A Seaside Funeral

Come to think of it, now she was dead, those were the years I would steal off into the suburbs of my imagination to snatch a glimpse of granddad’s misty nymphs in glades; those artistic exposures I had found in the tidied away heaps of his photographic society albums. For it was in his annuals of artistic spreads that I first discovered the carefully posed and sensitively treated monochrome mysteries of womanly shapes.

Leafing-over those artistically focused pages, I would dream of being embraced by one or other of the sun-fringed outdoor types, frolicking between the wars, in some sleepy lagoon, or as if to exemplify strength through joy, in their tastefully nuanced shades.

No, they wouldn’t have known it, my extended family relatives, come back for the funeral after all those years. But then, by the end, granny hadn’t known herself. Domestic lights were coming on in flats above what was the North Tyne fish dock as I walked the shore. Those innumerable fishing lines on South Pier tautened under a horizon vanishing in the dusk.

For once the remaining great-aunts had gone, on that long day of her funeral, I simply had to get out of the house and walk off the tension and upset, walk where they carried you in their arms on family holidays, where you would sit on the sill below the great sash windows and watch the drifter fleet come home, its rows of fairy-lights glinting in the rigging, as they pitched between two embracing piers.

From a seaboard family, come bath-time, my mother would sing how I was going to have a little fishy on a little dish-y when the ship came in, or when the big one sailed down the alley-alley-oh on the last day of September.

As at sweet and toyshop windows, my nose would be pressed to the glass display cases in the whaling museums, the scrimshaw and model ships made by Napoleonic prisoners from bones picked out of their sparse meals. I would haunt the lifeboat stations with their tales of shipwrecks and miraculous rescues, of Grace Darling, that wondrous-named female rower and her fearless exploit in an open boat.

All through childhood, the cargo boats, tankers and passenger ferries would push on beyond headlands and coves, out into the higher seas, then into history as cheap air travel drove them out of business, the ships scrapped and the sea horizon emptied of its interest – though not before I had learned to take an interest in that emptiness itself.

Entranced, I would stare out as a coaster or a liner passed, casting off its tugboats, would stare out as it slowly disappeared. Standing by the lighthouse at the end of South Pier, at the mouth of the river Tyne, a tiny enamelled doll pressed into the stone of its walls, I would gaze out beyond the heads and rods of the fishermen patient there.

In those days you could still sail from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Bergen, Oslo, Stavanger, Kristiansand, and Gothenburg. Those liners with their pinstripe funnels, the warships and cargo vessels would leave astern their pilot boats once beyond those wide-embracing piers. Or I might be watching from the top floor window of 22 Sea View Terrace, where my absorbing the views had doubtless been picked up from my mother and her parents, my granny and granddad proud of their North Sea vista.

As those ships would slowly slip away past the ruins of Tynemouth Priory up there on its headland, my mother will have told me they were setting out for Scandinavia, the place where our ancestors had most likely come from, with their long blond hair, blue eyes, and russet beards.

No, I’ve no evidence – other than the untested genetic signatures that

will have given us bairns our twentieth-century looks – for the idea that we’re descended from Viking marauders, or the settlers who had followed them across that northern sea, our direct ancestors long-time inhabitors of the Danelaw, the outpost of Scandinavia that still marks its language and landscape as humanly settled in my and my family’s part of the world. It’s something you can see in our eyes, especially when struck by wintry, oblique-falling, maritime light, picking out the chiseling of features and glint in my grey-blue irises. Yes, you can see it in our eyes.

‘It just looks like the whole place has been sold,’ said one of our mourners, ‘but the new owners not yet moved in.’

On that funeral weekend, their seaside resort had seemed so empty, closed, the victim of an earlier and definitive evolutionary downturn in the nation’s economic fortunes.

Drifting sand had buried long-laid paths through dunes. There were concrete blocks for seawall repairs, unfinished amenities, and derelict emporia or dilapidated amusement arcades. Past ‘Gandhi’s temple’, as my granddad would call the public conveniences, I would pace out that disappointed place with the look of her dead years’ expectations and aftermaths, at once both resilient and drab.

