MABEL’S FUNERAL or how to be your undertaker’s nightmare

Mabel had been my mother’s live-in housekeeper since before I was born till her mid-seventies. She died on the 19th April 1996. She made me executor of her will and left everything to me. Her only wishes in her short will were to be cremated and to have her closest family and friends informed of her death. Although I had experienced, and been traumatised by, many deaths in my life, I had never before had anything to do with the organisation of funeral arrangements. I was in my flat in London when my sister, Pam, rang to tell me the news. Mabel had died peacefully in her sleep, at home, in a small town in Somerset. Suddenly my presence was required, for an indefinite time, in Somerset, to sort out Mabel’s funeral and the disposal of her possessions. So I was, out of the blue, flung into a job that I had no idea how to perform.

On hearing about Mabel’s death I went instantly into an odd state of consciousness, feeling really peculiar, not at all myself, with a strange feel all over my body which I described to people as being a bit like having granulated sugar in one’s blood. On the one hand I felt totally able to cope and on the other hand I felt as if my anxiety levels were shooting so high that I would probably die myself of overload before I was able to arrange anything.

I had just spent five days over Easter with Mabel, which helped me a bit to handle the grief. I had been very busy that Easter time, however I had felt in my bones that I really needed to make the effort to visit Mabel for a reasonable length of time. I just cannot express how glad I was that I had managed those five days. If I had not done, I would have been overwhelmed with guilt and thus probably would never have been able to arrange Mabel’s funeral the way I wanted it.

On reflection I realise that Mabel had known on some level that she was going to die. During those five days, Mabel had chosen to tell me in detail about Nanny’s death. Nanny had been employed by my parents in 1927 to look after my eldest sister, Pam, who was then six months old. Nanny brought up my four sisters and then became cook in my parent’s household. I had appeared on the scene when the youngest of my sisters was 16 years old. Nanny had died in her bedroom of a heart attack when I was 20 and while I was away at university. During those five days that I stayed with Mabel, she chose to tell me lots of little details about Nanny’s death that I had never heard before.

I was also trying to arrange an eightieth birthday party for Mabel but she was being very negative about it. She kept telling me I would be wasting my time. I asked her if she would like to have the party the weekend before her birthday or the weekend after it, and she said the weekend after it, in case she died between the party and her birthday. I remember telling Mabel that a little enthusiasm would have been gratefully accepted.

On the financial side of things, Mabel had chosen a convenient time to die.

My endowment policy had just come to it’s end, my mortgage was paid off and I had an extra £2000 to do what I wanted with and this enabled me to take about two months off work without going into debt. I also was very tired of London and my work around that time, so an unexpected two months in Somerset suited me fine.

The way the grief affected me was totally unpredictable. At one moment I could talk about Mabel in depth and not cry and at another moment someone would just mention her and I’d burst into floods of tears. I went down to Somerset by bus, Pam having suggested that driving, overwhelmed by grief, was not such a good idea. Having got there, I met up with some of Mabel’s relatives who were going to help sort through her things. Pam informed me that I would need to get the coroner’s report and find Mabel’s passport, building society book and her funeral insurance.

On arriving in Somerset Mabel’s relatives and I went through her belongings to find various things that needed to be found. It didn’t take me long to find out that I had to be in touch with various officials, each of whom had a unique vocabulary, which I had never needed in my life up to that point. Also there was an order that things had to be done in, otherwise nothing worked at all. No official would talk to me unless I had spoken to the right official before him. Now a whole line of officials, each with his own unique vocabulary, who have to be spoken to in the right order, is difficult enough when one’s brain is in full working order. However when someone whom one loves dies, I find that one’s brain tends to stop functioning.

Within a couple of days I discovered that the officials who had to be spoken to were the police, the undertaker, the coroner and the vicar. Then there were optional officials like my solicitor and the funeral insurance people. The police have to be spoken to first - it would never have occurred to me that the police needed to be spoken to at all, as Mabel had not died under any fishy circumstances! One of Mabel’s relatives very kindly dealt with the police for me. I decided to get the coroner’s report first, however, I was informed by his secretary that there was no way I could get that, before I had officially employed an undertaker. However the lady did agree to read it to me down the phone. I listened to three sentences of what sounded like a foreign language with a total lack of any vocabulary that I had ever heard before in my life. Translated into layman’s terms it apparently meant she had had a heart attack. It was beyond me, why it couldn’t just be called “a heart attack”.

I rang my solicitor at the beginning of things, heard the word “probate”, and I knew I wasn’t up to it. I told him that I had survived my mother’s death, funeral and will without understanding the word “probate” and thus assumed I would be able to get through Mabel’s funeral without understanding the word as well. I also informed him I would only be able to employ him if I could do it down the phone, I wasn’t capable of employing him by letter. He told me that down the phone was fine, thus I had a solicitor to deal with the legal side of things for me. I found my solicitor the most helpful of all the officials.

Well, I might have got away without understanding the word “probate”, however I wasn’t so lucky with the other officials. Coroners I discovered have 2 words, “inquest” and “post mortem”. As far as I could see these two words meant the same thing, but I soon learnt that Mabel had had a post mortem, and to call it an inquest wouldn’t do at all. I was also having difficulty with the word “coroner”, that is difficulty with pronouncing it and trying to remember that the word “coroner” was associated with the words “post mortem” and “inquest”, though I was trying to forget the word “inquest” so that I didn’t use it by mistake.

