I decided to go to by train to my mum’s funeral on
Wednesday 18 January. I thought it would be easier than driving through
Bradford and having to find car parking. I couldn’t have been more wrong if I’d
tried. Here is what happened. I haven’t made any of it up.
04:15
The alarm goes off. I get out of bed, shower and get dressed in my dark
suit. I check to see if I have everything – phone, mum’s eulogy, clean
underpants in case I have an accident. I pull on my dark coat, leave the house
and head off to the railway station.
05:10
I pick up my pre-ordered day return ticket from the machine at Carlisle
station. After asking a member of staff about trains to Preston I’m directed to
Platform 1 where the 05:15 train is waiting. I’ll be in plenty of time to catch
the connection to Bradford. What could possibly go wrong?
The train leaves the station and two minutes later the
guard checks my ticket.
“Are you sure you want to be on this train?” he asks.
“This is the Preston, isn’t it?” I say.
“Yes. But this is the one that goes all the way around
the west coast. It takes four hours to get to Preston.”
“You’re joking! I need to be at my mum’s funeral in
Bradford at 11:30.”
“That’s not going to happen if you stay on this train.
Whoever told you to get on this train was an idiot. He should have directed you
to 05:18 mainline train that left from Platform 4.”
“Any suggestions about what I should do?”
“Well I can let you out at Dalston, but it’s in the
middle of nowhere. You’ll have to make your way back to Carlisle from there.”
05:25
Get off the train at Dalston. It’s pitch black. There are no taxis or
buses and it’s a four and a half mile walk back to Carlisle. It’s a dark
morning. I’m walking down a dark road. I’m wearing dark clothes. What could
possibly go wrong?
05:35
I get hit by a car. The first thing that comes into my mind, after saying
Ow, is thank goodness I’m wearing clean underwear. The car’s wing mirror caught
me on the wrist and it’s quite painful. Thankfully nothing’s broken. Even more
thankfully the driver stops and gives me a lift to Carlisle. I explained to him
what had happened and that I was on my way to my mum’s funeral, but all he says
is that I should have been wearing reflective clothing. I don’t think wearing
reflective clothing is appropriate for a funeral and besides, if I’d been
wearing reflective clothing the driver would have driven straight past me and I
would have had to walk the entire four and a half miles, thereby probably
missing the next train to Preston.
06:49
I catch the next train to Preston. As I’m sitting there looking at the
bruise that’s forming on my wrist I think how lucky I was getting a lift. More
importantly I think how lucky I was not to get killed on dark road.
Everything goes well from that moment on. I change at
Preston and board the correct train to Bradford.
10:02
Arrive in Bradford. I’m picked up at the station by my son Daniel and his
wife, Katy. My sister, Anne, and her husband, Gary and their two sons Dwayne
and Keiron are all just about ready and we leave for the Crematorium.
11:45
Mum’s funeral is non-denominational because we are a family of atheists.
The service was very nice and I’m asked to read out mum’s eulogy. Because it’s
a celebration of her life and not a sombre event I wrote the eulogy in a light
tone. Here it is:
Edith Owen was a fantastic cook. She made lip-smacking
Lancashire Hot-Pots, delicious Ham Shank in Thick Pea Soup, gravy rich Steak
and Kidney Puddings and belt-tightening Full English Breakfasts. She made
all-sundry of perfectly cooked roast dinners with all the trimmings. She baked
cakes, biscuits, fruit loaves and bread and Rice Pudding that everyone fought
over in order to get the most skin. Unfortunately her daughter – my mum – did
not inherit many of my grandma’s extraordinary culinary skills and instead
cooked almost exclusively from tins and packets and wondered what the best
thing was before sliced bread. Mum was not a natural cook. Her cooking skills
were not gleaned from Fanny Craddock or the Galloping Gourmet but from the
instructions on the tins of Fray Bentos pies and Campbell’s Soups, and her idea
of a square meal was an OXO cube.
Here’s a story my wayward brother,
David, told me once. He was working as a drayman in Blackpool and when he
returned home tired and hungry after his first hard day of draying he was
expecting mum to have prepared him a hearty meal. As he walked into the house
mum informed him that his tea was ready for him in the kitchen. As he stepped
into the kitchen the first thing he noticed was the complete absence of any cooking
aromas. This was followed by the realisation that there were no pots or pans of
delicious food on any of the rings on the top of the oven. In puzzlement he
asked mum where his tea actually was.
“It’s
right next t’kettle,” mum called back. “You can’t miss it.”
On closer inspection of the kitchen
area my bother did indeed notice that his tea was stood
proudly next the
kettle. It was not, as he had expected, a delicious pie stuffed with meat and
potatoes or a hearty stew packed with fresh vegetables. It was, instead, that
cornerstone of any nutritional diet, a Batchelor’s
Pot Noodle, and propped next to it, placed there by mum’s own fair hand, was a
fork.
“But it’s just a Pot Noodle,” said
David, “and I’ve been working all day.”
