FUNERAL BLUES

Last Friday morning was bright and cold as I climbed into the car and turned on the engine. My stomach was churning and I had an unpleasant taste in the roof of my mouth. A hundred miles to the south, sextons had dug a deep, narrow trench into which a coffin would be lowered. The others got in to the car and I drove off. The journey took three hours. I didn’t want to over-stress the car in case it broke down and I would be marooned, unable to attend my own father’s funeral. The sun shone through the windows and deflected off the crystal ornaments on the window-sill, but the house in Railway Terrace was deep in gloom. My mother looked tired, my sisters wretchedly inconsolable. ‘I’ve made some soup,’ said my mother, ‘Would you like some?’ I drank some, but I could taste nothing. The hearse and the funeral car arrived right on time. The chief mourner was a woman, smart, respectful, attractive in a top hat and dark suit. We filed out and took our places in the second car. The coffin in the hearse was draped with yellow roses. That was my dad’s favourite colour. I sat in the front passenger seat and looked directly at the coffin as we wound our way slowly along Wallsend High Street to the church. There was the sound of quiet sobbing from behind me. I gritted my teeth and stared out of the window. Wallsend was busy with people going about their business. One or two men in baseball caps and untidy tracksuit bottoms looked disinterestedly at the cortege as it drove past. One woman made the sign of the Holy Trinity across her chest. Otherwise, it was business as usual. The church, a modest Methodist one on Station Road, next to the SupaSnooker billiard hall, was crowded with over a hundred people. My dad was a popular man, very well-liked and respected. I took my seat in the family pew at the front, as the pall-bearers laid the dark rosewood coffin on two skimpy aluminium folding table-legs a mere four feet from me. The vicar was elderly, and deaf. He wore a hearing-aid in his right ear. His presence gave me comfort and the proceedings a suitable amount of gravitas. I did not want an eager young theologian with great political ideals to be spouting forth on the occasion of my father’s funeral. The first hymn was ‘Eternal Father, Strong To Save,’ on account of my dad’s time in, and love of, the Royal Navy. The organist stumbled into the first few chords then more or less kept to the tune. I sing hymns in the same manner as Richard Harris sang ‘Macarthur Park,’ sliding up and down the scale until reaching somewhere near the approximate pitch, but in a basso profundo voice that would not have disgraced Louis Armstrong. My sisters gave excellent eulogic perorations and my niece read a moving poem. Their voices faltered as they gallantly soldiered on towards the conclusion of their missives. I marvelled at their courage in standing up in front of a hundred people and pouring out their hearts in such a raw and painful fashion. I sat rigid, with my fists clenched and jaw locked, the epitome of masculine strength. Inside, I felt like shredded tissue paper. We sang ‘He Who Would Valiant Be', one of very few hymns I can still remember, and finished with ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ The organist must have been anxious to leave because she played it at four beats to the bar and turned it into Val Doonican’s ‘Walk Tall.’ We filed out and I reluctantly said 'hello' to people I had never met, or had only seen at funerals - that is to say, most of my relatives. A woman said: ‘You remember me, don’t you?’ I said ‘Yes, of course,’ but I hadn’t a clue who she was. I had to ask my mother. She said that the lady was a distant cousin from the depths of Northumberland whom I had last seen when I was six. I met an old friend whose voice was an octave higher than I remembered and whose hair, instead of being flaming red, was bauxite-grey. I hardly even recognised him, despite him having been my best friend for a half-a-dozen years when I was a kid. We drove to the cemetery. The sun had disappeared and the afternoon had turned chilly. I stood by the graveside as the sextons lowered the coffin into the gaping maw on stout ropes. The coffin looked very small and it went down a long, long way. My mother stepped forward and threw down a single yellow rose. The mourners stepped across the path to gaze at the plethora of bright flowers, whilst I stood looking down at the coffin as it lay nestled in my dad’s final resting-place. I read his name on the little brass plaque, neatly fastened to the lid. “William Talbot Hardwick, aged 85”. That was it, a whole life summed up in a few words on a coffin-lid. ‘You’re not thinking of throwing yourself in, are you?’ said a male voice behind me. I turned and there were three men with whom I used to play cricket almost thirty years ago, before I left the north-east of England for good. They had known my dad, had seen the obituary notice in the newspaper, and had come to pay their last respects. They had been quite youthful when I played cricket with them, but now one was in remission from prostate cancer, one had had a multiple heart by-pass, and the third had lost most of his hair. I wondered briefly how they perceived me, though I was several years their junior. I reflected that the ageing process does no-one any favours and once again I glanced behind me to remind myself of where we all end up. I was pleased to see this trio after so many years – their presence evoked memories of a happier time for me, when the world was a much more pleasant place to live, and old age was something that happened to everybody else. Eventually, the crowd dispersed and the funeral car took us to the social club where ‘the big eats,’ as my dad would have described them, were to be held. I did my best to mingle with the assembled hordes, mainly for my mother’s sake, but I felt as empty as a vagrant’s wallet and I really couldn’t wait to be away and back home. I volunteered to take an elderly aunt back to Hexham, a short drive along the A69, then a much longer one north along the switchback A68 through the Borders. I didn’t get to the house until ten ‘o’ clock in the evening, by which time I was exhausted and way on the other side of depressed. Here was a man about whom no-one could ever say a bad word, a man who had made his presence felt on every day of my sixty years, a man whose goodness made me ashamed, now torn away from me and deposited in a cold, bleak cemetery a hundred miles away. The vicar had read from the first book of Corinthians about ‘faith, hope and charity, and the greatest of these was charity’. My father possessed charity in abundance. There is no justice, and death comes to us all, but, on reflection, his was a noble life, full of compassion and humanity, whilst mine has simply been lived.