The words I had to associate with the undertaker were “hearse” and “limousine”. I could never understand why I wasn’t allowed to use the word “car” when talking about a limousine. My brain wasn’t functioning at all well, I was bursting into tears when I least expected it, so understanding all these new words was a task I could well have done without. However the undertaker was used to talking to people with non-functioning brains. Slowly and carefully he explained, over and over again, that a hearse is what the coffin goes to a funeral in and a limousine is what people, that is alive people, go to a funeral in. He also painstakingly explained that all funerals have a hearse, that is one hearse, and most funerals have at least one limousine, some funerals have numerous limousines.

I also discovered from the vicar that what I called “sermon” he called “address”, and calling it a sermon, just wouldn’t do. No doubt the police had specialised vocabulary too. However as I didn’t deal with them, I didn’t, thank God, have to learn their vocabulary as well.

To go back to the beginning, to the finding of Mabel’s papers. I found her will with ease, however I knew that somewhere were her passport, building society book and a lot of cash. Mabel had always been able to produce cash at a moment’s notice if anyone wanted any. It didn’t matter how much you wanted, Mabel always would be able to produce it. Finding these three things tested every bit of detective skill I had. On the first day I found a locked money box in an old carrier bag underneath a pile of old papers at the back of her hanging cupboard. I also found about 200 possible keys. I remember sitting on Mabel’s bed trying to open the money box with one key after the other. After an hour I found the right key and in the money box I found a selection of obsolete passports. Now if this was how Mabel kept papers of no value, I dreaded to think where she had hidden the valuable papers!

Over the next three days Mabel’s relatives and I went over Mabel’s flat with a toothpick, twice. No sign of her passport, building society book or cash. My solicitor rang the Home Office to see if they had her passport, they hadn’t; or whether she had reported it lost, she hadn’t. He rang her building society with the same two questions; which got the same two answers. So both her passport and building society book had to be in her flat. Now Mabel’s flat was very small consisting of two smallish rooms, a box room, a tiny bathroom and small kitchen. I decided that the two missing items and the cash had to be in the same place, we couldn’t have avoided finding three hiding places. I got to the stage where I was ringing up people for ideas. I learnt to feel underneath and around the sides of all drawers and cupboards, to pull up the carpet and look for loose floorboards. It was even suggested that I pulled her mattress apart, however as Mabel had always been able to find cash quickly, I decided that she couldn’t have hidden it in the mattress!

At the end of three days I was at a loss as to where to look next. I sat and prayed and got the feeling that I should ask one of her friends over who seemed to have a reputation for finding lost things. I left this lady in Mabel’s sitting room going through her things while I went through her clothes in the bedroom, which had already been searched by Mabel’s relatives twice.

I was lucky! In a sponge bag in her underwear drawer I discovered her passport, her building society book and an enormous amount of cash. Actually there was so much cash, that I needed to get it to the bank very quickly. However due to other commitments I had to leave the cash where it was for two days. I kept telling myself that if I had taken three days to find it, a burglar could hardly find it quickly.

On the evening of my first day in Somerset, I sat with Mabel’s relatives in Mabel’s flat and had supper. Mabel always kept a very full fridge. For pudding we had Vanetta ice cream. Now, the first half of this Vanetta ice cream I had eaten with Mabel, one week earlier. It was very strange eating the second half with Mabel now dead. I felt it wasn’t somehow right for Mabel to be dead and the ice cream to be still edible. It was a rather sombre meal. It has succeeded in putting me off Vanetta ice cream for life.

Although I would have been quite happy to stay in Mabel’s flat and to have slept on the bed she had died on, Mabel’s relatives didn’t think this was a terribly good idea, so we all stayed in a local Bed and Breakfast, where they had stayed on numerous past occasions. It was not an uneventful visit. I was awoken at 6am on the first morning by horrific screams from one of Mabel’s relatives. I rushed out of my bedroom to find the lady concerned lying on the floor, in the passage, and screaming in agony. She had been sleeping in a room different from the one she had usually slept in and had fallen down a step the other room didn’t have. The landlady appeared, also alerted by the screams, and the first thing she said was: “Oh, you silly thing, you should have looked.” Not a terribly good opening sentence I thought, when she was possibly in line for being sued. Nowhere was there a notice saying “Mind the Step”, and the passage light was off.

Later that morning, while in my bedroom, my leg went funny. It sort of vibrated and then gave way. I somehow got to my bed and sat there terrified, not daring to move. I was uncertain as to whether there was something terribly wrong with me, whether it was just too much stress, or whether there was something wrong with the floorboards! It’s a very strange feeling not being able to tell the difference between a leg problem and a floorboard problem! I remember feeling in that way out space I feel after severe shock, though I was also experiencing a type of excitement over Mabel’s gift of leaving everything to me in her will. So I was full of grief, overwhelmed by Mabel’s generosity, feeling totally out of it mentally, with a sensation of granulated sugar in my blood and a leg I dared not put to the ground. I also remember thinking that if it was the floorboards, which were about to give way rather than my leg, then I should leave the room quickly in case the entire floor gave way. I sat there on that bed for a long time wondering what to do next. In the end I got enough courage to try walking again and the problem did not return. I never did discover what happened to my leg that morning, or was it the floorboards?

