Last Thursday

Vati's funeral took place last Thursday, and was surprisingly religious for someone who had evinced no religious sentiment throughout his entire adult life and as far as I know hadn't been to church since he was a boy (apart from weddings and other people's funerals, that is). The order of service, which he himself had drawn up before his death, included two hymns, two prayers, an address by one of the local vicars....and two tributes, one from a former colleague in the aeroplane business which had been his career and the other by the eldest of my brother's two sons. (Although I had previously thought that the turn-out from former work colleagues would be low, the number attending was larger than first calculated. And we have received a huge stack of cards from the various people who knew him.) Both sons were a bit teary, as were I and my three siblings. Not to mention my mother, who looked utterly bewildered by the whole thing -- as one might, when one's just lost a life-partner of such long standing (their sixtieth anniversary was last September).

At the wake afterwards, I was approached by a number of people who remembered me from when I was a child and hadn't seen me for fifty years or thereabouts, but of whom I had no memory at all. Apparently this isn't unusual -- "childhood amnesia" is the technical term for it, and most of us have only sketchy and isolated mental snapshots of our first few years (whereas of course the adults who remember us as children have the clearer memories that come with being an adult). But this amnesia should only apply to the first three or four years of life, not the first eight to ten -- so what does it say about me that so much of my life before we moved to the bungalow in Porton, near Salisbury in 1963 is such a blank?

That evening, I, my siblings, Judith and my elder sister's husband took my mother out for a slap-up meal of expensive oysters and such at Hix's overlooking The Cobb at Lyme Regis, at which many toasts were offered and much champagne quaffed. (The restaurant's young maitre'd was very sympathetic, since his own grandfather had died just a few months before. But he didn't give us any discounts.) Apart from the toasts, our repartee was fairly inconsequential family and work-related stuff; but that was probably exactly right for the occasion.