In Memory of James Wolfe Murray

I was his brother.

Perhaps I should not be doing this. I was there from the start.

At first, we were enemies. Later, we became friends. That’s a better way, I think.

We arrived at prep school on the same afternoon. I was so young I didn’t know what a surname was and when Jimmy told me, I said, “What’s ours?” “Idiot!” he barked. And so when they asked, as they did all the new kids, “What’s your name?”, I knew what to say. It didn’t make me look good – Angus Idiot, no relation to James the Just.

It was hard for him being the eldest, motherless after the sinking of The Laconia and fatherless for the first six years because of the war. We lived in Grannyville, behind green baize doors with Big Nanny and then Thin Nanny and then Thin Nanny’s friend. Reality was sharing a pram and having whooping cough and being sick over Alice In Wonderland. Nanny said

she washed the pages and hung them on the line to dry. Jimmy laughed. He knew stuff about the real world. He knew that grown-ups talked rot most of the time. If I had believed that I would have exploded with terror.

He was pragmatic, clever, stubborn and oddly vulnerable. I drifted on a dream pillow that could have been punctured at any time by the bluntest of sharp instruments. He preferred to leave me floating, while he marched through the door marked: High Fliers – Junior Training.

It was hard for him because he was forced to take responsibility for me when we went anywhere, such as on the bus from Scotland to England back to school, which meant that in this war we waged he had been compromised by a parental no fly zone. He couldn’t beat me to pulp in a public place. He had to get me to where we were going with all my limbs intact, which gave me a powerful advantage. I could annoy the hell out of him in the full knowledge

that he couldn’t touch me in the street.

We were intensely competitive. Always. When he shot a rabbit with his bow and arrow in the woods behind our Granny’s house, I spent the best part of a summer holiday practising in secret so that I could out kill him.

One Christmas, the morning before being taken to the circus in Edinburgh as a special treat, I was rushed into the nursing home with acute appendicitis. The following day Jimmy was lying beside me in the next bed, having had his appendix out as well. But he had been to the circus and I hadn’t and he told me how wonderful it was – over and over and over again. What

hurt most after the op was laughing. We lay there, side by side, thinking up jokes to cripple the other. Competitive, even in stitches!

There are those who carry their lives before them with a purpose that feels unbreakable and there are those who follow in the slipstream of imagined greatness. The first are leaders, the second chameleons. Jimmy belonged to the former.

When we were young we fought like cats and then we fought like dogs and then we fought Andy, our new step brother. I was shy and weedy. Jimmy was strong and certain. Andy was caught in the crossfire. Jimmy called me The Mosquito. I called him dangerous. We called Andy Four Eyes, because he had a squint and wore glasses.

Insults scattered to the four winds as the teenage years mended memories and there were other, more immediate things to think about, like solving the mystery of the bra strap. The world beckoned and he grasped the moment, first in The Black Watch, our father’s regiment, for National Service and then to Oxford where he avoided the socialites in favour of more interesting friends – and cricket. He was a fast bowler and played a few games for the

University. He never boasted about his sporting achievements, in fact avoided self-analysis wherever possible. What you get is what you see, now have one of my Bloody Marys!

He was a scratch golfer, a crack shot and a keen fisherman, up to his navel in the Tweed whenever the salmon were running. His taste in music and movies was MOR – middle of the road - and found my animated analysis of obscure foreign films a pointless abstraction.

I admired his loyalty, best illustrated when I would drop in to see him in his posh London office, during the Black & White years, and he would greet me with genuine affection. I looked like something the cat brought in, scruffy as an urchin in work clothes, and never once did he call Security.

His generosity astonished and healed those closest to him. People loved his company. He had natural charm that never oozed through the cracks of a false persona. There was nothing false about him.

In the old days, in the days before we became old, Jimmy was known as a hypo – that’s hypochondriac to those who can’t spell. A simple headache became a brain tumour. Pins and needles down an arm was the early warning sign of a stroke that would leave him in the veg patch. And yet when it came to the real deal – The Big C squared – he was pragmatic to a point beyond stoicism. During the final struggle he worried more about having his paperwork in order for Cris’ sake than what might happen to him if the lights went out.

I think he understood mortality’s lease from The Man who walks beside us through the fog of a long, long life. The Man is not a figure from a horror flick, not even the spectral hoodie playing chess with Max von Sydow in The Seventh Seal. He puts an arm across your shoulder and speaks in soft tones. “It’s time now,” he says. The Man is not Death’s servant. He is The Collector. If God talks through prayer, he talks to the living. The Man guides the dying

to a holding zone, a promontory where the mountains are like these mountains and the sky is like this sky, only darker.

Jimmy battled for two days and one-and-a-half nights in the hospital before succumbing to The Man’s gentle touch. And then he knew, slipping away, without a whimper, without a cry.

They say he was handsome. I don’t know about that. What I do know is, he had a handsome heart.