I phoned around various health centres, tracking down a doctor who had time to come and see the poor lady who had fallen down the step, whose back was causing her extreme pain. A doctor was found in the end, but a cure for the back was unavailable. I later heard she was in bed for weeks, a lot of it in great pain. I thought it was such an unnecessary thing to have happened that morning. As soon as she was able to travel, Mabel’s relatives left and I moved into Mabel’s flat for the rest of the time I was in Somerset.

The coroner’s secretary, having told me that I wasn’t allowed to collect the coroner’s report before I had employed an undertaker, I therefore had to find an undertaker. Taking the Yellow Pages, I rang around various undertakers. I realised a funeral might cost hundreds of pounds though I had not realised it could cost thousands. How does one know which undertaker to choose? Finally a local person told me the best undertaker was called Bevins. Unlike other undertakers, Bevins didn’t produce extra expenses when one got round to paying the bill, so I employed Bevins.

Mr Bevins turned up to see me the next day. He was terribly kind, he told me not to worry, he would arrange everything. He came across as very helpful. I did not realise in the beginning that undertakers like to take over and do everything as quickly as possible before one has time to think. Funerals, I later realised, are usually done conveyor belt style, by the time one is able to think about what one actually wants the funeral is over. I also realised that undertakers like to get the icing right but don’t care about the cake. I cared about the cake. I think I turned into my undertaker’s nightmare, I put spanners in his plans right from the very beginning. I told Mr Bevins I wanted the funeral to take place in two weeks time. He told me this was very unusual, why did I want to wait so long? I told him, I wasn’t interested in being usual, I wanted to give Mabel the best funeral possible, and I wanted to give all her friends and family enough time to organise themselves, re getting to the funeral. Mr Bevins didn’t like this at all. I also told Mr Bevins that I wanted all the flowers in the church with the coffin. Mr Bevins was horrified. Nobody ever had all the flowers in the church with the coffin, where would they all go? I said, “The church is huge, Mabel doesn’t have hundreds of relatives and friends, there is masses of space for the flowers.” Mr Bevins then told me that he wasn’t sure how he could get the flowers out of the church at the end of the funeral service. I suggested asking members of the congregation to help. Mr Bevins said “No, no, that won’t do at all. If I have to get the flowers out of the church it will upset my flow.” I asked him what he was talking about. He explained that after the funeral service, the coffin flowed out of the church into the hearse, the people flowed out of the church behind the coffin and into the limousines and other cars. Then the hearse followed by the limousines and private cars all flowed off to the Crematorium. If he had to collect the flowers it would upset this flow. I said “Damn the flow, I want the flowers in the church.”

Mr Bevins also told me that I would need to choose and pay for a gown for Mabel to be cremated in. I asked why she couldn’t be cremated in the nighty she had died in. He told me that it would pollute the atmosphere, one had to have a natural gown. I told him her nighty was 100% cotton and what could be more natural than that. Mr Bevins said that he didn’t mean that type of natural.

The next day Mr Bevins arrived with a choice of gowns. They were that nylon type, the peachy, pinky coloured gowns you get from mail order catalogues, but much, much, more expensive. They were all utterly revolting. I chose the least revolting gown. “Oh no, she can’t have that one,” exclaimed Mr Bevins, “that one is for Catholics and Mabel is C of E.”
“Either that one or her nighty,” I replied.
Mr Bevins sold me that one. The reason it was a Catholic gown, was because it had a small picture of Our Lady around chest height. Buying this horrible gown was the only thing I really regretted about Mabel’s funeral. At this stage I hadn’t yet got expert at handling my undertaker. From his point of view it was the only time he got his own way.

Mr Bevins also asked me what I would like to do with the flowers after the cremation. He suggested that I gave them to a local hospital or nursing home. I was horrified and exclaimed: “Give them to someone else? No way! You mean give Mabel’s flowers to someone else? No! How about cremating them with Mabel?”
“Oh no,” replied Mr Bevins: “They would pollute the atmosphere.”
Not polluting the atmosphere turned out to be a very important matter in Mr Bevins’s life. The flowers were cremated in the end, though not in the Crematorium, but more about that later. The flowers couldn’t apparently be left at the Crematorium, so I agreed to pay for an extra car, note “car” not limousine, to carry the flowers back from the Crematorium to Pam’s house. When I repeated this conversation to Pam, she told me that people in hospitals and nursing homes don’t like receiving flowers from a funeral, as they don’t like to be reminded as to where they are likely to be going next!

The vicar came round to see me that evening. He was extremely kind and very helpful. He asked me if I would like to have a Requiem Mass for Mabel. I said that that sounded great, but what about the undertaker? He had already given me the impression that collecting the flowers from the church would take up all available time. The Vicar said that this was nonsense, of course there would be enough time, Mr Bevins needed to pull himself together. I said that I was not certain I could handle another conversation with Mr Bevins on a subject of me wanting something different from what he wanted. So very kindly the Vicar offered to take on Mr Bevins for me. Apparently Mr Bevins had already told the Vicar that I had this very unusual request to have the flowers in the church with the coffin, and where would he put them? The Vicar had answered much the same as I had, as in pointing out the church was huge and so there was masses of space.

