Marmoreal - Legacy of Love

When the time came to choose a new gas fire and surround for the front room, I knew exactly what I wanted; small, white-ish marble with narrow hearth and mantle piece. It had to be marble, not the composite, marmoreal looking stuff that looks like plastic pretending to be brown onyx. It was going to replace a massive, tiled thing with a sunburst design. Hairline cracks in the hearth were stained black from years of having a coal fire – before our time, but we might wish for it this coming winter – and it stretched too far towards the middle of what is quite a small room. A very efficient, old-fashioned gas fire looked like it didn’t belong, but it really blasted the heat out, excellent when needed and served us well. Replacing it wasn’t a financial priority, however, being a beneficiary in the Will of a departed aunt raised the opportunity. I was very happy to find my preferred fireplace and ‘living gas fire’ which still look great in our lounge twenty-odd years later. Thanks again, Auntie.

Auntie’s passing, very sad as it is with a close relative, left me and my sister with added complications in dealing with her estate. My sister took charge of most of it. It was emotional for both of us and I was carrying the added burden of guilt. I’d always had a lovely relationship with Auntie. Things changed as she got older and I was raising my own family. I didn’t completely fall out with her, it was more of a frustrating situation that I didn’t know how to handle.  She would phone me, to tell me off and shout at me for no valid reason. She lived alone in another town a good hour’s drive away, too far to just pop in, another contentious issue.  I had two small children, doing my best for everyone who needed me, including Auntie, but for her, nothing was good enough and I didn’t have the patience to deal with it. If I had, I might have realised that she probably had a form of dementia and needed the right care that I might have been able to find for her. She died before her behaviour made any sense to me.

Nothing was straightforward. Auntie had been living in a council owned bungalow suited to her needs, which had to be emptied within days, even before her funeral. She still owned a property which had to be sold, but some connected finances needed to be cleared before it could go on the market. Bless my sister, I didn’t have the brain to cope. She kept her head straight through it all. Eventually, and it was ages, everything was signed, sealed and delivered. Job done. I’ve kept all of Auntie’s photos and special things. Her archive of family papers sent me on a genealogy journey that I continue to dip in and out of. And, somewhere on this journey I discovered that she didn’t hate me, she loved me as she always had but she was confused and not herself. With some of the monetary inheritance, we bought a beautiful marble fireplace, the perfect size for our lounge.

I don’t do much grave visiting. I carry memories of my departed loved ones in my head and in my heart, all special people, my family. They are so much more than names carved on tombstones or on the marmoreal kerb-like structure surrounding one of our graves.

I found this poem, which reminded me so much of my late mother until the last line, which clearly refers to a lost love. Read it through my eyes and ignore the last bit.

Your Name

When I can dare at last to speak your name
It shall not be with hushed and reverent speech
As if your spirit were beyond the reach
Of homely merry things, kind jest or game.
Death shall not hide you in some jewelled shrine
Nor set you in marmoreal pomp apart,
You who still share the ingle of my heart,
Participant in every thought of mine.

Your name, when I can dare to speak it, dear,
Shall still be linked with laughter and with joy.
No solemn panegyrist shall destroy
My image of you, gay, familiar
As in old happy days,—lest I discover
Too late I’ve won a saint but lost a lover.

Winifred M Letts 1882 - 1972

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Northern Man - The Best

photo of my maternal grandparents

My first thoughts on Northern Man were of my grandfathers and my father. Northern, Manchester born and bred, all passed on now. My paternal grandfather was in the army during WW1. He was just old enough to get called up and went to France or Belgium in the summer of 1918. He married in 1922 and raised his family in Rusholme, which I used to joke to my dad, made him an original Rusholme Ruffian. The family moved to Wythenshawe when the new estate was built c.1930, then to Northenden, which is the first house I remember. Giant daisies lined the garden path. I’d like some in my garden and one day, I’ll sort it out. His wife, my Nanna Hetty, was the gardener, though Grandad looked after the cutting of the grass. I didn’t know him very well, which might sound sad, but he wasn’t the sort of grandfather, or father for that matter, who endeared himself to children and grandchildren. Anything to do with children was his wife’s department. After he was widowed, he moved in with us. He helped out in the pub and kept himself to himself. It turned out to be a short term arrangement. He moved into a flat, with a lady. He is laid to rest with Hetty and their daughter, Peggy in Manchester’s Southern Cemetery, amongst the great and the good.

Laurence Stephen Lowry, a northern man, described himself as a ‘simple man’, not uneducated but meaning that he was ordinary, unremarkable. Well, that’s a matter of opinion. I’ve studied him and his work and find him extraordinary and a unique artist.

“I am not an artist. I am a man who paints.” He said.

The first time I saw his work I wept, full of emotion for this special man and his art. It was such an overwhelming experience. His paintings were on display in Salford University and I sobbed my way through the galleries a couple of years after his death. I’m probably the only person to cry at Brian & Michael’s song, ‘Matchstalk Men & Matchstalk Cats & Dogs’. It gets me right in the heart. The Lowry Theatre and Gallery complex in Salford is a fabulous monument to him.

Alan Bennett, oh my word, no, his words, all of them. He renders me speechless. I can read his work over and over, finding something new each time, then I want to snap all my pencils because he is genius and I have no place writing anything except a shopping list. The truth of The Lady in the Van is emotional and very much a stand-alone work, a masterpiece.  A quote from Untold Stories regarding his mother’s concern about Miss Shepherd taking up residence in her van on his driveway,

“I was a reluctant (and, of course, unpaid) landlord but what worried my mother on one of her rare visits to London was what the neighbours would think.

‘This isn’t Leeds,’ I told her. ‘They won’t think anything at all.’”

In Talking Heads he has been unafraid to tackle uncomfortable and taboo subjects. Food for thought, or if it’s too difficult, don’t read it and don’t watch the TV version. Sarah Lancashire played 'Gwen', a mother feeling attracted to her fifteen year old son, beyond motherhood. Alan Bennett takes us on a journey through her thoughts and emotions, edging towards sexual in feelings, but not stepping out of line. Exceptional from a very much alive Northern man.

My maternal grandfather was the direct opposite of my paternal one. When I was a child we played, we laughed, we got told off for being rowdy and too loud, and I don’t think we cared. He taught me Tiddlywinks and Snakes & Ladders. We played hide and seek in his pub, we moved furniture, anything. Times with him and my maternal grandmother were fun. Sometimes, he liked to be quiet and read a book for a little while. He’d been affected by WW1, though this didn’t become apparent until much later in his life. My aunt told me a story about him having a child, the result of a dalliance during his marriage. True or not, I’ll never know and it wouldn’t change anything. I loved my grandad. He cried his heart out at my mother’s funeral and now they share a grave.

Northern man, northern men, gritty like the women. The best.

My poem,

A Northern man, my grandad,
Reliable and always there.
I’m told he had his ‘moments’
But I loved him and didn’t care.
Nowt for me to fret about,
A serious ‘moment’ he had
Though he stayed put with my nan
And never set eyes on the lad.

I’d wear his precious Trilby
And put clips in his Brylcreemed hair.
My childhood, fun and laughter,
And a Jaffa orange to share.
Then the loss of his daughter,
Grandad’s heart broke when my mum died.
I sat with my Northern man,
To comfort him as we both cried.

PMW 2021

Thanks for reading, stay safe. Pam x

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