The shiny black mermaids still held marble torches to the night. Your feet edged round the cleared borders’ dark earth. In Bents and South Marine Park the shadows, insubstantially complete, fattened the shrubberies with childish fears.

Mother had been playing in South Marine Park with her younger sisters on 3rd September 1939. She was looking forward to her thirteenth birthday, just over two weeks later. Then granny had come out and hurried the three of them across the road and home.

The German High Seas Fleet had bombarded West Hartlepool – Whitby, Scarborough, and Hartlepool too – on 16 December 1914. There were many civilian casualties, useful for the propaganda war, recruitment, and legacies of anxiety and fear. For granny, raised there, had been a young girl at the time.

The town of South Shields was divided into evacuation and reception areas. Mother was sent away with the other evacuees. At first they were taught in the church hall, because the local private school wouldn’t condescend to accept them into its confines.

Eventually, they relented, or were ordered to relent, since there was a war on, and all that – but, whatever the explanation, eventually they did. The headmaster was a sensitive man who must have had an influence on mother’s educational development, her eventually going on to study geography.

Only too late to speak with her alive, I had come back here after all these years to find their well-parked cars outside. The relatives, more than halfestranged, how they would arrive to a clothes rack lowered by pulleys from the ceiling, the kitchen’s brown-patterned linoleum, a tub and mangle in her scullery, and the deeds, the newspapers … like a frayed drawing room carpet’s edge, these things grown decrepit about her.

The night before the funeral itself in that fourth-floor box-room, you’d lain awake watching the shadows stir. Before dawn, her sleepless bereaved had heard the staircase groan as I tiptoed down those two floors to the chilly bathroom. In childhood up there our black iron beds were all supplied with chamber pots beneath them. Then, searched by the white revolving rays from the North Pier’s beacon, the corridor flickered an instant, like an old-time film of fishing smacks, colliers or lifeboats, like those you had sketched in charcoal though Fifties rainy holidays. Then those drifters would be as skittishly gone.

Once, back then, I encountered granny at the stair head in a dressing gown,

her silver hair in a long plait down her spine. At the funeral, again you could picture her encourage you with jigsaws laid out on a tea tray, could see her pointing out remnants of a dock gate that slipped its tug moorings in a storm – the North Sea foaming against it, irretrievable now, as her memory for faces and sense of time became.

Not in her regular church, our hymns faltered beneath its ribbed and darkstained nave.

‘A stalwart of the Mother’s Union,’ is what the incumbent, too young to have even met her, called grandma in his peroration.

Pierced by a vandal’s stone, one saint’s stained-glass shield distracted me a moment from his orotund oration. But could she have believed, had she seen them, those doses of tears, or her daughters’ Valium?

Mother had watched as they came and took down the South Marine Park railings for the war effort. I could remember, too, how coarse grass, grass gusted flat by ‘Joe Stalin’s ghost’ had taken hold on the roof of a padlocked air-raid shelter. It was right across the road at the edge of the Park – still there in the 1950s behind its low walls. There were the stubs of wrought-iron railings in the pediment I would balance on holding mum’s or grandma’s hands.

Shut out of their home behind its high privet, for being too loud, I found cover on that shelter’s roof, and, as if reconnoitring, pondered how to besiege or ambush them. On the park lake pleasure boats exhausted their bought time. Nursing resentments and with barefaced shame, I had promised to be less heard, begging to be allowed back in the house again.

‘If you don’t know what you’re talking about,’ granddad turned and spat, ‘then don’t say anything at all.’

Thus ‘father’, as she called him, her husband obsessed by the Test Match, would watch in a snow of bad reception, the sound turned down, a radio commentary describing the action, commanding silence to follow England struggle then collapse, collapse at almost close of play. And I sensed dad’s bitterness, the shame in that thwarted attempt to humour his father-in-law.

Her husband was an only son, a survivor of Gallipoli, survivor from our first lost generation – lost in his darkroom with those leafy nymphs in glades, or in front of the cricket, wholly absorbed by his team’s forlorn, its plucky attempt at the Ashes.