I discovered that Mabel had paid hundreds of pounds over the years into her funeral insurance, she had been paying it since she was a young woman. However, the pay-out was a mere £400, a small percentage of what Mabel had paid in, and a small percentage of what I needed to pay Mr Bevins. If Mabel had put her insurance money under the bed it might have paid for the funeral and even have made a profit. As it was, the only people who had done very well out of this was her funeral insurance company. To get the money quickly, I had to go to Yeovil in person, with a copy, a proper copy, not a photocopy, of the coroner’s report and to get this report I had to go to Chard.

Pam suggested that I hired an elderly, semi-retired, local cab driver, who had known Mabel and was a lot cheaper than other cabs. He could drive me to Chard to collect copies of the coroner’s report and then drive me to Yeovil, so I could visit the funeral insurance people and collect the £400. Pam told me that I would be safe in this man’s hands, which turned out to be rather optimistic!

I set out with the elderly cab driver, who managed to hit a parked car outside Mabel’s flat within 60 seconds of me getting in the car! I decided this was a rather bad omen for the journey and ceased to feel safe from that moment on. He did actually manage to avoid hitting anything else, however the journey was quite terrifying from beginning to end as he drove around all bends on the wrong side of the road. I arrived at the coroner’s office with the right set of documents, which as far as I remember included Mabel’s passport, which was why finding it had been so important. I paid for and collected four copies of the coroner’s report. My solicitor, the undertakers, Mabel’s building society and her funeral insurance company all needed a “proper copy”, not a photocopy, of this report. Various other bodies kindly agreed to accept the fact that Mabel had died, if my solicitor wrote to them and told them that she had died. The most hair-raising part of collecting the coroner’s report was watching my cab driver turn his car around in the coroner’s car park, it looked as if he was trying to turn a car for the first time in his life.

Off we then went to Yeovil, where my cab driver got lost on the ring road around the town. We went round and round at least three times, and I started to have visions of spending the rest of my life with this elderly man, circulating Yeovil. Finally we managed to find the road that led to the centre of the town. Finding a parking space was the next nightmare. Then I went off on my own to find the funeral insurance company.

Leaving Yeovil was as difficult as finding it, we circulated the town numerous times looking for the right exit, in the end the only conclusion I could draw was that my driver had never been to Yeovil before. Luckily my brain was working quite well that day, otherwise we might still be circulating Yeovil!

I decided I wished to visit Mabel’s body. Pam thought this was totally unnecessary and told me so. However, for me seeing a person’s body after they have died is important. I was just six when my father died. I never saw his body or went to the funeral, with the result that I never quite understood which bit of him had died or which bit of him had been buried. I used to think that the part of him, which was buried, was like a huge football of solid flesh with a rough outside.

I was eleven when my grandmother died, I saw her body and thus understood that the bit that dies, or vanishes perhaps is a better way of putting it, is the person’s “spark”, the part of them that you recognise. Since then I have always insisted on seeing the bodies of people who had been close to me, after they have died. My conscious mind likes to know which part of the person has died and which part remains. I made an appointment with the local Chapel of Rest to view Mabel’s body. Pam gave me a small cross to hide in Mabel’s coffin, - “hide” because it would surely not be allowed, as it would no doubt pollute the atmosphere!

I arrived at the local Chapel of Rest and was met by an undertaker whom I didn’t know. I expected to be shown into the correct room and to be left alone with the body, the way it had happened when I visited my mother’s body. However here the procedure was different. The undertaker asked me if I was ready to go in, if I felt
alright about it. I felt like saying: “Why do you think that I’m here then? If I wasn’t ready to go in, I wouldn’t be here.” I actually just said that I was ready to go in. The undertaker came into the room with me. A fancy lacy thing hung over the coffin and the undertaker asked me if I was ready for him to take it off. I was composed before I arrived, however all the questions finished me off. I said “Yes”, started to cry and then the undertaker started to hug me. Standing in front of the coffin, looking down on the body of someone I deeply loved, feeling the bottomless emotions and being hugged by an elderly undertaker, whom I didn’t know, was an indescribable feeling. I wanted to be allowed to cry and he seemed to want to stop me. I knew he was trying to comfort me, however I preferred to be able to feel my grief and I knew that I needed to be alone. I asked the undertaker if this was the coffin she was going to be burnt in. “No, no, not burnt, cremated,” he exclaimed. I would so much have preferred to have called a spade a spade, rather than have to talk undertakers’ lingo. The vocabulary to an undertaker is so important. If you use non-normal words, you may be able to cushion your feelings and thus get less upset. I asked him which bit of her they had cut for the Post Mortem. He started to explain and then stopped himself and said that he felt that this was not the right place to talk about such things. I thought it was exactly the right place; it is so much easier to ask questions and to understand the answers when standing in front of the body.

I asked the undertaker to leave me so I could spend some time alone with Mabel’s body. I let myself cry and so release some of the pain that I still held. I hid the cross which Pam had given me. Before I left, the undertaker gave me Mabel’s ring which had been made for her by my Mother, many years earlier.

