2k 20
I’m going to begin this the same way that I'd begin a letter, I think, because - well, ultimately this is all just words flying across a lot of land and saltwater. Much like a letter.
So.
To - all of you.
/
Hello, all nine of you. It’s me, the tenth person, and I’m not around to give this speech in-person, so I’m writing it with you in mind, and imagining us all being together again.
I mean - I know you're all together again, but in my imagined version of today, I'm there too. As I should be, or as I would have been if The Times Were Not Hard.
As a ten - or a twelve, I ought to say, since the founding members of our group aren’t here today - we’re pretty good at having a good time. Kind of like The Famous Five - but, in our case, it would be The Tremendous Ten.
The Tremendous Ten could, and have, got up to a lot of adventures together. Ten Go Off In A Van. Ten Go Off To Camp. Ten Trudge Off On A Boxing Day Walk.
But this particular occasion is not an adventure, in the traditional outings-and-escapades sense.
This occasion is just - a celebration of a life. An eleventh life. A founding-member’s life. Another life that was a tiny, tremendous adventure in and of itself.
/
As I started writing this, I realized that I’m not sure if you’re in church - but somehow I’m imagining us all in church.
And - regardless of whether the imagined or the real scenario takes place In Church, I’m going to start with a story that includes a word that The Good Lord may not have appreciated very much.
And, perhaps more importantly, this word is a word that Nan also did not appreciate all that much. So, for the sake of Nan’s posthumous good humor - and the good grace of The Good Lord who, I assume, would prefer the omission of certain utterances within his sacred walls - I shall omit Said Word.
But - for the sake of the story, I want you to consider a B-word that also happens to mean Female Dog.
/
Initially, I wasn’t entirely sure where to begin, when I began with a reflection upon Nan.
I had enough alphabetical matter to write another book, if I’m being perfectly honest, but we don't have time for another book at the moment, so I'll shut up, and I'll get on with it.
After a bit of digging, I decided that I had to begin with the Puppy Training story.
Sam was thirteen when he died, so this is A While Ago. Either way -
We’d all jaunted down to Grove - and it was Grove, if my memory serves me correctly - for Puppy Training.
We bundled on in to the squeaky village hall, with all the peeling sugar-paper Scout collages and stacked plastic chairs pushed up against the walls. And I was there with Nan, and Dad, and Megan, and Sam - and we were all there for Puppy Training, because pestulant little sheepdog puppies Must Go To Puppy Training.
Sam was bred to be a sheepdog, not a house-dog. So as a puppy, he was - well, he was a nuisance, to put it briefly. He growled too much at the other dogs, and he lunged and he barked and he snaffled things. And he most certainly Did Not Come Back if you let him off the lead.
I don’t remember the name of the lady who ran Puppy Training, but I do recall the smell and the squareness and a lot of standing around. I also recall the lady telling Nan - you have to be the Alpha [Female Dog].
And - well, Nan did not like being told to be the Alpha [Female Dog].
/
A couple of days ago, I called Dad and asked him - I know this is a big question.
But - do you have any specific memories of Nan.
He was stuck, at first.
It was the middle of the day, and the middle of the day was already thirty-eight degrees celsius over here in Phoenix, and I was on 12th and Highland, and I was slumming along beside the British Auto Repair place right near the Dinomart. And while Dad got going with his stories, I stopped into the Dinomart, and I got my cigs and my drinkipoos at the Dinomart.
The grizzly man - the man with the pouchy cheeks that always gives Sonny treats at the counter - was working. He stole a fat little Jack Links sausage from the container at the register and gave it to Sonny - the frantic, slobbering dog at the end of my arm. I nodded thanks, and I didn't say thank you, but please stop, because now he jumps up on the counter at every store because he thinks there'll be treats.
Anyhow. At first, Dad just said, well, she was always easy going.
And he hummed, and he huffed, and he haa-ed, as his brain cranked back through the years.
And then he got somewhere. He thought about when he’d still been living at home, at 4 The Croft - many moons ago, of course - and how he’d come and gone between work and rugby and other outings in his Grubby Gear, grabbing a few of the chicken joints that Nan had cooked. And he said that Nan had never minded, never scolded, never said you treat this house like a hotel!
She just kept cooking the chicken joints. And her eyes probably lit up every time he came home.
/
There are a million minute details about Nan that I can’t imagine ever forgetting. The immutable elation at the sound of our arrivals. The my darlings, the goodigumdrops, the brillikins. The crepey skin around her knees, the silver bangles that chinked against one another when she moved, the turquoise earrings that tugged downwards on ageing earlobes. The weathered feet in sandals, the wrinkled knuckles, the slender legs of someone who walked, and walked, and walked. The bran and clementines, followed by tiny morsels of other things that were never potatoes and that was never, ever pudding. The huffs, and the puffs, and the eye rolls. The pints of afternoon cider, and the many tipples of evening ginger wine. The occasional naps at the table after a Few Too Many. The rows of toys - the multiplying rows of toys - lined up neatly along the tops of the sofas, and the coos of affection at every new addition to the family of stuffed bears and stuffed birds. The coos over gifts. The coos over babies.
