HS080

Hastings Diary Day 12 May 2016 

3pm - Driving from Hastings along the M4 to my aunt’s funeral, thinking about why we started the diary project. There is something about motorway driving, the combination of concentration and boredom that aids thinking. The idea originally grew from  the  ‘Pop Up Museum,  which focused on objects but really ended up being about people’s stories – who they were, how they got to be who they were, what they wanted: the story of me – which, essentially, is what diaries are about beneath new territories explored -  the story of who I am, what I do, what I think and feel.  They are both private and public – a solitary escape and a longing to connect, to have someone empathise with our thoughts and feelings. Do we always imagine a reader when we write a diary, if only ourselves in ten years time? I think putting pen to the page is in itself an act of connecting.

In places like Hastings people live cheek by jowl, yet often know very little about each other – that funny man who comes out of the house at 7.30 every morning with his pug, that woman in the Spar buying a tin of carrots - the diaries are also a way to connect, to legitimize our nosey tendances, to find out we’re not so different after all.

4pm Westerleigh Crematorium – Bristol

It’s been seven years since I last came here, and then it was October, an early snow, white sleet on our black coats. Now, cherry blossom spirals on the lawns, the last of the tulips flop over remembrance stones.  

How final it is, seeing my cousins carry Auntie M’s coffin down the aisle, knowing her body is inside, that I will never see her again. Tears, sadness for my aunt, for my cousins, for Uncle B, and for me, for all of us, because how can you not look at a coffin, heavy on the pallbearer’s shoulders, and not be reminded of your own death? 

My father stands next to me in the chapel, singing out of tune to All Things Bright & Beautiful – not knowing the words, humming enthusiastically, rejoining the chorus – there should be a word for that sort of half singing, half humming –shumming or himging?  How excruciating I used to find this when I was younger, at weddings, harvest festival, Christmas (our family was occasional church goers), his loud tuneless groan audible above the tuneful melodic voices. It reminded me of how embarrassed I was by him generally growing up – a memory of  SP’s overnight stay flashes to mind - (circa 73/74), him walking along the landing to the bathroom in his brown and orange Y fronts.

We came out of the chapel, across the bridge into the memorial garden; the same space where we stood after R’s funeral – all of us then with fags in hand, despite her dying of lung cancer – how sad that was, snow on the ground, and the absurdity of R’s death, so young, (who hardly smoked), and us smoking –  in defiance, or denial, a snook at the Gods, or our own powerlessness -  I don’t know. Maybe it was just nicotine.

On the way into the chapel, I handed my car keys and sunglasses to my mother. I’d changed into my funeral clothes at Membury Services and forgotten to bring a handbag.  After the service, I stayed a while in the memorial garden talking to my cousins, uncle, nieces, nephews, step-cousins, and as the crowd began to thin out, and cars passed on their way to the wake, I looked round for my mother who was nowhere in sight. I walked back to the car park where my car stood alone in a sea of white gravel. My mother, father and brothers had gone, my keys forgotten. My phone was also inside my car. I walked down to the gate and managed to flag down a distant relative and asked them to send someone back from the wake with my keys. It was gone five by now, and I was totally alone in the crematorium. I wandered through the gardens.  Every tree, bench and shrub was dedicated to someone’s memory. Between stone plates, blue silk lilies and fake red Chrysanths, purple  and orange Gerbers, bunched in pewter pots, out of kilter with the soft greens and greys which ran into frothy hawthorn hedges.

Auntie M was 84 or (85) when she died: a good life, a good death, a good funeral, one could say. I remembered an interview I’d seen with Paul Eddington years ago (Gerry in The Good Life), when he knew he was dying of skin cancer. The interviewer asked him how he would like to be remembered. He said, ‘as someone who did no harm.’  He was a Quaker, I think. Auntie M was Catholic to the end, and definitely someone ‘who did no harm’, who (as they said in the service) gave to her family, who made teas/cleaned the church/did the flowers/worked on her allotment, drove trainee priests around, (which was perilous for all concerned) helped people with English lessons, with a cracking sense of humour, and much kindness.

I was sitting on a stone at the entrance of the car park when my brother pulled up in his Ford, wound down the window:  ‘Come here often?’ He said.

9.30pm:  Picked up email from B - first of the diaries have come in.