15

the duty minister — on call at the crematorium in the absence of anyone else whom the deceased or the family might have wished to take the service.

MORS JANVA VITÆ — ‘Death is the gate of life’, incised over the door to the crematorium chapel.

‘I spose it’s a way of life...’ — ask any undertaker.

floral tribulations — as they say in the trade.

a triumph of incongruous medium over illiterate message — Compare Dr Samuel Johnson — ‘The triumph of hope over experience’, referring to one who remarried immediately after the death of his wife with whom he had been unhappy, and the Canadian (Herbert) Marshall McLuhan (1911—80), The Medium is the Message’.

With uncouth rhymes... — Thomas Gray (1716—71), English poet: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), quatrain 20 ll 3&4.

a peak in Darien — last words of On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats (1795—1821); Hernando or Hernán Cortés or Cortez (1485—1547) (Spanish conquistador who defeated the Aztecs and conquered Mexico (1523)), it was whom Keats imagined staring:

‘at the Pacific — and all his men

Looked at each other with a wild surmise

Silent, upon a peak in Darien.’

16

outrun ... fetch ... shedding ring — terms of the sheepdog trial.

Cardophagus — that which eats thistles, an ideal name for a donkey.

Abram (Lancashire), Cubert (Cornwall), Mutford (Suffolk), and Westenhanger (Kent) — all places with which I have had some association.

17

Words in italic type are from the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer, interspersed with the sorts of wandering thoughts that may churn round in one’s head on such occasions.

(who in our case we did not know) — cf Henry Reed (1914—86) English poet and playwright: Lessons of the War: I, Naming of Parts (1946), verse 2:

This is the lower sling swivel. And this

Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,

When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,

Which in your case you have not got.

19 February 2003 is the 50th anniversary of my joining the Suffolk Regiment at Gibraltar Barracks, Bury St Edmunds, for six weeks’ square bashing preparatory to transferring to the Royal Army Education Corps for the rest of two years’ National Service. I can vouch for the wicked accuracy of Henry Reed’s poem.

18

Lizzie Siddal — Elizabeth Eleanor Siddal was discovered early in 1850 in the workroom of a bonnet shop in Cranbourne Alley, near Leicester Square, by Walter Deverell. She was, in the pre-Raphaelite terminology, a stunner, who was Sylvia for Holman Hunt, Ophelia for Millais, and much painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828—82) to whom she became engaged in 1851. They were married in 1860, but Lizzie’s health declined, and she became addicted to the opium-based laudanum. She died in 1862; overcome with grief and remorse, Rossetti took the manuscript book of the poems he had written for her, and placed it in her coffin between her cheek and her beautiful hair; it was buried with her in Highgate Cemetery. As time passed, he began to regret the loss of what became in his mind his most perfect book of poems, and in 1870 sought — and gained — permission to exhume Lizzie’s coffin and retrieve the poems. They were published as Poems that same year; no doubt their melancholy history contributed to their instant success.

Blossoms by Albert Moore (1841—93) is in the Tate Gallery; it is typical of the classical figures who provided his normal subjects. An obituarist wrote of Moore: ‘As a painter of drapery he was unexcelled’.

Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,

And little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum.

And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;

While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.

— A de Morgan (1806—1871).

subsides, quiescent — becomes quiet [the weariness of spent emotion].

19

osseous remains ... fed through the cremulator — the ash from the crematorium furnace contains bony lumps and, when cool, is fed through a cremulator to grind it to a more seemly and more scatterable powder; it is then placed in a casket for scattering in due time by the relatives.

stag-headed oak — where dead branches protrude through a healthily-growing crown; it is by no means a fatal conditions.

George I (1660—11 June 1727); the first Hanoverian King of Great Britain from 1714.

Quercus robur marbiensis — Q robur is the pedunculate oak (with its flower on a stalk, as opposed to the sessile (stalkless) variety); marbiensis pertains to Marby.

Alien they seemed to be ... — from The Meeting of the Twain by Thomas Hardy (1840—1928) English poet and novelist.

Harland & Wolff — shipbuilders of Belfast, who built the 4-funnelled White Star Liner SS Titanic, that struck an iceberg and sank on her maiden voyage on 14 April 1912; only 711 of 2201 passengers were saved.

20

Robert Stephenson (1803—59) British engineer of many noted railway features; son of George Stephenson (1782—1848) ‘The father of railways’.

Datta Dayadhvam Damyata — Give, sympathise, control, as incorporated in Part V of The Waste Land (1922) by Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888—1965); ‘The Fable of meaning of the Thunder,’ writes Eliot, ‘is found in the Brihadarnyaka — Upanishad, 5.1.’ The Upanishads are sacred books in Sanskrit written 400—200BC and embodying the mystical and esoteric doctrines of ancient Hindu philosophy. Shantih shantih shantih is the formal ending to a Upanishad; the word ‘is equivalent to’ (TSE) The Peace which passeth understanding.