Another of my tasks was to find hymns for the funeral service and for the crematorium. There was enough time for two hymns in the church and one hymn in the crematorium. I spent an entire afternoon in the church, getting rather cold, going through all the 533 hymns in the hymn book, trying to find something suitable. I didn’t even find one that I mildly liked. Mabel’s relatives wanted “Amazing Grace” and I had always been fond of “Oh God, How Great Thou Art,” neither of which were in the hymn book, however I found them in some other hymn book which I had.

The saga of finding a third hymn became quite a drama. The vicar tried to find me a hymn, by looking through other hymn books that he had. I told him that I could not stand hymns with pathetic words. He found me a hymn with acceptable words, however I had never heard it before. The vicar told me that everybody would know it, the first ten people I asked, did not!

Finally I decided to have “Amazing Grace” and “Oh God, How Great Thou Art” in the church and to have a certain Alleluia at the Crematorium. The problem was I knew what this Alleluia sounded like, but I didn’t know its name. I also didn’t know it well enough to be able to sing it, so someone else could tell me its name. The “Alleluia Saga” started. Various friends started to sing various wrong Alleluias on to my home answer phone, which I collected remotely. Pam went to church the next Sunday and came back with yet another wrong Alleluia. I finally had to return to London so I could look through my various hymn books and cassette tapes. I managed to find yet more different and wrong, Alleluias. Finally I found a cassette with the right Alleluia on it, called Pacabel’s Alleluia. Tracking down its music turned out to be impossible. It was suggested by a friend of mine that I rang St James’s on Piccadilly and spoke to the vicar’s secretary, a lady who was likely to be able to help. However when I tried, I got on to the vicar himself, who did not know how to operate his switch board, so was unable to put me through to anyone. He also had no idea where I might find the music, however he did correct me on the pronunciation of the word Pacabel; you pronounce the “c” as a “ch”. In the end I supplied the tape with Pacabel’s Alleluia on it and it was put into the sound system at the crematorium, thus doing away with the need for an organist.

A few days before the funeral, Pam and I went off to Chard to order our flowers, which were going to go on the coffin. I took Pam out to lunch in Chard and then we went on to the undertaker’s office to check out the text for the pamphlet to be handed out in the church. The proposed text said that Mabel had passed peacefully away. Pam asked what was wrong with the word “died”. The undertaker said: “Oh no, you can’t use that word, it might upset people’s feelings, they need to be cushioned from the reality of the situation.” Pam replied that if people could not accept reality at death, then when could they accept reality. We used the word “died” on our pamphlet.

I wanted 30 pamphlets altogether, Mr Bevins insisted on a minimum of 50, the vicar told me that this was ridiculous, Mr Bevins was being pathetic. In the end we agreed on 40.

Throughout the days of dealing with officials, I was also sorting through Mabel’s belongings. I was deciding what I wanted to keep for myself, letting close friends of Mabel and her relatives choose what they wanted and deciding which charity shop to give the type of stuff to that none of us was likely to want. Finding the right charity shop was important to me, as I didn’t want to support any charity that gave money to drug companies, in the end I chose a charity which helped the Lifeboat Society. Deciding what to keep for myself had it’s problems, as I knew that Mabel had bought various items of furniture with me in mind, things like a large fridge, a beautiful gate-leg table and a tumbler drier. My problem was that my flat in London was small and I just did not have room for any more furniture. In the end I found room for the gate-leg table. I already had the biggest fridge that could fit in my flat, so I passed Mabel’s on to one of my nephews. As for the tumbler drier, I gave it to Mabel’s best friend. I just had nowhere in my flat where I could put it. I felt terribly guilty about the items of furniture that I just didn’t have room to house. I also chose large numbers of small objects to be put in a room in Pam’s house, so that the people who came to the funeral, could take home something to remember her by.

During the weeks that I was in Somerset, either before or after the funeral, I can’t remember now, I had two very unnerving incidents to do with birds. Mabel had had a secret lover. This was a secret that only I knew, and the only reason I knew was because I had by chance guessed. When Mabel had left my mother’s house, she had moved to protected accommodation in a near-by town. Periodically Pam would visit her and bring her to visit my mother. It was noted that Mabel seemed to be so much happier than when living with my mother. As my mother was a difficult person to live with, it was assumed that Mabel’s happiness was caused by her escape from my mother’s house. One day when I was visiting, I noticed how happy Mabel was and said to her: “You’ve got a lover haven’t you?” I meant it as a joke, I never thought for one minute that it could have been true. However Mabel went the colour of a tomato and made me promise never to breathe a word of it to anyone. Mabel told me the name of her lover and swore me to secrecy. This is the first time I have mentioned it to anyone. I feel it is O.K. to mention it now, as the lover is dead as well as Mabel. However I have decided to keep his identity secret, as I always promised Mabel that I would never tell.

