Showing posts with label remembrance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label remembrance. Show all posts

Sunday 12 July 2015

So On Thursday Mother Died


So on Thursday morning at dawn, my mother died.  My sister and I had received what we, for years, had termed 'the 5.30 am call'. It means, in our family, a cry for help from one of the tribe, delivered as 'early as decent'. In this instance the message was simple - 'If you want to see your mother alive, come now'.

A Cry From One of the Tribe








The experts say that bad news sinks into the human brain in three stages: disbelief, acceptance, fortification. So, for an hour or so we had this ludicrous disbelieving conversation in which we reasoned that we would probably arrive too late for our mother's departure and that, based on our kindly father's desire 'not to bother us' we probably should just wait until the funeral.

Over hot tea and buttered toast, we came to our senses and pelted down the platform for the first train out of Paddington Station, London, to a destination in the far west of Britain.

The First Train Out of Paddington








We reached the parents' cottage in time, in fact time enough to gather round our mother's bed, not for a maudlin death-bed scene but for a family sing-song. Ma even frowned at me for getting the second line of the Welsh National Anthem wrong, as I always do and she always does. She lived another four days, actually, while the temperature soared in the hottest July on record. Gradually the surreal NHS 'End of Life Package', became our accepted norm. We rang our places of employment, not once, but the next day and the next. As the sun baked the garden to death, we wheeled her bed to the porch where she could hear the seagulls.

Where She Could Hear the Seagulls

We moistened her lips with wet tissues instead of those awful sponge swab things, and when we weren't talking to her, reminding her what a great Mum she'd been, we got on and cooked the dinner like a normal family.  They say that hearing is the last sense to go, and I like to believe it fortified her, as well as us, to hear the family carrying on as usual, arguing over the washing up, reminding one another to water the roses, discussing the merits of the new vaccuum cleaner.


Flowers in Her Hair

After she passed over, I had the great privilege of helping to lay her out, instructed by two ladies, Kerry and Diana, who did a stunning job. Oiled and anointed, with flowers in her hair, she looked almost like a young girl again. Then, with the kind of tact only British bureacracy could manage, a psychotherapist called Candida telephoned from the local hospital. Mother had, she said, seemed a little depressed during her last visit to hospital. Would it help if she, Candida came around and had a bit of a chat? "Not really," I replied.  "If I'm honest."

How many loved your moments of glad grace
And loved your beauty with a love false or true
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you
And loved the sorrows of your ever-changing face

William Butler Yeats 1865-1939


With grateful thanks to the wonderful teams from Devon C.Air and Pembroke House Surgery Paignton

Monday 9 December 2013

Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red



The Banker Pub

On a gorgeous day in August I met my dear friend Janet for lunch in a rather nice pub called The Bankers. It overlooks the River Thames, very close to the Tower of London. So, after a prettily dressed salad and a glass of lightly chilled white wine  (at a price that would make your Auntie scream), we nattered on about families, funerals and fallopian tubes. Then we strolled over to view the latest artwork.

It was a sculpture of ceramic poppies that erupted out of a window of the Tower. We thought it very pretty, and a fitting tribute to the lost soldiers of World War I.  What we didn't realise at the time was that the poppy installation wasn't finished. Day by day, week by week, month by relentless month, a team of 8,000 volunteers have planted 888,246 beautifully crafted flowers, one for each life lost during those years in the trenches, 1914-1918. 

The Poppies, August 2014
This morning I returned to the City of London in the early morning and sat writing at the bottom of the Monument, built to commemorate an earlier London disaster - the  Fire 1665. The Monument's a peaceful place now if you catch it before the rest of the crowds. I'd been having such trouble with my current chapter, trying to write about my hero's experience of war though I was born in peacetime. Eventually I thought I'd wrestled some sort of result after a short, furious bout of the scribbles.


The Poppies, November 2014
 Ten minutes later, quite unprepared for what I'd encounter, I took a brisk walk in the rain to the Tower. The poppies now are waist height. They fill the moat, right up to the railings. They spray across the bridge and surge along the river side in full view of the Thames River Police, the dredgers and the HMS Belfast. In 1914 there were many who thought the war would be a bit of a diversion, 'over by Christmas'. Now their descendants stand, literally thousands of them, every age group, every social class, in hushed silence at 8.00 am in the morning. There were so many people there that they closed first Tower Hill station, then Aldgate, then St Paul's. Still the crowds came flocking, stomping along the Thames path with their prams, umbrellas and walking sticks. Eerie, and unforgettable. Now there's a fitting tribute.


With rue my heart is laden
  For golden friends I had,
For many a rose-lipt maiden
  And many a lightfoot lad.

A. E. Housman
1859-1936 

My short story published by Ether Books, Free today for Remembrance Sunday 

 Click Here


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