For Mum, here's a virtual candle of hope for you, like the one you lit every day. I thought I'd post the text of my eulogy at the moving funeral we held last week, so that others can read it. Keep laughing, all my love Josie xxx
To me – and to many of you – Mum seemed to be most enjoying life when plucking some quote from a limitless store of allusions to great English literature or pop culture. Possessing as she did an encyclopedic mind for what she held dear, she could conjure a line to fit any occasion. On bad days she would cheer herself with the hammed-up cry of Hamlet's lament “O my offense is rank.” On others, she would rally hope with the brylcreemed sincerity she found in fifties crooner Jim Reeves' line that “I love you cos the future's brighter.”
And from my earliest memories of Mum onwards it was always a case of “welcome to my world, won't you come on in.” The fabric of her world, the world I grew up in, was weaved by a rich imagination in which even the most mundane inanimate objects could be assigned a character. For many years “Joe” was the name she gave her trusty green Volvo car, after Joe Gargery, the lowly, honest blacksmith in Dickens Great Expectations. Later, she even brought the depressing apparatus of immobility to life, dubbing her two reclining chairs “Buddy” and “Eddie” after the doomed rock and rollers Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. Even her spindly wheelchair became Nigel, after the delicate, emotionally-vulnerable TV chef Nigel Slater.
For Mum, who thought nothing of christening a wheelchair, naming us kids when we came along was an act of significant symbolism. After long discussions with Dad, Simon was named after the spiritual, sensitive child in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, who risks everything to tell the other boys his enlightened truth. As for me, I was to be Josephine March of Louisa Alcot's Little Women, all willfull, passionate, untidy and restless.
When I was little, Mum would delight my friends and I by putting on a faux New England accent, getting us to call her “Marmy” and pretending we were all one of the March sisters. I was brave Jo of course, flying like the seagull as she always said, while the others took turns as responsible Meg, skittish Amy, or weak, not-long-for-this-world Beth, meekly resigning herself to lie in her sick bed and watch the sparrows come and go on the windowsill. When she died Mum had been writing about Beth. I think recently she had begun to see the character as less of a wet blanket, and more as a courageous soul facing death. (Maybe Beth was braver than Jo after all eh, Mum?)
Many of you knew Mum as a talented novellist, poet and playwright, others as a teacher, a director or an actress. To all these pursuits she brought her love of life, drama and most importantly, a good laugh. To me certainly, growing up, she was simply a lot of fun. Before nursery we would skip around the living room together pretending to be goblins to the final movement of Belioz's Symphony Fantastique. With Mum, it was any excuse for a lark.
I think she got a lot of it from her Dad, my Grandpa Tom, who was always larking about. When they got together there was guaranteed hilarity. On visits to our grandparents Mum and Grandpa would invariably do the dishes to a rousing chorus of On Ilkla Moor Baht 'at in exaggerated Yorkshire accents. If we were lucky, afterwards they'd announce a game of lurgy, which would always send Grandma scurrying off to shut herself up in the safety of the front room. The rules of Lurgy, or
Sock Lurgy, if there were any, were sketchy at best. The main aim was to chuck socks at each other in the dark. First we'd collect the contents of Grandpa's sock draw and ball them up into a arsenal of soft missiles. Then we'd split into two teams and take up positions up or downstairs. Finally all the lights would go off and, in total darkness, the four of us, Simon, Mum, Grandpa and I, would spend a happy hour battling over the no-mans land of the stairwell, with both teams trying to invade the other's territory using our sock stockpiles.
But undoubtedly Mum developed her star turn over the years of holidays in a small village in Pembrokeshire in South Wales. Every autumn half-term, we'd stay with family friends in a humble block of pebble-dashed coastal holiday flats. To Mum, it was a stage. After dinner a mischievous look would come into her eye. She'd don a long, burnt-orange jacket, flip up the oversized, fur-lined hood and announce that “Monk Woman” was abroad.
This was our signal for an outdoor game of night-time hide-and-seek. Again, we didn't bother with rules. The goal was simply not to let Monk Woman get you. Cowering on the dark hillside together with the other kids, I'd listen with a mixture of thrill and terror to Mum's “mad woman in the attic” impression of Mrs Rochester from Jane Eyre. The laugh started low and quiet, rising into a cackle out of the shadows. Whenever it all got too much for me, the youngest, I'd run over to her silhouette. She'd take down her hood, scoop me up in her arms, remind me it was all a game and let me be on “her side.”
But it wasn't all fun and games. Our heartfelt thanks goes out to all of you who supported Mum through the hard times. You know who you are. As we all found as we strove to help her, Mum's nerves were often strained in recent years. We must put it down to the side-effects of medication, and to the MS, which she always said stood for “Miserable Sod.” But this is a celebration, so let's celebrate Mum's life by remembering her laughing. Despite all that life threw at her, she kept laughing, and making others laugh. After all, life's a beach, right? This is how I'll remember her, with pride. My strong mother who battled misfortune with rich fantasy and indomitable humour.