Eulogy
What is a blog for if not moments such as this? Here is the address I gave at St. Leonard’s Semley yesterday, Friday 4th Nov, 2011.
House keeping first.
Thank you all for coming.
The family would be pleased if you could join us at the Benett for a wake immediately after the service.
The order of the service follows the traditions of the Church in which my mother was brought up. We have tried to be conventional and to accord with what I think my mother’s wishes would be. Where possible we have followed the precedents of my father’s service. That however is four decades ago and while some things don’t change I can hear the priest in charge – a stranger – saying “it’s supposed to be a sad occasion not a celebration”. I’m not sure a priest would say the same today.
I’ll try to thank all concerned but if I leave anyone out it’s my fault and you must not feel in anyway overlooked. While I remember, by the way, I hope you agree that the flowers are terrific. My mother would have approved not least because she was on the roster for years, her friend and neighbour Julia is in charge this month, and much of the greenery is from the garden of the Malt House. So thanks Julia and your team. And while I am on the subject I know that my mother valued the friendship of good neighbours and several members of the family have asked me to express our gratitude to Julia and Freddy. I am pleased to join them and to say that I wish all of us were blessed with such neighbours.
I know some people say that on occasions such as this they would rather be in the casket than the pulpit. I think that’s taking things a little far though I have to concede that if my much loved brother James were still with us, I would tell him to speak about our mother. Alas he is not here but no doubt sharing a family cloud somewhere. I was always the one left behind and so you’ll have to put up with me. It isn’t, alas,the first time.
I remember my father telling a family O group after my parents sold their house in Buckinghamshire that we were not under any circumstances moving west of Salisbury. My uncle Tom says he doesn’t know what an O Group is nor that it will mean anything to the modern generation. My father, however, was always having O groups – even if it was mainly bluff. He spoke with the authority of a man who had won the Military Cross and a Distinguished Service Order in the Italian campaign. And so it was after the typical O group in which he said that we were not moving West of Salisbury that my mother and I were driving up Barker’s Hill,a few days later, more than 15 miles west of Salisbury. Househunting. It must have been 1966.
Michael Lodge, who still I am delighted to say, was doing logs and lawns at the Malt House more than forty years on was on the roof of the farm on the right doing whatever people do on roofs, and my mother looked at the Malt House on our left and clocked the beautiful and inimitable very English view through the drawing room window. She turned to me immediately and said “I think it’s empty”.
And so it was. Martin and Diana de Satge had farmed it but moved out recently to a house in East Knoyle and the Malt House was not technically even on the market. Nevertheless my parents bought it within days and my mother stayed there until she finally went to Hays House in September. Thank you, Sara Vaughan, for making that move possible and relatively painless. And thank you, James and Sara, for the love and affection you have demonstrated over the years and especially in the last few months.
The house on Barker’s Hill defined Jean’s long life and she achieved two things there. First she became an important figure in the community.
It was a very different world in those days – opposite the Malt House where there is now a hard tennis court and a pool was a working farm; there was a village shop where Ernie boasted one of the finest displays of gumboots in the country. Squadron –Leader Steiger-Lewis ran the Benett and Canon Rogers was the vicar. When Anthony and Anne Johnson took over the parish they made some additions to the Rectory and my mother, on viewing them, said characteristically that it now looked like Soweto.Into this scheme of things and tapestry of people my mother fitted admirably. She became a big cheese in the local conservatives – Denis Walters was the MP -; she was a key player in the parochial church council run by Ollie Patch, who had destroyed the Italian fleet at Taranto and whose family my parents had first met in Malta in the 1940s; she distributed poppies, laid on meals for the elderly, many of whom were latterly much younger than she was. Lucy, my daughter, her grand-daughter, who is alas in New Zealand, remembers Jean and Mrs. Patch trying to thread cherry tomatoes on to liquorice sticks as part of a Women’s Institute project.They were hopeless but hysterical. Above all, London was much further away than it feels to day. She was always a traditional countrywoman and she became a working part of the local countryside.
Just as important she became a focal point for her family. When she first moved to the area this was essentially a small nuclear one but gradually she went from being a sprightly young forty something to a venerable 90 plus. In the course of this she garnered daughters-in-law, six grandchildren and four great grandchildren. She was always a source of common-sense and reassurance for the family and a refuge from the often antagonistic world.
These two aspects of her life – the community and her family, allied to a strong sense of place and of rightness and wrongness, were fundamental. She was flawed,funny, cutting and cuddly, giggled a lot, boasted a well-turned ankle and thanks toYoga remained enviably supple , fond of fudge and fire-lighting–she was a decent, complex individual who didn’t apparently change much, who didn’t suffer fools but was always there when needed.
She was born in 1920 at the Green in Martock, South Somerset, where her father my grandfather, had a glove factory. Penny and I recently moved to Bower Hinton, one of the village’s suburbs, and we are within walking distance of the farm house in which her great childhood friend, Diana Palmer once lived It was a solace to my mother that the family had, in a sense, “come home” and she recently had lunch in Bower Hinton once or twice with Caroline, who latterly co-ordinated her care. Caroline was recommended by Dr. Carter at the Tisbury surgery and I owe her a huge debt.After my grand-father’s premature death in the 1930s the family went into exile Jean was educated at Ashford High School in Kent and later taught Pamela Digby later Pam Harriman. La Harriman had a reputation as one of the grandes horizontelles of her time but my mother apparently taught Pamela Gym. That, at any rate, is the story.
During the war Jean served in the ATS and at the Keep in Dorchester where she formed two important, vital associations, that shaped her life. The first was with Fan. My godmother, as she became was always Fan, my mother Loo. When Loo first saw Fan, she was peeling spuds. “That’s Lake” said my mother’s guide, “I think you’ll like Lake”. Lake was tall; my mother short. It was a rule of those times that ATS could only dance with officers but they were nearly all too short for Lake. Consequently Fan and Loo used to skyve off in the evenings to Askerswell and to a camp near Piddlehinton where the Guards were stationed. There they danced the nights away with six foot other ranks. There is some dispute about where exactly the Guards were stationed but none about the fact that when walking home in their great coats my shortish mother always felt safe with the much taller Fan. They looked like an officer escorting his girl-friend after an evening on the tiles. No-one would dare to attack them.
The other person she met in Dorchester was my father, who at that stage was the weapon training officer. When the Regimental Sergeant Major was interviewing my mother there was a loud bang somewhere off-stage. My mother jumped and looked incredulous. “That’s that shocker Heald”, said the RSM without blinking an eye-lid and coining a family nickname which lasted years. A few days later my father was fitting gasmasks. When he got to my mother she winked at him; they married in 1943.
From that moment on my mother was dutiful and seemed subservient. That meant Malta, Austria, Hong Kong, and Canada, followed by the presentation of countless cups and other awards as the wife of one of the Founding Fathers of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and of the Special Events Manager of W.D.and H.O. Wills, tobacco manufacturers.
Then in 1972 my father was tragically and unexpectedly killed in a motor accident. From then on my mother to the apparent surprise of the world at large, though never to her nearest and dearest, emerged to become the substantial and significant figure I have already described.
I can only speak for myself but I am proud to have known her and pleased that God chose her to be my mother. I would like to say thanks to Him and thanks too to her, for the strength she was and the example she set.There is a line of Thomas Hardy’s which describes the sort of person she was. It is deceptively simple and it runs “You was a good man and you did good things.” This was true of my mother too. She was a good woman and she did good things and I have reason to be profoundly grateful for both.
END