Nan did, after all, especially love babies.
/
When I initially sat down to write a eulogy, I got stuck. A Euology-with-a-captial-E is a capital-B Big task, by the way. I found a eulogy template on Google that I immediately scoffed over and - well, did a bit of a Kay Longworth eye roll over, if I’m being very honest.
With eulogies, you’re supposed to sit down and trundle through the A to B of a person’s life, and that seemed silly to me. Especially since there’s only ten of us here - in my head - and we all know the rough outline of Nan’s lifespan.
We know she was the first of the Lodge children. We know about the Watch Shop. We certainly all know her dear husband, the Brian Longworth who made her become Kay Longworth.
And - well, all of her children and all of her grandchildren are present and accounted for, here in this room. This church. This church in my head.
We all know about the bangles and the biscuits and the table naps, because we knew her.
And we also know what she did for work, as the Eulogy Template told me I should say.
We know that she worked for babies. Or, rather, that she was a Health Visitor. But - really, she was there to make sure that other people were looking after their babies properly.
/
Dad told me one story that stuck with me. I can't tell it the way that he can, but I want to try to. Because this story sums up Kay Longworth in a way that hum-drum prattling about details we're already aware of simply cannot do.
There was once a woman, and the woman’s name was Amy Stevens. Amy Stevens was on Nan’s rotation of visits, and Amy Stevens was - to quote my beloved father - a bit of a rough diamond back in her day. Amy Stevens was a traveller, a traveller who had settled for a while somewhere between Longworth and Hinton Waldrist. And Amy Stevens’ father had knocked her up, and she’d had a baby, and Nan was one of two women in charge of making sure that both she and the baby were doing okay.
Dad said, she thought so much of Mum, right, that she would write a Christmas card to Mum every year. He said, she's a year younger than me, this girl, and that she's in a care home now, because she can't look after herself.
Dad had found the card that Amy Stevens had written, and he’d called the care home to let her know that her favorite health visitor had passed. It's like a child of probably six or seven wrote that letter, he said. Quite rough writing, you know.
He said that he’d called, and that a few days later she’d called back, and he’d told her.
And Amy Stevens had said, oh I used to have the two health visitors, but I always wanted to see her.
She thought the world'a Mum, Dad said.
I can imagine Nan exclaiming and cooing and calling Amy Stevens’ child my darling, and I know exactly why. I think we all do.
/
There are few people in this world whose hearts are good enough to be - innocently formidable.
You see, one of the other things Dad said, when he was talking about Nan, was that you’d never cross her.
And I know, as you know - you nine of you - that you just simply wouldn’t. There was absolutely no reason to ever get on Nan’s bad side - her Naughty List, her [Number Two] list.
She was just simply - too good. She was just too quietly, gorgeously, fantastically - good.
No one, in their right mind, would ever think to do something hurtful to someone so painfully pleasant, to someone who gave - and gave, and gave, and gave.
But - isn’t it wonderful? To think that a person can have all that power, and all because they were just - kind? That someone can truly be the Alpha [Female Dog] - and all because they had the capacity to be gentle, and smiley, and to coo at babies, and to exclaim at entries, and to labor over dough and chicken wings with genuine relish?
That someone cannot - and will not - be crossed because they are just too … good?
/
So good, indeed, that the mere idea of an un-good side is so unfamiliar that you daren’t cross it.
/
The year is 2020. 2k20.
And the world looks a bit different than it’s ever looked, now. And there might be deaths, but there are going to be some babies, too.
There is always going to be a reason to continue to smile. Life will continue to unfold before us as lives pass around us. New eyes will keep seeing it, as old ones close. New hearts will beat, as old ones cease to.
Nan understood that. Her heart saw the world that way.
/
So, you nine of you, let's do that today. Let's drum up the inner Kay, one of the many things we all have in common.
We must choose to smile. And we must choose to imagine worlds that make us smile, and futures that make us smile, even if - in the present moment - we are forced to sit with a fact that doesn't make us want to smile.
In an imagined world, a world in which I was with you all, a world in which I might be smiling through tears, a world where it was somehow acceptable to be equipped with pints of afternoon cider in a church - a world that would probably have made Nan smile very much - I’d propose a toast, at this point. A toast to smiling, and to Nan.
So - let’s use our imaginations for a moment. Let’s toast to those things - the good things. The bangles and biscuits and blue skies, and a life lived well.
To Sam.
To Nan.
To Kay.
To a woman whose smile permeated her whole life.
To a woman whose tremendous amounts of smiles permeated all of our lives, too.
To a woman whose goodness made our own lives good, too.
To a life lived - well, very well indeed.
