Uncle Jim Pops His Clogs - And Other Funerals I Have Known

I went to a lot of funerals when I was very, very young. It wasn’t that my family knew a lot of people who’d died, but more the machinations of Mrs. Mills. It came about like this

At the end of the War, my mother and I moved back to Rochdale from Ardrossan, and we lived for a while with her parents. My father was still in the Royal Navy, and had been moved to Plymouth. He expected to be de-mobbed soon, so it wasn’t worth my mother moving there too. My mother started her teacher-training, leaving my Grandma to look after me. This was all very well, apart from Tuesdays, when Grandma went to the ‘Bright Hour’ at church, to enjoy a women’s get-together, with tea and cake and chat, with the odd prayer thrown in. This was sacrosanct. Arrangements would have to be made, so my mother paid one of Grandma’s neighbours, Mrs. Nellie Mills, to take care of me whilst Grandma was out, and to give me my tea.

Each Tuesday afternoon started the same. Mrs. Mills would bundle me into my blue Harris-tweed coat with its darker blue velvet collar, and plonk my pixie-hood on my head, and off we’d go to the crematorium, where we’d sit in a pew during a funeral service, and Mrs. Mills would weep loudly and copiously. Invariably, at the end, someone would come up to her and say sympathetically, “Are you coming back for your tea?”

“Yes, thank you,” she’d say, putting on her gloves and a brave face; and off we’d go, with a group of people we’d never seen before in our lives.

(At that time, everybody walked everywhere. No-one we knew had a car, except the doctor and the local mill-owner. Buses were only taken for long journeys, such as going to Manchester.) So we’d attach ourselves to someone, and proceed to where there’d be a funeral tea of boiled ham, lettuce, and bread and butter, with numerous cups of tea, a feast in those days of food rationing. Everyone assumed Mrs. Mills was from the ‘other side of the family’, only to be encountered at weddings and funerals. If she was asked about her relationship with the deceased, she would burst into tears and be unable to speak.

This pattern went on for a few months, until something I said to Grandma made her question me more closely about Tuesday afternoons, beyond ‘we went for a walk and had our tea.’ All hell broke loose. In no time the whole street knew that Mrs. Mills had been given money to pay for my tea, but had been able to hoard it, thanks to her histrionic abilities. It was to be a good few years before I went to another funeral, and by this time rationing had ended. If we were lucky we got tinned salmon instead of boiled ham.

I haven’t mentioned Uncle Jim yet. His funeral was the most memorable, but before I explain why, I’ll fill you in on a bit of background.

He was my Grandma’s younger brother, and his full name was James Watson Greenwood. One of the first memories I have, when we moved back to Rochdale from Ardrossan, was of his crimson chenille table cloth. I loved its deep rich colour and textures, the contrast between its stubby centre, its soft velvet edging, and the long tassels which fringed it.

Uncle Jim at that time was an upright man, in every sense of the word. His back was ramrod straight, and he moved stiffly. His morals were uncompromising, too. He was a Quaker, and so a pacifist. In the First World War he’d been a ‘conscientious objector’, and had joined the Red Cross as a stretcher bearer. In the muddy trenches of northern France he had shared the squalor, the fear, and the comradeship of the soldiers. After an offensive, Jim and his fellow stretcher bearer had to ‘go over the top’, armed only with red crosses on their chests and backs for protection, to bring back the wounded, the dying, and sometimes the dead. From the enemy lines facing them, German Red Cross workers were doing the same for their fallen. These Red Cross men were supposed to be inviolable and safe: but one day Uncle Jim and his partner were fired on. One minute they were both there, the next the partner had been blown to smithereens.

Of course, when I was a little girl I knew nothing of this. I watched in fascination as Uncle Jim tried to raise a cup of tea to his mouth, and his hands began to shake uncontrollably, until he would give up, and Auntie Lizzie, his wife, would take the cup from him, pour the tea into a large saucer, and he would put his head down to it, and drink like a dog. This was ‘shell shock’. Nowadays we call it post-traumatic stress after battle. Then there was no treatment for it, and men just had to live with it.

