Thought for the Week

Just over a week ago the oldest parishioner of St Brides’s ever to live in our parish died at the age of 105.

Maureen McGuire died very peacefully in a care home in Prestwick, near to relatives. In the end her death came suddenly. She was physically weak, as you would suspect of someone of that age, but she still had a sharp mind which was only impaired by a long-term difficulty with deafness.

Amazingly, Maureen lived in the same house, 71 Dukes Rd, for over 90 years.

Along with her family they had been one of the first people to move into these, as they were then, new houses.

She went onto lead a fulfilled professional life, was a company secretary to a printing business and was a PA to a CEO of a travel agency that eventually was bought over by Thomson Holidays.

I was always in awe of her. She seemed to me to be a woman from another time and another age. She had impeccable manners and was very dignified.

She was, of course, from another age, having been born in 1913. Being born in that year meant that she lived through World War I, even although she was a baby and just a child. But she is one of those links with that terrible moment in human history, with its loss of life and terrible destruction.

How strange, it seems to me, that she should pass away just in that moment when we were about to mark the centenary of the Armistice on November 11.

I would like to think that I will never forget Maureen, she made a deep impression on me.

Similarly, I would like to think that I will never forget the First World War, especially the desire of the fallen to find ways to end war forever.