Chapter 1

 

Carrying on Regardless

 

 

The occasion was my mother Polly’s funeral, the location was the Highlands of Scotland, the month was March. We’d been standing around in an icy wind at the gates of the cemetery for what felt like hours, waiting for the priest. He was supposed to be coming with the undertaker, and they were late.

When the funeral-mobile rounded the corner, I didn’t register why there was only one person aboard. Not until the undertaker jumped out and said: “We’ve got a problem. The priest isn’t coming.”

A problem indeed, the sort of problem better suited to books. And there wasn’t a Plan B, because no-one had thought: What will we do if we get stood up by the priest? The undertaker didn’t have a Plan B either: just two horrible alternatives, one marginally less awful than the other.

“We can take your mother back to the mortuary and leave her there while we reschedule the funeral, or we can carry on regardless,” he said.

Carry on regardless? How do you carry on regardless at your mother’s funeral without a priest?

The whole priest business had been nothing but trouble from the start. In the end, we were stood up not by one priest, but two. My brother and I had decided on a somewhat unconventional graveside funeral because neither of us wanted to do the church thing. And the reason we didn’t want to do the church thing was because it would have been an empty church thing, and that would have been awful. Polly deserved so much better than that. She’d accumulated hundreds of friends during her peripatetic lifetime, but they were scattered around the globe, and could not, for logistical reasons, be present.

So we had reasoned, mistakenly it now seemed, that a graveside funeral would be more dignified. Because Polly was a Catholic—she’d converted to papism for reasons known only to herself and God some decade earlier—the business needed to be done by a priest. So I rang Priest No. 1, explained what we wanted and waited for him to say “Yes of course, my daughter.”

He refused point blank on two counts.

“What if it snows?” he said. “I don’t want to be standing about in the snow for half an hour. And besides, that’s not the way we do things in the Catholic Church.”

So I rang Priest No. 2, who was engaged in a long-term feud with Priest No. 1, or so I’d heard, and hence likely to agree. He agreed at once, although he did point out the arrangement was a little unconventional. But now Priest No. 2 had shafted us royally as well, although not through choice, for I later discovered he’d taken ill enough to be hospitalized.

Sending Polly back to the mortuary and trying to find Priest No. 3 simply wasn’t an option. Carrying on regardless wasn’t much better, but it was better than that. Thus I found myself preparing to officiate at a funeral, my mother’s funeral.

“A Bible. Does anyone have a Bible?” I was in a state of near-catatonic panic.

The small gathering stared at me blankly. Of course no-one had a Bible. What kind of person carries a Bible around with them?

And then I remembered. I was that kind of person. There was a Bible in my car. A week or so before Polly died, I’d seen an old leather-bound one in the local charity shop, so beautiful I had bought it. It was on back seat along with all the other things I never got round to transferring to the house.

The funeral service plan was exceedingly simple, and that’s because it’s very difficult to come up with an elaborate plan with a waiting coffin and minutes to spare. I would read a psalm, I decided, and I’d give a short address. A very short address, and one I’d have to make up as I went along. I had a sheaf of pages, tributes from overseas friends, and a poem from Polly’s grandson. I had planned to ask the priest if I might read them aloud, but now it seemed I was the priest, and didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.

Our small group trooped down to Polly’s graveside, where several bemused-looking gentlemen from the undertakers were waiting to lower her coffin into the ground. Now I had a new problem. I couldn’t find the book of Psalms. I know my Bible well, because you don’t waste the best part of your adult life studying theology and so forth without getting to know your Bible very well. Flicking through in a frenzy wasn’t helping, because the book of Psalms had mysteriously disappeared.

Then my brother stepped into the breach and in spite of not having picked up a Bible for decades, if ever, managed to find it effortlessly. I wanted the psalm that said even though Polly walked through the shadow of death the Lord would be with her, and that she was off to dwell in his house forever, but I couldn’t remember the number.

More frantic fumbling, until at last I remembered—it was Number 23. I read it and then I looked up at the sky and made my first, and God willing last, funeral address.

“Hello Polly,” I said. “I know you’re not in the box, so I’m not going to look at that. I’m really sorry this has turned into such a farce.” I said a few other inconsequential things, now forgotten and then I read the poem, and the little tributes, and it was all over in minutes. It was the shortest funeral any of those present had ever attended, and presumably also the oddest.

But then little about my life with Polly had been ordinary, so it was not so surprising that her leaving should fall outside the regular way of things also. Our life together had been made up of ninety moves through six countries, lived as if we were clinging to a dysfunctional roller-coaster that had left the rails somewhere a long way back along the line.