I must have been about three when Auntie Lizzie died, because Uncle Jim married Auntie Bertha when I was four. They had a ‘do’ in the Co-op Hall on the corner of Toad Lane and St. Mary’s Gate (now long gone), and we all did the Hokey Cokey. I remember Auntie Renee and Uncle Stan were there. It was to be another ten years before I saw them again…..

There was great excitement when Uncle Jim announced he’d done the football pools, and expected to win a lot of money. As a Quaker, he did not approve of gambling, but had squared it with his conscience by deciding skill was involved, and so it was not just chance –or so he said. He duly sent off his coupon with a postal order for threepence (those were the days!).

Saturday came, and all his predictions were wrong. He was furious! The pools company had taken his money under false pretences! He wrote to them, demanding his threepence back, and couldn’t understand why he got no reply.

I hope you get some idea of him. I never really knew him as a person, only some of the things he did. This is the problem with being young, that older people don’t have any true reality for you.

Years went by, and everyone got older, though to me, as a child, all old people looked much the same as they always had. I, however, had reached the grand old age of fourteen when Uncle Jim died. It was a great shock, and a bit of a catastrophe, as he died in the outside lavatory. When he didn’t come back in, Auntie Bertha went to look for him, and could not open the lavatory door, as he was behind it. Men had to come to remove it, and then remove Uncle Jim as well; and at last Auntie Bertha could go to the toilet, which must have been a great relief.

On the day of the funeral, our relatives and Auntie Bertha’s relatives converged on the house. Uncle Jim’s coffin, open to display him arranged in a pious position, with his hands crossed on his breast, stood on a trestle, covered by the crimson chenille tablecloth, in the middle of the sitting room, and everyone trooped past, saying the same thing, “He looks very peaceful, doesn’t he?”, and I thought, ‘Well, he would as he’s dead’, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to look in the coffin either, so I stayed in a corner, out of the way.

We were waiting for the hearse and the mourners’ cars to arrive to take us to the cemetery when there was a commotion outside, and a large Riley sports car pulled up, the same colour as the cloth draped under the coffin. Out of the car stepped my Auntie Renee and Uncle Stan, estranged from the rest of the family these last ten years. (No-one had told me why, but I think it was something to do with black-marketeering in the war).

Bear in mind that this was the mid-1950s, when funerals were marked by everybody wearing deepest unrelieved black. Up the front path teetered Auntie Renee, on stiletto sling-back heels, and wearing sheer black spangled stockings such as Rochdale had never seen before. Her mink coat was slung over a green shot-silk cocktail dress, cut very low, so that her ample bust went before her. On her dyed red hair was a wisp of a hat, with a feather sticking out. Her face was made-up to the nines. Following on was Uncle Stan in a light-weight, light coloured sports jacket over a canary-yellow waistcoat, and BROWN SHOES. Brown! At a funeral! We all stared open-mouthed as they sailed in dramatically.

Ignoring the grieving widow – and everyone else for that matter – Auntie Renee pulled up short when she saw the coffin Then she staggered forward, and leant over, lifted Uncle Jim’s hand, and held it away from her – much as Hamlet held Yorick’s skull. “Oh!” she declaimed melodramatically, “It’s his hand! Yes, it’s his hand!”
My dad said dryly, ”Who the bloody hell’s hand did you expect it to be?”

It was as though a switch had been turned. Auntie Renee shook with fury. She stepped back, dropping the hand, which flopped down. “ Right! That’s it! Come on, Stan, we’re leaving!” she said, and she stormed out.

“Yes dear,” said Uncle Stan, smiling round apologetically as he followed her through the door.

There was a stunned silence. Then, “Who was that?” one of Auntie Bertha’s relatives asked.

“Er, I’m not sure,” Auntie Bertha said.

My mother spoke, very quietly. “It’s Uncle Jim’s niece. My sister.”

Oh, dear. Utter embarrassment.

Then Auntie Bertha said, “If I’d known, they could have stopped to their tea. We’re having tinned salmon.”