Grave, where is thy victory?

I think I owe some of you an apology for last month’s blog. The title, Tribute to Doctor Smith, gave at least one friend of Bob Smith a fright, since such tributes generally follow after a death. She was relieved to see from the third paragraph that Bob is still going strong. I remarked later that I feel we should show our appreciation of friends and colleagues while they are alive.

So: sorry about that. The trip to Atlanta was a success, and it was great to see Bob and Irina again.

This got me thinking that the subject of mortality has been rather high in my consciousness for the last year or so, presumably partly due to the prostate cancer diagnosis (all OK there, I’m relieved to announce). And it occurred to me that a death can be associated with rather incongruous and seemingly unimportant issues. Let me tell you a story.

I have mentioned before my dad’s rich uncle, Dan Flynn, a successful Glasgow bookie, and his sister Josephine and her husband Frank Coutts, who shared his opulent mansion in St Andrew’s Drive (see https://mrduffychangestrains.blogspot.com/2022/05/steve-and-his-dad-goto-glasgow-before.html, May 2022). Jo and Frank had a daughter Bud (real name Winifred), my dad’s cousin, whom he hero-worshipped. Jo and Frank owned a magnificent rocking horse called JImmy, which Bud and my dad had played on as children in the 1920s and 30s.

In the 1960s, when I and my younger sister Marian were little kids, Jimmy was passed to us, on the understanding that it would return to the Flynn/Coutts branch of the family when the Duffy kids grew up. The horse afforded Marian and myself hours of great fun. When we outgrew it, it wasn’t long before my older sister Kath’s family started accumulating, and the horse in turn passed to Kath and Eugen’s kids, but still with the assumption that it would return to Glasgow in due course.

My dad died in 1989. A few minutes before his funeral in Dunfermline, it appeared that no-one from the Flynn side of his family was going to attend, although as I recall, they were simply delayed on the way, and turned up during the service. Their non-appearance prompted some adverse comment, and I do remember someone saying, ‘Well, they can whistle for that rocking horse.’

Now, you might remark that at a time like that, we might have had better things to think about than rocking horses, but that’s not how the human mind works.

Believe it or not, I am going to lighten up the atmosphere with a story related to my mum’s funeral more than a decade later. In some ways, my mum’s funeral was less harrowing than it might have been, partly because mum had been ill and unhappy for some time before her death, so that the event was seen as something of a release.

Anyway, the cremation took place in the afternoon, following which there was the usual rather formal serving of whisky and sandwiches at a rather elegant old hotel. After dinner in the evening, there were still a substantial number of relatives around, and we all went to the pub. After the cathartic effect of the funeral (and the general feeling that mum’s passing was a relief to her), there was a certain amount of letting the hair down, and the generation below me were a bit boisterous in the pub. After closing time, the staff were exhorting us to drink up and go home, and I caused some merriment among my nephews by remarking, ‘Who are these people intruding on our grief?’

                                                          **************************

I now propose to give you my March poem. I can hear the groans from here. This year of poems didn’t come from nowhere. I should express thanks to my pals who have advised and encouraged, notably Kevin Connelly and David Bleiman. Also to the writers from whom I have pinched phrases and ideas: Robert Louis Stevenson, Robert Burns, Giuseppe de Lampedusa, Ry Cooder, Charles Dickens, Leila Berg, John Drinkwater. As Tom Lehrer said:

Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,

So don't shade your eyes, But plagiarize

March

“The hard weather of mid-March”

(RS Thomas)

In from the Atlantic, down from the pole,

The gale blitzkriegs over moor and forest.

In stone-frozen church, on wind-blasted knoll,

The tiger of cold claws tight at your chest.

 

O wert thou in the cauld blast? Pull your coat

Tight about you. Button your collar high.

With hangover shiver and wind-dried throat

You turn and face the grey and whirling sky.

 

But down, look down, through parted clouds the light

Shows the year’s turn at the foot of the hill.

A tree no longer bare but cushioned white,

And at its foot an open daffodil.

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