Valediction for my mother

My mother died on 4th February 2018. This is the valediction speech I gave at her funeral.

"How is it possible to summarise in just a few minutes a life of 98 years and what it means?

My mother was born in 1919 in a house long-since demolished, just across the road from this Church. She went to the St James’ primary school a few yards away, and spent the rest of her life in Shirley. She remembered that when she was a child,  Shirley was an attractive village surrounded by woods and meadows full of wild flowers. Water came from a well, and you lit a candle to go to your bedroom at night.

Mom was one of five children, in a family that became increasingly impoverished after the prolonged illness and death of her father when she was still a child. I once asked her for her father’s Christian name, and she said ‘Daddy’, as a child would. The family was held together by her formidable mother, who somehow fed and clothed her children on a widow’s pension of ten shillings a week. Like all her brothers and sisters, Mom left school at 14 to contribute to the family’s income.

At some point in her teenage years, Mom started ‘courting’ (as they said in those days) my father. Unfortunately, marriage was opposed by her mother on the surprising grounds that my father was too short. My mother therefore had to wait until she was 21 to be able to marry without parental consent. The marriage took place in Solihull Registry Office in December 1940, and was immediately followed by the sound of air raid sirens. So my parents first night of marital bliss was spent in an air-raid shelter.

Marriage was followed by wartime factory work, with my mother working on day shifts and my father on nights. This may be one reason why the birth of my brother and me was delayed until after the war. My parents had a happy marriage, in which they seem to have done almost everything together. Mom and Dad were united by their commitment to politics, to cricket, to gardening and to the education of their children. They saw education as the road to a better life for their sons, but also as something worth having for its own sake. Both were essentially self-educated and loved reading.

My mother had a deep love not just for her own husband, children and grandchildren, but also a strong affection for her many nieces and nephews. She enjoyed attending their weddings and celebrations, which she saw as an opportunity to get what she called a ‘new outfit’. She had a love of cooking, which was somewhat handicapped by my father’s refusal to eat any meat other than sausages or indeed any food other than sausages and two veg followed by pudding and custard. My mother provided loving nursing care for my father when he was severely ill towards the end of his life.

My mother was a person of great honesty, to the extent of sometimes being outspoken, and she had enormous optimism, including about her own ability as a driver. This was curtailed somewhat when she drove from a standing start into a shopfront. Fortunately, no-one was hurt and the shop conveniently turned out to be an insurance broker.

She had enormous energy and a love of life. This was despite a failed operation which left her almost blind in the last few years of her life, and the increasing debility to be expected of someone a few years short of a century. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until May of last year.

But when I think of Mom, I smile. I remember not the frail old woman who died last month, nearly blind and struggling to breathe, but instead think of the young vigorous mother I knew as a child, who played with my brother and me with fun and imagination. My mother taught me, by her example, that raising children is the most important thing you do in your life, and that you do so by stimulating their imagination, promoting their desire to learn, and helping them make their own decisions to become thoughtful, caring and independent adults.

I hope that when you think of my mother, you will smile as well".

NOTE: the photograph was taken in 1989 and shows my mother with her five granchildren.