ashes

26Oct09

Yesterday evening, as daylight slipped away an hour “earlier” due to the end of British Summer Time, my Dad’s immediate family gathered at the bottom of the garden. We stood in a horseshoe formation beneath the knarled old branches of the oak tree, beside the flower bed where my grandparents’ ashes had been spread years before. My uncle had raked the earth at some point recently, in preparation. He took the large burgundy urn from my hands and the miniature jam jars that my aunt had cleaned up earlier in the day and poured some of the ashes into them.

Elle and I had wavered during the day; The general upset of the memorial service had shaken our decision to scatter him. It wasn’t so much that we didn’t want him scattered here. Indeed, there was no doubt in our minds that he should rest now in the same grounds where he came into the world nearly 59 years ago. But the act of opening that urn and spilling its contents meant we had to confront, again, the reality of his death.

Uncle Chris passed the jars to us, and we put them in our coat pockets along with a handful of acorns. There is a reason the house was so-called, you see. The original house is no longer there, of course. My uncle bought his siblings out of their shares a few years ago and built a beautiful home for him and his wife to enjoy in their (early) retirement. My Dad – in his urn – had spent Saturday night and most of Sunday in their study, which occupies the same space that used to be the front living room when my grandparents’ house stood here. My Dad was born in that front room.

Despite the ebbing of the light, gone 5pm on a late-October evening, the ashes were bright against the dull earth. Chris scattered first, then me, then Elle, then aunty Sue, watched by our cousins, Chris’ wife aunty Ann, The Fencer and The Mechanic. The fine powder almost glowed in the moonlight. There seemed to be so much. We poured some around the base of the oak tree.  Chris had explained in the day’s (less formal) eulogy that, when my Dad was a child he had built a working lift for hauling small boys up into the uppermost branches of this tree using a counter-weight. Those that braved the lift had access to the den he had constructed up there, away from prying adult eyes. The counter-weight had once crashed down out of the tree and knocked out one of their friends. Possibly not a surprise. But incredible to think that a child designed and realised it.

The eulogy also brought forth many more stories, perhaps not fit for the formal ceremony in Croydon at the start of the month. We were treated to the recollection of a now-infamous incident, whereby my aunt and grandfather happened to come up behind my Dad’s car on Stock High Street when he hadn’t long been (legally) driving. But there was nobody in the driver’s seat. Instead, there was my Dad in the passenger seat, having come up with some way of changing gear and turning the steering wheel from there.

Why?

Well, as Chris explained, my Dad’s answer to most things as a precocious child (teenager, young man) was: Why not?

As a young adolescent, he used to walk around the village trailing an empty tin can behind him on a string. If anyone stopped him and asked: “why are you dragging that can around on a string?” he’d reply: “because it’s easier than trying to push it.”

We learnt that one day he rigged up his record player to stereo speakers and placed them in the thick hedge that runs along the front garden alongside the road. He got hold of a recording of a steam train and waited for some unsuspecting passerby to come along, before playing it at full volume and laughing at the expression as the poor sod thought there was a steam train coming full pelt at him.

We found out that he managed to get hold of a key for the chapel and would let himself in on a Sunday afternoon when it stood empty after the morning service and play the organ that we only had to look to our right to see. He taught himself to play the piano sitting underneath it, facing outwards into the room, with his arms crossed over above his head.

So many extraordinary tales of such an extraordinary man. So many people there from his past, people he loved, people who loved him and who had been moved by his very existence. The reverend who hosted the service – a relative (I think everyone in Stock is a relative somehow) – asked the elderly man who used to be the vicar when my Dad was a boy to say a few words. He stood up, mostly-blind, half-deaf, and delivered a moving and off-the-cuff tribute to my Dad. He talked without preparation for a good 15 minutes, recounting the warm relationship they had had, from when my Dad turned to him as a troubled young man wanting to leave Cambridge University (and he did) to more recently when they picked up their friendship after some 33 years.

I don’t think my Dad ever realised how much he mattered to people who knew him. He was forever underestimating himself. I hope he turned up and paid attention, although I suspect he was sat there, at the back on the left wishing everyone would bugger off and leave him in peace to play the organ to his heart’s content.

It was exhausting scattering the ashes, and I was thankful for the dark rushing in, allowing Elle and me to screw up our faces in that really unattractive way that you do when trying to fight with tears. Chris raked them into the soil and the family walked back up the garden to the house, leaving us alone there to reflect. We stood side by side, warm hands around mini jam jars in pockets. We said little.

A friend of mine looked at me like I was truly insane recently, when I explained our intention to keep a little bit of the ashes. I talked the decision down aloud, chuckled that it was a silly thing to do. I wish I hadn’t now. I wish I had met his eye and stated quite simply that, until you lose someone who means so much to you that they are a part of you, you simply cannot understand. Wanting to hold onto that person desperately is more than a ludicrous notion. It goes beyond want, safely in the realm of need.

Don’t look at me like I am stupid to keep some of my father’s ashes. My grandfather kept my grandmother in a pot by his bedside for years – until he joined her in death and they were scattered together. Elle and I will be able to let go in time. We may return with our jars one day and empty them out at some important time for us. We may find some other place to scatter them. We may just keep them. We don’t know. But we need that for now. In the same way that I need his reading glasses in my lounge, and will take back the leather wallet currently in my uncle’s office when he’s done with my Dad’s bank cards, I just need it. For, while I felt lighter knowing that the urn was now empty and my Dad is where he belongs and not coming back to my Woking flat, I knew it would have been a mistake not to keep a little bit near me. For now.

And Chris is going to grow a chilli plant in the urn next summer.

Filed under: Blogging   |  9 Comments