The sad thing about Mabel’s love affair being secret was that my mother never knew that Mabel’s new found happiness was not connected to her leaving my mother’s house, apart from the fact that she would not have been able to make love to her lover regularly at my mother’s house, without my mother knowing about it. I remember my mother sadly telling me once, that Mabel seemed to be so much happier, since getting away from her. Fridays had been Mabel’s day with her lover. Pam soon found out that Mabel refused to be visited or to go anywhere on Fridays and she was very secretive about why. As Mabel was not a secretive person usually, Pam just didn’t know what to make of this. She asked me once, or more than once, if I knew what Mabel did on Fridays. I tried to look vague and always said I hadn’t a clue.

After Mabel’s death, I had quite a bit of communication with Mabel’s lover. He kept ringing me up and telling me which bits of Mabel’s furniture and other belongings that he would like. I knew that Mabel didn’t want him to know that I knew that they had been lovers, so I had to treat him as if I didn’t know, whereas I would have liked to have been sympathetic towards him. Her death must have been an awful shock to him, as she had seemed in perfect health when she died. She had been on a wonderful day out with friends the day before. Now, I didn’t particularly like this man, and the more often he rang up asking for items which were either financially valuable or sentimentally valuable, the more irritated I became. I felt sorry for him on one hand and felt terribly annoyed with him on the other.

Now I can tell you about the two incidents with the birds, both of which seriously freaked me out. I was sitting in Mabel’s sitting room on the first occasion, telling a friend of Mabel’s how annoying I found this man who kept asking for valuable items. I was as such complaining about his behaviour to another person when suddenly a large bird threw itself at the sitting room window next to me, making a loud bang, and I jumped right out of my skin. I felt that somehow Mabel’s spirit had got into that bird and had hit the window to tell me to shut up. After that I didn’t dare complain of Mabel’s lover’s behaviour to anyone. However a few days later I was driving, quite fast, along a dark, lonely, country lane late at night, thinking about how annoying I found Mabel’s lover, when another enormous bird flew straight into the windscreen in front of my face. It terrified the living daylights out of me! I luckily managed to slow down and stop without hitting anything. I assumed the bird must be dead. I did back the car up to check, and yes it was completely dead. Now one bird incident when thinking bad thoughts about Mabel’s lover might have been chance, but two, no way! Neither of these two incidents had ever happened to me before in my life or since and I don’t know of anybody else who has had this sort of bird happening either.

The violence with which the second bird hit the windscreen was rather typical of Mabel’s over-reaction to things. I remember sitting with Mabel on one of my visits to her. I was just about to lick a stamp to stick on an envelope, when Mabel yelled at me to stop with such urgency in her voice that I wondered if the stamp had a secret supply of arsenic on it! It turned out that she had a wet pad for stamps and was just trying to save me the trouble of licking it.

My family, meaning sisters, brothers-in-law, nieces and nephews, all being Roman Catholics, were having great trouble with the type of funeral Mabel was having. They hated the idea of her being cremated rather than buried. However as Mabel had asked to be cremated in her will, nothing could be done about that. Also because of the Requiem Mass that Mabel was having, it meant that communion would be given, and all my Catholic relatives had to make up their own minds as to whether or not it was O.K. for them to partake. A few relatives dealt with this dilemma by not coming.

Mr Bevins told me that the normal way to start the funeral would be to drive the hearse, with the coffin in it, and a limousine, to Mabel’s flat and then hearse followed by limousine, with me in it, would flow off to the church. This to me seemed a pointless operation. I was the only person who was in walking distance of the church, so it made far better sense for the limousine to go to Pam’s house and to collect her, her husband Larry, and as many other people from there who could fit in it, and for the hearse to go straight to the church. As Mr Bevins had long since given up all hope of giving Mabel a “normal funeral” and it was far more convenient for him to drive the hearse straight to the church, he agreed without a murmur.

In the end I didn’t walk to the church as another of my brothers-in-laws collected me. He had to come early as he was bringing from London the silk pall, to cover the coffin, that had been especially made for my mother’s funeral.

The flowers were in the church when I arrived, but at the back of it, only visible when you walked in. I said that wasn’t good enough, they needed to be up front with the coffin. “Oh no they can’t go there” exclaimed Mr Bevins “My bearers might slip on the flowers and break their necks.”
I was quite ready to have a full scale argument on the spot, in the church. However the vicar intervened and said the flowers could go inside the railings of the main altar with him, he was completely capable of not slipping on them himself.

The church part of the funeral went well. The singing seemed good, bearing in mind that none of my family can sing. Some people commented on the poor quality of the singing later. However as they had never heard my family try to sing before, they were not in a position to comment.

We all managed to flow out of the church, including the flowers, and to flow off to the crematorium without getting lost. However having got there, we all needed a lavatory urgently. The Ladies were full, the Gents were full, the wheelchair lavatory looked free, so I opened the door to come face to face with one of Mabel’s friends, sitting on the lavatory, with her pants around her ankles. I apologised and backed out, then Larry turned up and before I could stop him, he also came face to face with the same lady, in the same position. Perhaps that lady learnt that day why it is wise to use the lock on a lavatory’s door. Then Pam turned up with a message from Mr Bevins to tell me to hurry. It was like adding insult to injury. I was trying to hurry, I was absolutely desperate.