I cannot leave God out of this story because He was always a part of it too. He is quite a tricky character to include because of his invisibility and that habit He has of disappearing for years at a time, and appearing to do absolutely nothing at all. But it is nevertheless my experience that when the chips are down, He will put in a rare dramatic appearance, and these sporadic appearances are recorded also in this work.

And now for the usual disclaimers: These are my personal, subjective memories of events. They will not necessarily coincide with other people’s recollections. While in places I exaggerate in order not to bore you, I never willingly or wittingly deceive you, but seek at all times to get to the heart of the matter. You can allow for a ten percent margin of error throughout, especially when it comes to detail, because I’ve never been good with that. I have also made considerable effort to spare various friends and relatives the embarrassment of making unexpected guest appearances in these pages. These omissions are not because these people are unimportant to me, but because they are, in fact, so very important.

 

ΩΩΩ

 

Perhaps Polly’s death wouldn’t have been so bad if I’d been expecting it, but I wasn’t and the reason for this, despite all evidence to the contrary, was because of the Myth of the Queen’s Telegram. I am not sure where the Myth originated, but it grew to be very powerful.

“You’re going to get your telegram from the Queen,” I’d say, and Polly would give me a little sideways look as if she wanted to believe me, but deep down knew better.

So powerful was the Queen’s Telegram Myth that when she took ill enough to be rushed to nearby Inverness Hospital, I didn’t take it seriously. She was only 82.  There were 18 years before the Telegram. No need to panic.

Not even when she started having visions of the Blessed Virgin Mary did I doubt the Myth. Now if that wasn’t a hint from the Almighty to do some speedy demythologizing, I don’t know what was.

I wasn’t there when the Blessed Virgin Mary first put in an appearance at Inverness Hospital. Perhaps it would have been different if I had been, although I suspect not, for the layers of Telegram Myth induced denial went very deep.

“She’s having visions of Mary,” my brother told me.

“Mary who?”

“The mother of Jesus.”

“You’re joking.”

“I’m not. She pointed to the bottom of the bed and said ‘Look, there’s the Blessed Virgin Mary’.”

“Who was actually at the bottom of the bed? Was it a nurse?”

“There was no one there.”

“Did you point that out?”

“Yes, but she was just seemed surprised I couldn’t see her too…Look, sis, I think this means Mum’s dying.” (He insists on calling me sis. I hate being called sis.)

“Nonsense,” I said. “She’s not dying. She’s going to get her Telegram from the Queen.” And he too gave me a little sideways look, as if he wanted to believe me, but knew better.

A day later Polly as good as told me she was dying.

“Mary said I am going home tonight,” she announced, looking terribly frail and weak, with Mary’s imminent arrival obvious to everyone except me. “Such a beautiful girl, that Mary,” she added.

I still didn’t get it. If I’d got it, I would have stayed with her that night and been with her when Mary came for her. I may even have seen Mary. Now that would have been something to write about.

But as it was, when the phone-call came in the early hours of the next morning, grief came with it like a mighty bear’s paw, an express train, a hurricane, a thunderbolt, and any other over-the-top metaphor you like, and it swiped me sideways, knocked me to the ground and I’ve still not fully gotten over it.

I had no previous experience of grief, proper adult grief, that is, and so when it came, I simply couldn’t handle it. But I had to handle it. There was all this stuff to do. No-one tells you that when someone dies you are going to be plunged into a nightmare round of practical tasks. There was a funeral to arrange (although you’ve seen how that went...), there was paperwork to take care of, bank accounts to close. There wasn’t an estate to settle, because Polly went out of the world much as she’d come into it.

Most pressingly, there was a move to arrange, for I would not be able to continue living alone in the house in the Scottish Highlands we’d been renting for the past several years. Instead, I would have to first find, and then move to, the cheapest place in Britain.

Perhaps worst of all were the reminders that were everywhere: that empty hot water bottle in the bathroom, that brand of tea she liked in the kitchen cupboard, her books in the bookcases, her fountain pen on the dining room table. I closed her bedroom door because I couldn’t bear to look at her personal things, her empty bed. It took me four weeks before I was able to sort out her clothes, papers and books. And as for the photographs, which she had all over the place, stuffed in drawers, falling out of manila envelopes, I certainly could not bear to look at those. I bundled them all in a pink cardboard box—a too hard to deal with box—and jammed the lid down on this photograph of my grandmother Hannah. And so it is with Hannah that I will begin.