglamorously attached to him by salivary threads. As we were all laying bets as to how far they would stretch it took a certain amount of pathos out of their passion.

But all the vigorous bed swapping had turned it into a comedy, anyway. It says a lot for their acting when they manage to keep their own faces straight.

What makes us cry? We share our laughs, why not our griefs? There are enough disasters around to tremble the firmest chin; food mountains, futile deaths, hooliganism and cuts in education.

Perhaps nostalgia or sentimentality evokes our tears. Some catastrophies cut too deep to be relieved by mere tears. The sort that make you feel that someone has you by the solar plexus. You long to dissolve the tension but remain painfully dry-eyed. Our bank statement has us in such a grip at the moment.

Sometimes when I am iced to the wall at the bus stop, scanning the bleak horizon for a bus that never comes, I feel an uncomfortable bubble of rage well up from the pit of my stomach until it almost chokes me.

I don’t need to ask the feminine side of our household what provokes their watery outbursts. Deep depressions and assorted tears are an occupational hazard, caused by poverty (theirs), homework, friends, washing up and my inadequacies.

What brings tears to your eyes? I asked our male element. Their answers were varied: ‘Paying my board, bashing my finger with a hammer and watching Crossroads, says son. ‘Onions’ from dad. Men are more ashamed of showing emotion than women. Some cannot bear to face female outbursts, Harold Wilson was one – according to Joe Haines.

My family think it a huge joke if television induces me to tears. Seeing as it is responsible for a lot of my wailing, this is most disconcerting.

I am not a football fan, but I always find the Cup Final a great tear-jerker. When the victorious captain goes berserk with the cup, it’s impossible to stay dry-eyed.

Liz Taylor has wrung a ‘flood’ from me over the years, and no one was more thankful than I was when Lassie finally did come home.

Witnessing another’s defeat makes me cry. ‘Weep with them that weep,’ urged St Paul. Although prone to self-pity I do sometimes dab my eyes for others. During the showing of the Vancouver Empire Games film of 1954, when the brave figure of marathon runner Jim Peters crept into the stadium and he struggled desperately to guide his rubbery limbs over the last lap, our handkerchiefs were dripping. With the crowd screaming encouragement he collapsed, before he reached the tape. Just the thought of all that effort brings the tears again.

A friend tells me she cries every time she sees the Queen. I want to mop my
eyes every time I hear a seventy-eight-year-old widow friend thank God and count her blessings. She is partially deaf and recently had to discontinue her newspapers, even with the aid of reading glasses and a magnifying glass the words are indecipherable.

Oscar Wilde was jeered and laughed at by passengers as he stood in his convict’s attire on the central platform of Clapham Junction. In his last work of prose, ‘De Profundis,’ written during the final days of his confinement in Reading Gaol, he describes his humiliation. ‘For half an hour I stood there in the grey November air surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me, I wept every day at the same hour for the same space of time.’

As if to decry his despair he goes on to say, ‘That is not as tragic as it sounds. To those who are in prison, tears are a part of every day’s experience.’

My son and I once spent a week crying at the same hour. He was upstairs in his cot, I was sitting in the stairs. We were following the ‘Let him cry’ technique, but we gave in first – setting the precedent for future evenings, we placed him downstairs in his carrycot. Life brightened considerably. Every night he played with his toes until he was tired, then I would awaken my mate and we all toddled to bed gratefully. Now we sit playing with our toes waiting until he is tired enough to come home!

When crippled children were refused accommodation in a Yorkshire holiday park because of the alleged effect on other holidaymakers, it brought tears to my eyes.

Of course people are upset by the handicaps of others – so they should be – if only to remind them of their own abilities and the duties that go with them.

On holiday last year we joined a small queue of elderly people at a theatre side door. We hadn’t noticed at first, but it gradually became embarrassingly obvious we were the only members in the queue who were not disabled. The rest were physically and mentally handicapped. A woman in front made the children giggle when she twined her arms round her companion’s neck and kissed her.

Their excitement showed in their happy smiles that kept spreading over their faces. When the doors opened, my smile disappeared. ‘This entrance is for the disabled only,’ said a red-blazered youth. But when I mentioned the shooting pains in my left leg, he grinned and allowed us in. We saw the small party many times later and gradually accepted their deformities naturally.

Of course it is disturbing to see their hardship, but a thousand times more disturbing not to see them enjoying their right to a happy holiday as anyone else.