I got into the crematorium in the nick of time. We had the last five minutes of our allotted time. Apparently if you are late for the crematorium you can’t get burnt for three or four days. The service was nice but terribly quick, luckily for those who had not managed to go to the lavatory. They were in agony by the end, for out in the courtyard a fountain was playing and everyone knows the effect of that on a full bladder. It turned out that the crematorium had a one-way system, so nobody was allowed back to the lavatories that some of us had successfully managed to use. Luckily more were found before quite a few people embarrassed themselves.

Looking back on it I realised that we should have gone for a later time-slot at the crematorium. We would have had one if Mr Bevins had suggested a Requiem Mass at the start. He told me later that it never crossed his mind to suggest one. “C of Es don’t have Requiem Masses for their funerals, it’s unheard of,” he said.
I knew then that funerals are organised so that the icing on the cake looks good, no-one cares about the content. It goes as quickly as possible, as smoothly as possible, and it flows! I, of course, went for the content rather than the icing.

A special Ford Escort transported the flowers from the crematorium to Pam and Larry’s house. There they were put on and around a stone table in the garden. Watering cans and buckets, filled with water, were put under the flowers which had stalks, so as to keep them alive as long as possible. Later when I counted them, I found that the stone table had 12 lots of flowers on, or around it, and a 13th was somewhere else; this was interesting, as Mabel would never sit down at a table if 13 people were present. Left to their own devices the flowers might have died slowly of old age. However about a week later a government van came round which was burning the excess foliage at the edge of the roads. Larry spoke to the driver and in his conversation mentioned that the flowers would probably need burning at some point. The driver assumed he meant at that point, so burnt them all to cinders. Larry was furious when he realised what had happened, because he hadn’t meant for them to be incinerated then. Pam was extremely cross with Larry when she found out, as not only the flowers had been burnt, but all the cards that went with them too, so she didn’t know whom to thank. I was having a short stint in London around this time and I found it rather strange when Pam told me one day that the flowers were doing fine and a couple of days later that they had all died. Pam decided not to tell me the truth and forbade Larry to tell me also. However when I returned to Somerset and inquired about why the flowers had suddenly died so quickly, Larry told me the truth, as he had forgotten he wasn’t supposed to tell me. I felt, however, that the right thing had been done, I had always thought that the flowers should have been cremated with Mabel.

I spent the weeks between Mabel’s funeral and the disposal of her ashes sorting out her belongings and emptying her flat. I decided to pay an extra month’s rent on her flat so that I could do this in my own time. I had assumed that the extra four weeks would give me plenty of time. As it turned out though, her flat had some type of mysterious power, so that it could hold much more stuff than was physically possible bearing in mind its size. Thus, rather than having a leisurely four weeks sorting through her belongings, it turned into a full time job with overtime.

The interesting thing was that Mabel’s flat had never looked over-crowded. However car load after car load was removed, and the quantity of stuff in her flat never seemed to reduce. I took car loads up to my flat in London and it definitely looked more crowded as a result, however there was no obvious difference to Mabel’s flat. I remember one of my relatives taking all her wine making equipment and a fold up bed. He could hardly fit it all in his very large car, and again this didn’t make Mabel’s flat look any emptier. Car loads were taken to the Lifeboat Society shop, car loads to Pam’s house for people who came to the funeral to pick out what they wanted. I let Mabel’s relatives, friends, and those people who told me they were her friends have anything they wanted. My relatives also took what they wanted. Mabel had left me so much that I just wanted to give her friends as much as I could. Her gift to me had made me feel very generous towards everybody else.

Let me give you some idea of what I found in Mabel’s flat; a carrier bag of currants, another one of flour, another one of sugar, six pairs of brand new size 6 shoes, boxes and boxes of buttons, food in copious quantities as if another World War and rationing were just about to start. Everything needed to run a flat was found in copious quantities, except for three exceptions. There was no salad bowl, no silver polish and only one oven glove. I had unfortunately let Mabel’s relatives take that away at the start, not realising that I would need an oven glove if I was staying in Mabel’s flat for six weeks. Mabel didn’t like salad, thus no salad bowl and there was not even a bowl or dish that could be used as a salad bowl. As for the lack of silver polish, I had once asked Mabel why she never polished her silver toast rack and she told me that as she had spent her entire life polishing other people’s silver, she was not now going to polish her own.

Mabel’s armchairs I gave to her friends who also lived in the protected housing. Getting them out of her flat turned into a nightmare. A man who was supposed to be handy was asked to help, he turned out to be totally useless. It ended with two of Mabel’s elderly lady friends and me removing the sitting room door from its frame so we could get the chairs out. Apparently this had not been needed when the chairs had gone in, but it was definitely needed to get the chairs out. The two ladies decided that the so called handy man was really pathetic, he just hadn’t a clue or even a brain when it came to taking a door off it’s frame.

The phenomenon of what came out of Mabel’s flat got quite a reputation. No one could believe what came out and how emptying it had no effect on its contents. By the time I had finished I felt totally cured of the desire to ever look around an antique or second hand shop again.

During these weeks of sorting through Mabel’s belongings I also cancelled the subscriptions she had to various magazines. I remember one conversation in particular about cancelling a magazine she had subscribed to. I rang the magazine and got onto a dim wit of a girl. I told her I had rung to cancel the magazine as Mabel had died. Her reaction to this was to say, “So you want to cancel it then, are you sure you don’t want me to send any more copies?”
“She has died.” I replied.
“Are you sure you don’t want any more copies?” The girl answered.
I just wondered what this girl thought “died” meant. In the end I just told her to cancel them full stop.