“Stop your complaining,” said mum,
“I’ve taken the top off and boiled the kettle for you.”
Mum used to call me ‘Hollow Legs’ because I
grew up living with the kind of physiology that could devour any amount of food
without putting on one ounce of weight. Back in the late 1960s I worked as a
Commis Chef in a hotel in Blackpool and I used to love watching big-boned women
(as mum used to call them) slavering as I tucked into mountainous piles of
mashed potatoes and slabs of steak the size of my head, knowing that just a
morsel of what I was eating would put pounds onto their hips.
Mum once tried to set me up with the daughter
of one her friends and as soon as she told me she was big-boned I knew exactly
what she meant.
“She’s just big-boned, Stephen,” she said.
“You mean fat, don’t you mum.”
“You cheeky bugger; you never listen to what I
tell you. She’s a right nice girl, she is – too bloody good for you, that’s for
sure. I don’t know why I bother.”
It didn’t matter, though, if my girlfriends
were big-boned, small-boned or had no bones the same thing would happen
whenever I took one of them home to meet my mum. The first thing she would do
would be to tell them all about any embarrassing mishaps that had occurred
throughout my entire life up until that exact moment in time. And the second
thing she would do was to reach for the dreaded photograph album, which always
seemed uncannily ready to hand. Her fingers would nimbly skip through the pages
until she reached one particular black-and-white image. It was taken by her
using her old Box-Brownie camera and it showed me as a cute, loveable blonde-haired
six year old on a summer’s day at Morecambe Bay wearing what can only really be
described as a girl’s swimming costume that my mum had knitted out of wool. Mum
would sit there with my girlfriend, pointing at the photograph and cackling to
herself and say, “Ooh, wasn’t he a lovely little boy? And look at him now, the lanky,
long-haired lout.”
She may
have said to me, “I don’t know why I bother,” but, the thing is, she did
bother, because she loved all three of her children, even my wayward brother. She
walked away from all her marriages clean, taking nothing with her except her
children.
So how do I
remember my mum? Well, she was an intelligent, well-read woman with a sharp, idiosyncratic,
often sarcastic sense of humour.
She called
the music I listened to ‘heebie-jeebie’ music, but she liked Cliff Richard,
preferring his bland, insipid version of rock’n’roll to that of the
hip-swinging, electrifying sound of Elvis Presley, thereby proving (to me at
least) that she had absolutely no taste in music whatsoever.
Material
things meant nothing to her and she happily gave away all my treasured Marvel
and DC comics to a jumble sale after I left home to join the RAF in 1970 (a collection
that is now worth hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of pounds). But I’m
not bitter about that.
She was
stubborn and determined and she didn’t suffer fools. She told people exactly
what she thought of them. She was small of frame but a giant fireball of rage
when angered.
In her
forties she lied about her age constantly, passing herself off as younger than
she was, until she reached an age where she was happy to admit how old she
actually was. At the age of eighty-one she had lived longer than any member of
her family before her, something of which she immensely proud.
She moved here
to Bradford from Plymouth when she was seventy-nine. I had just begun working
in the Middle East and Anne and Gary cared for her and showed her love and
understanding in her final years as dementia began to tighten its grip on her
once sharp and active mind.
When we
were together we often annoyed the hell out of each other and we fell out
frequently and sometimes didn’t speak to each other for great lengths of time.
But when all’s said and done I loved her as all sons should love their mothers
and I will remember her as an amazingly strong woman who lived a life full of
surprises and she was loved, not just by me, but by everyone who knew her.
12:15
We go to the Care Home where mum spent the last four
months of her life. Sandwiches, nibbles and drinks have been put on. I have a
couple of rather large whiskies and then at 14:00 we go to the pub, where I
drink too many beers and we all tell funny stories we remember about mum. By
the time I have to leave to catch my train my cheekbones are aching with
laughing so much. It was, as it should have been, a real celebration of mum’s
life. She would have liked it. It’s just a pity she wasn’t there to enjoy it.
19:30
I’m on the train to Preston. I’ve been up since 04:15.
I’m tired and a bit drunk. What could possibly go wrong?
20:13
I wake up as the train is pulling into
Poulton-le-Fylde.
Poulton-le-Fylde is two stops after Preston.
I jump on the next train back to
Preston, but arrive there at 21:50, four minutes after the last train to
Carlisle. The next one is a 05:45 the following morning.
I’m advised by one of the station
staff to try the bus station. There maybe, she tells me, a bus to Carlisle. It’s
worth a shot.
22:10
The earliest bus to Carlisle is a National Express coach
at 02:10 that gets me into Carlisle at 04:15. It’s a four hour wait in a cold
bus station, but it’s worth it.
04:25
Arrive back
at my flat, tired and perhaps a little wiser from the experience of the last
twenty-four hours.
I'd like to thank everyone for their kind words of condolence when I announced the passing of my mum on 30 December 2016. They were a great comfort to me and my sister on that sad day. Her ashes were spread off North Pier in Blackpool on 28 January.
