I shall say no more after this, as public expressions of grief are embarrassing and unseemly, but I wanted to record Monday's proceedings here.
Below is the programme for my mother's funeral which took place in the East Chapel of Cambridge Crematorium on Monday 2 October at 315 pm. There is also the text of a tribute I prepared. In the delivery I deviated from the script, as I always do, and my brother's contribution is not recorded either.
I promise that I shall now return to normal blogging.
A commemoration of the life of Sheila Ann (Nancy) Roper, née Tillard, born 10 January 1914, died 23 September 2006
Henry Purcell Incassum Lesbia, Incassum Rogas (The Queen's Epicedium) performed by Susan Gritton and the King’s Consort directed by Robert King
Reading: Fear no more the heat of the sun William Shakespeare Cymbeline Act IV Scene ii
Leoš Janáček Štěbetaly laštovičky (They Chattered Like Swallows), From On an Overgrown Path, Series 1 performed by Leif Ove Andsnes
Tributes from Tom and Peter Roper. Do speak if you would like to contribute.
Charles Lloyd Lift Every Voice And Sing Charles Lloyd (tenor saxophone), John Abercrombie (guitar), Geri Allen (piano), Larry Grenadier (double-bass) and Billy Hart (drums)
Please join us afterwards for refreshments at 3 Fulbrooke Road, Cambridge. If you have space in your car, would like a lift, or need directions speak to us at the end of the commemoration.
Tom and Peter Roper
Eulogy
Thank you for coming to commemorate the life of the person known variously to those here today as Mum, Granny, Sheila or Nancy. I am Tom, the oldest of Mum’s two adopted sons and I want to talk about some aspects of Mum’s life. Peter, my brother also wishes to say something, and if any of you would like to contribute, please do.
We are both very grateful to you for coming here today, particularly to Chris and her family, for Pat or Bob, Mum’s brother, died a few days before her, and to Jean and her family for her husband David, Mum’s brother in law, died in the summer. We told Mum, as she lay in hospital, that Pat had pre-deceased her. I think she could understand this.
I want to thank those who looked after Mum in recent years: Maria, Aneta, Gabriella, Goscai and Anna who worked for Mum, and the many neighbours who helped her, above all Julia Mannheim and Valerie Wheater.
We have not planned a religious ceremony; we do not think Mum wanted one and she felt strongly that funerals were for those left behind, not for the dead person. I read too much Homer and Virgil when I was a boy, in translation, but I was always struck by how the dead heroes would go to fields of asphodel. Later, as a teenager, when we travelled to the Balearics, my mother pointed out asphodel to me. If she were to have an after-life, I should like to think of her walking in such Mediterranean fields. We shall scatter her ashes on a Norfolk beach that she was particularly fond of.
Mum died, at the age of 92, and though there is far much more to there than the way she died, over those eighteen days, the tenacity she showed in that period shows a particular part of her character. Though she always believed she was frail and feeble, in fact her will proved extremely strong, strong enough to keep her alive where others would have given up.
She was especially fond of young children and, though she and Tim could not have children of their own, they made the finest adoptive parents. Later, she was able to take pleasure in her grandchildren, in order of age Bernie, then Erika, then Will, then Connor and last but not least Josephine.
I am not very well qualified to deliver a tribute. I knew Mum for a little over half her life, and my earliest memories are probably unreliable. But we can say that she was born in 1914, before the first war, when Russia was ruled by a tsar. She had a peripatetic childhood, as the Navy moved my grandfather around; her education was consequently haphazard, entrusted to a series of governesses and to several schools. She attributed to this what she saw as her poor knowledge of history, for example, She never completed a university education. She would not discuss much of the work she did in the war, though she used to tell me about the work she did with Czech refugees. During the war she met my father, Tim, in a boarding house in Maida Vale, when he was a newly qualified hospital doctor. They were not married until well after the war, but when they did, Mum moved to Cambridge, to 58 Lensfield Road, a house full of dogs, cats, Dad’s brother Tony and patients. There she lived until Dad’s retirement, and Mum worked for him in a range of roles, for which a modern general practice requires an army of people: she was at once receptionist, typist, pharmacist, practice nurse and chaperone. When Dad retired, they continued to work, and Dad’s University of the Third Age swimming classes would not have happened without Mum’s organisational flair.
I want to mention three aspects of Mum’s life that seem to me important to remember.
The first is her intelligence: even late in her life, she was still reading in several languages and could beat me at the crossword. Had her academic career continued (though I think she would have found academic life dull and restricting), she could easily have been a teacher and researcher at the highest level. She maintained a curiosity about the world, and, I found when trying to explain something such as broadband, even if she knew nothing of the subject herself, she knew enough to be able to expose someone who is out of his depth
.
The second aspect I want to highlight is her love of the natural world. She preferred wild nature to nature domesticated, it must be said, and though she coped with the menagerie she found when moving into the marital home, her preferences were always for wild animals rather than pets, above all for birds and for plants. She had an unsurpassed knowledge of wild flowers and of botany, though could never find a gardener who could understand the way she wanted to translate that love into her own garden. She could be withering about media gardeners, and the cult of gardening as fashion. She, and Tim, were both environmentalists avant la lettre and she was appalled at the waste and destruction visited on nature by people, and by governmental indifference to that.
The final thing I want to talk about is related to the last. Mum was not a very contented person. But I think her discontent, which I think both Pete and I share, came from an understanding that life is far from perfect, and that it is right to be angry at its shortcomings and at human stupidity. I remember studying Voltaire’s Candide for French A level and discussing it with Mum. She could have rivalled Voltaire himself as a critic of maitre Pangloss and his theory that, in the face of the Lisbon earthquake, “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”.
So I would choose for Mum Swift’s epitaph:
Ubi Saeva Indignatio
Ulterius
Cor Lacerare Nequit
Abi Viator
Et Imitare Si Poteris
Strenuum Pro Virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem
She has gone where fierce indignation can tear her heart no more-- go traveller, and imitate if you can, one who championed liberty strenuously and to the utmost.