Laid To Rest

My grandmother departed on her journey to the next life at Eltham Crematorium, a stone’s throw from where she had lived and raised her family, a stone’s throw from where she had died in the small council flat she never liked, with the balcony door that rattled in the wind, and the white alabaster horses on the window sill.

We had been on holiday, at a Pontins Camp in Norfolk: it was 1973. I was in the middle of a trampolining competition when my dad heard the news. Those were the days when strangers in bright blue jackets, the people who were supposed to be in the charge of the fun, walked over to your dad in the sunshine to tell him his mother was gone. No chance in those days of a brother holding on the phone to tell him with a family voice; no chance of phoning back, someone else would be using the call box. I could tell it was bad news by the way the blue-jacket people bustled over officiously and pulled him to one side with their eager-actor faces pulled into shapes of concern. I could tell it was bad news by the way my dad sagged: his face, his shoulders, his knees. I got off the trampoline in the middle of my jumping routine and picked up my cardigan. I didn’t think we would be back.

My grandmother had been born in Norfolk. I don’t know how or when she made the journey from her small coastal village to the dense, drear slums of south-east London. She raised her seven sons, my father the youngest, and they each in turn came home physically unscathed from the war to celebratory cricket matches with their littlest brother on the green at the end of the road. It left its scars in other ways but that is another story.

Granny raised her seven sons in Eltham, and she buried her three girls. One born prematurely at five months, lived for fifteen minutes. Two daughters carried to term, born still. She didn’t name them - they didn’t in those days, not in that situation. The small grey silent girls, already born ghosts, were taken away by nurses, with not a touch from their mother to send them on their way. Buried in a corner of the cemetery, they said, with all the other babies. There is no stone or plaque to mark this place, but you can be sure that these daughters, their nearly-names, their dates, were engraved on their mother’s heart.

It was a hot sunny day for Granny’s funeral, just like yesterday. Children like us wouldn’t normally attend, but it was directly on the way home from holiday so we went along. My mum was pregnant, felt queasy in the car, kept asking to stop. My dad spoke not a word, looked at his watch in the black thatch of hair on his wrist, over and over and over.

The crematorium and its grounds are too regimented to feel rural, and are split now from our family’s part of town by the great roaring river of traffic that pours in its concrete banks towards the sea. We didn’t have a plaque. We weren’t going to forget that she was there, together again with her much-older, long-departed husband. The father my dad hardly knew, who had his last unexpected son when his was in his late fifties and his wife my age, already her neighbours were grandmothers. A big south-east London family guarantees a good send-off, in terms of sheer numbers at least. Her seven sons, and their six wives. Her fifteen grandchildren, most represented by their parents, but each had sent a pink rose and Aunty Malvy tied them together with a ribbon.

My father has since organised the Eltham funerals for five of his six older brothers, and one of their wives. He has paid for all these funerals himself, as it is hard to afford such things from a postman’s, a milkman’s, a bus-driver’s, a phone repair man’s, a caretaker’s wages. No doubt he’ll be paying for Uncle George’s too, as a jazz pianist’s income is likely to have left even less in the coffers than these others. Dad can afford to do the right thing by his brothers, as they did by him, each contributing from his wages a weekly amount to help the little lad through grammar school. They had all in turn passed the eleven plus, but had been unable to take up their places for want of money for the uniform, the daily bus fare to Tooley Street. Dad has done them proud, as they all so often said.

So Granny and Grandad, their drinking, laughing boys and their silent ghost girls all ended their journey at the Eltham Crematorium. On hot sunny days like yesterday, and on other days besides, thus are hopes and dreams laid to rest. Our lives today are not like theirs, our children’s lives different again, with easy chances and choices that can only be made thanks to the hard graft of people they never met, never knew. I have never taken my children to Eltham Crematorium, but I think we need to go and listen to the stories that whisper in the breeze.