I decided to have another ceremony to dispose of Mabel’s ashes. This was not as straightforward as I had imagined it would be. Mr Bevins started by informing me that it is against the law to scatter ashes on land or water. I found out that there is no one employed to catch you doing this, thus as far as I could see, it is a safe law to break. However Mr Bevins was very much against breaking the law, even in these circumstances, so he refused to have anything to do with the scattering of Mabel’s ashes. I asked Mr Bevins what I was supposed to do with them then. He told me I could bury them on private land, provided the deeds of the property where changed to include a graveyard. I can understand why people might be reluctant to do this, particularly if they are thinking of selling their property at some stage. Even if you are prepared to do this, you need a fairly large garden, as graveyards aren’t allowed within a certain number of feet of water or bricks and mortar. On reflection these laws may be the reason why so many people tend to keep their relatives’ ashes indefinitely in their bedroom cupboards.

Mr Bevins told me I had to decide whether I wanted the ashes in a plastic casket or in an oak one. It was obvious that the oak one would be more expensive, however the price of it didn’t particularly concern me. I asked him for advice on which to have. He reluctantly told me that I could get the ashes out of the plastic one, if I was intending to break the law and scatter the ashes. If I had the oak casket I would have to bury the ashes in the casket, as it’s impossible to get the ashes out of an oak casket. I ordered a plastic casket. It was an ugly brown plastic jar with a removable lid.

Next I had an interview with the vicar. I was wondering whether he was also dead set against breaking the law where the disposal of ashes were concerned. Luckily the vicar was interested in following the laws of the Church rather than the laws of the Land, so he didn’t mind which method I used to dispose of the ashes.

The vicar and my family wanted to know why I wanted another ceremony for Mabel. They almost sounded hurt when I spoke to them about it. The vicar wanted to know what was wrong with the last one. I asked them why Mabel had to be limited to one service. Just because I wanted a second service didn’t mean there was anything wrong with the first one, I just wanted to do as much for Mabel as I could. The more services the better was the way I looked at it.

As it turned out, there were various advantages to having a second ceremony. The people who had been unable to come to the funeral were able to come to this service and so were the people whom we had rather embarrassingly forgotten to ask to the funeral.

I decided to have a short ceremony at a small church in the middle of some fields near my sister’s house. As the church didn’t have electricity, it was necessary to have the ceremony in daylight and to have a portable tape recorder for music and hymns to sing along with, this being greatly helpful for a family of tone deaf people. We decided to bury the ashes in my sister’s garden, secretly of course, as Pam and Larry had no intention of changing the deeds of their property. The vicar had no trouble with this.

At first Pam decided to bury the ashes at the edge of her property amongst some young trees, but then she decided to have them nearer the house so that she could see the young tree that was going to be planted with it, from her house. Chickens wandered around this area and I was wondering if the vicar would have any problem with this, as the ground needs to be sacred. It turned out that the vicar loved chickens, he had some himself, and he considered land with chickens on it, to be especially sacred!

I decided that I wanted to line the path from the road across the fields to the church with flower heads and Lindt Easter Eggs. However, as it was after Easter, the Lindt eggs were unobtainable, so instead I used Quality Street and Rose’s chocolates, which sparkled in a similar way and had been a favourite of Mabel’s.

I filled a bucket with flower heads and another half bucket with the chocolates and scattered them up the path in the fields between the road and the church. The effect was lovely. My family thought it was rather a waste as they said that the cows would eat the flowers and grind the chocolates into the earth. The cows behaved themselves and did neither.

We had a short service lasting about 30 minutes and we managed to sing along to some songs I played on the tape recorder, without going out of tune too often. When we came out, the sun was shining making the path of flower heads and chocolates glitter, a sight to behold. My great niece, Freya, made quite a good job of refilling a bucket with flower heads and chocolates on the way home. Apparently after we had gone the cows came and messed up what was left. Everyone thought it was miraculous that the cows had left the path alone while we were in the church.

Pam had asked Larry to buy a bay tree to plant in the ground with the ashes. Larry, who can never do anything straight forward, came back with a Weeping Genko, a tree no one had ever heard of. Apparently Weeping Genkos like a hot climate, which is not the usual description of the weather in Somerset, however this Weeping Genko is miraculously surviving Somerset’s winters.

A hole had been dug, I poured the ashes into the hole and the tree was planted on top. On the top earth, Freya put some of the flower heads and chocolates; it was very moving.

On looking back, I realise I did Mabel proud, and I’m glad. I am also glad that I had the time and money to take the best part of eight weeks off my life in London, to sort out Mabel’s ceremonies and her possessions.

I was surrounded for most of that time by love. I felt extremely grateful to Mabel for leaving me everything, and for the sense of abundance that I had, which went on for months. I am also extremely pleased that I had spent those five days with Mabel over Easter.

I feel it was a lack of guilt, a vivid imagination and the strength to carry it through, that enabled me to do what I did for this much loved lady.

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