40 years ago | Rectory Lane, Standish, UK | 16th December 1983

Forty years ago, I faced mortality for the first time in my life – not my own but someone else’s. I’d been aware of people having died before, but for the first time, I became of the rituals and the etiquette of bereavement.

If I’m honest, I can’t say I knew Uncle Tom all that well. He was an intermittent presence in my young life, with his wife, Elsie, at Christmases and other family events. The only things I can associate with him were his deep, rumbly voice and the smell of pipe smoke. And clearly, given his advanced age, he wasn’t my uncle but my Grandma’s.

Only since then have I heard how he was once described in less than flattering terms by his brother-in-law, ‘Pop’, my great-grandfather – although this picture suggests that these very different men did get on quite well, together.

One day, in Junior School, I was asked “Why are the curtains closed at your Grandma’s?”. I had no idea – and I was utterly oblivious to what that might mean. A few hours later, I found out.

My Grandparents’ house was about two minutes’ walk from my school. My brother and my cousins and I used to walk there from school and wait to be collected by our parents. On this day, we were collected at school. “Your Grandma’s busy today. Uncle Tom has died.”

Death is rarely welcome but, from an adult perspective, a December passing is a particularly unwelcome intruder in the lead up to Christmas. Being a child, I don’t remember it intruding too much into my pre-Christmas excitement, because it was decided to be that way. I vaguely remember there being a funeral squeezed in before the festive period and asking about it but learning that, as a child, I would be kept away from the proceedings.

In the week after Christmas, I do remember being required to go to his Memorial Service, at St. Paul’s in Goose Green, Wigan. I observed some of the accoutrements of bereavements but I was aware that this was a far less sombre occasion than the funeral would have been. My chief recollection was the vicar’s sermon in which he made references to the forthcoming New Year, 1984, and the themes explored in the famous Orwell novel of the same name.

Tom and Elsie didn’t have any children and Auntie Elsie survived another six or seven years of widowhood, in a retirement home nearby, regularly exasperating my Grandma with her ability to cause a stir with the other residents. “If I ever get like this, you will tell me, won’t you?”, she once said to me, probably at the end of her tether, when I was about nine, after ‘waiting in the car’ while she sorted out whatever it was that had just happened.

I never forgot that promise but, thankfully, I never had to keep it.