‘You can stay a week, but then I’m putting you back on the train,’ her mother had said when grandma fled after her honeymoon.

Back she had to come, back to the man she had mistaken. And just look at her, there on her wedding day, in that Twenties cloche hat and ankle-length dress with that younger war veteran beside her, a bank clerk in his formal suit, his waistcoat and buff spats – just a few years after the Great War had ended.

Their dark-stained upright, you can almost remember her playing it. But at the funeral it couldn’t have even sustained half an echo of the testing duets she would play with her husband, his polished violin arthritis would finally silence. But a generation of rumours in the air, through the unmoved years, blamed him for that long-held rest, saying it was he who had forbidden her those old reopened scores and the concord locked under its keyboard lid.

Yes, her jealous husband, that proudly isolated man, he couldn’t bear being disturbed by others’ pleasure. And there, where no music resounded, he had left just a few words recalled, disenchanting inert furniture. Still I’d heard it resonate, a tune passed down we failed to catch, now that all those sounds were hushed forever.

Out of the scuffed brick walls, a single frond sprouted from its flaking mortar. Where steps ascended, graffiti survived the loves they named. A single laden freighter unbound the sky and sea. Though brought back to a muddled youth with people you couldn’t but choose to be attached to, and were bound to lose, still I was borne back by her death and funeral, the last time mother’s family would be in one place all together.

No, nothing recompenses the love withdrawn. It’s as if I’m unsure that they ever would let me back in where other histories beyond our own were intermingled about that shoreline. They were lost in the mist like the shipbuilding and the steel where Tynemouth Priory still gripped its headland, an ebb tide’s stinking wrack bringing seaweed and sewage, crude oil and children’s stick drawings to score the wrinkled sand.

The family would shelter behind abandoned stone ballast on this beach. Shuffling off into darkness, the damaged footprints disappeared. Where the enclaves were demolished, pubs standing proud on bare street corners, the alleyways still cut through, and, unforgiven, I picked my way back to that pieced-together past where you had thought we all belonged.

Of course they let me back in when I returned, returned decades later for her funeral, returned to find her relatives speaking their mind, uneasily, close, with too much conviction, and a head of feeling uncontained. Surely not foreseeing contradiction, these near strangers in a half-circle round the black-and-white television would defend themselves aggressively.

‘Bloody foreigners, coming over here.’

They would heckle each other’s outsmarting phrases, the expressed views not their own. I had listened in choked-back agonies to those pointless disagreements, each expressing something other than what they said, voicing their resentments, disappointments in how their lives had gone.

‘Oh yes, you were always my favourite,’ granddad was saying to one of the aunts, the other out of earshot, while, as if in recompense, he ruffled mother’s hair.

Beyond drawn curtains, inward rushes of breakers were pestering the foreshore. Sat with them on the sofa, I can still see my father wishing he hadn’t the ears to hear.

Only speechless, the family’s choked grief, its frictions and retaliations, they were still there, heated behind eyes and cheeks. I had borne it in mind, beyond others’ beliefs, been tongue-tied, careful never so much as to mention either art, or death, or politics.

But then sidling, sidling away at dusk with the shimmer of a tide curve picked out by full moonlight, a seaside bungalow high on the foreland, I would keep my eyes down as I went, sidling away from all those things turned bad, my grandma and grandpa tired, it seemed, of their daughter’s pubescent offspring, from the very idea of setting those things to rights.

It seemed as if the guilty secrets, those misty nymphs in glades, had driven me away from friends and family, even from the country of my birth. Then you wouldn’t know what you were missing when the leaves shivered on chilly days, or the faded ones hung upon the air, cradled in a spider’s threads. I wouldn’t know what I was missing, though charms like those against resentment would never be more than a temporary salve.

You could try not to let the thought of that pier-end lighthouse draw you back to those youthful memories, try not to fret though its revolving beam picked across the rose wallpaper in the back of your mind, or rummaged in that box-room where you stirred in the small hours – there at a bedroom window overlooking the sea, where you would watch lights rock in their rigging between each pier, or see the rows of portholes in black hulls going out beyond those high cliffs’ greenish stone.