Eulogy for my mother
Thank you all for coming today, on this wintry day, to celebrate the life of my wonderful mother, Catherine – but of course to us she will always be Kath – Moss. Before I begin, I want to say some thank yous. I have been away from Newport for more than 40 years, and as my father’s health declined and then my mother’s it fell to Kevin, with the help of Julie and Dan, to take on the caring role, which they did uncomplainingly. Mam’s niece, Louise, also gave huge support to Kevin in the last, often difficult 18 months, and her neighbours in Howe Circle, especially Vera Rees, kept an eye on her.
Before lockdown, her cousin Michael Brunnock was a great comfort to her and she looked forward to his visits and to reminiscing about growing up in Pill. Pat Newall was also the staunchest of friends, and Mam was so pleased to be back in touch after they had for many years drifted apart. I also want to thank the NHS. Mam has been in and out of many hospitals and care homes in the past few years and, despite the strain under which they were operating, they did their best for her.
I want to start this eulogy with something very personal. When I went to university at the age of 18 in 1975, I had no easy means of communication with my parents. Not only were there no mobile phones or social media then, my parents didn’t even have a landline, so we used to exchange letters. Kevin recently cleared out the attic at Mam’s, and these letters came back into my possession after more than 40 years. In them you can hear her authentic voice – her love for her family, her devotion to her sons, her selflessness.
“Dear Steve, We have bought you this coat, being as it is so cold. Hope you will like it. Don’t take any notice of the labels on there; just cut them off; only the girl packed it so neatly in the shop, it seemed a shame to unpack it again. Now Steve please get your scarf and you should be alright for winter time at college. All you want now is a pair of gloves, that’s if you’ll wear them. How’s your cold Steve? Write and let us know.”
All the letters to me in my first year away seemed to be about the cold. “Keep yourself warm Steve and use the electric fire in your room. Dad said we’ll worry about the bill when it comes in. We’ll have to help you pay it. You must keep warm.” My parents were always sending me things, including once one of my mother’s home-made bread puddings. She was very proud of her bread puddings, but they were large and very heavy – it must have cost a fortune in postage and was not in the best of shape when it arrived.
What spare money my parents had, they happily gave to me and Kevin, and later to their grandsons Tim and Dan. We never wanted for anything and got mountains of toys at Christmas, which Mam and Dad always loved and celebrated in style, because my father worked endless “doublers” to pay the bills, and my mother did her bit by doing secretarial work and bar work and playing the piano at the Man of Steel pub and for keep-fit classes. The piano playing – music, along with her family, was the love of her life – she adored. The secretarial work and bar work were perhaps less to her liking. She was a free spirit who liked to do things when she wanted to. The structures of office life and pub and hotel life didn’t really suit her.
It struck me quite late in life that a key factor that united my mother and father and affected their outlook on life was that they both lost parents when they were very young. My father lost his mother when he was six and had a very tough upbringing, which he survived and overcame brilliantly. My mother’s father died in Iceland in March 1942, when Mam was just seven. He was a musician in an army danceband and was killed in a crash on the way to a concert in Iceland, dying almost instantly.
The loss of her father and the earlier loss of her parents’ house in Raglan Street during a German bombing raid on the docks in October 1940 coloured her whole life. It left my grandmother, a brilliant pianist, bereft. My Nana could just about cope while her own mother was alive to offer support, but after the latter’s death in 1959 my grandmother declined. My mother worried about Nana and the disturbances she brought in her wake, but she never stopped caring about her. She loved her intensely. One tape we treasure is of Nana still playing beautifully in her 80s, even though she was blind and had only a cheap piano that was never tuned, with my mother singing along in the background.
My mother did not make light of the loss of her father and the loss of her parents’ home – she realised they had wrecked my grandmother’s life. But nor did she allow them to destroy her. She talked affectionately of the friends she had at school; of her beloved Uncle Billa, Auntie Joan and Auntie Maggie; of life at the convent school – where despite being quick and intelligent she was clearly a hopeless student, incapable of concentrating on anything and interested only in clothes and dancing. She had, despite everything, a happy childhood.
It is characteristic that the story of the blitz that wrecked her house which she liked to tell was a funny one. Her father, who was still at home at that point, left a piece of chocolate for her each evening on the mantelpiece in her bedroom. The house was blown up and she was luck to escape with her life, but she recalled that her first question to her father when he carried her out of the rubble was “Where’s my chocolate?”
The fact that both my parents had lost a beloved parent very early and came from shattered homes – in Mam’s case literally – made them determined to build a secure home and family of their own, which they did, giving security and confidence to me and Kevin, but also treating Mam’s half-sister Ann as a daughter in her teenage years, when life with my grandmother became impossible and Ann came to live with us in Howe Circle.
My mother loved the 1960s, despite all the problems of Nana’s decline. The music; the clothes; the going out; the new wave of consumerism; the optimism everyone felt as Newport boomed and Llanwern brought secure, well-paid jobs; the friends she made in Howe Circle and beyond; the trips to Bullmore Lido and Barry that she always adored; the holidays we started to take every year in Porthcawl from the late 1960s on.
She was never happier than when she was on the beach or in the sea. Until the very end she was talking about going to Porthcawl or Barry, or to Plymouth (where my Dad had been stationed as a royal marine and which they both visited in later life) or even going on a cruise. It annoyed her that she had never been abroad, and even at 85 and with multiple health issues she was convinced that she and Pat were going to go on an epic adventure.
Despite everything, my mother never gave up. She was convinced she could make a recovery, get back on her feet, get in to town, go to Vacara’s for fish and chips, go on holiday. She was resilient, having a huge heart operation at 83 and recovering even from that, though we fear a stroke she suffered during the 10 hours she spent in theatre contributed to the dementia that afflicted her final year. She contracted Covid in hospital and seemed to shake it off, though it may have weakened her and made worse the chest infections that plagued her in her final months. She battled on despite multiple ailments and would not give up, though my father’s death in 2017 knocked her for six and she was never quite the same afterwards.
Her life was lived with and for her husband Ray. She adored him. Married at 21, a mother at 22, her life was devoted to her family. She knew how to enjoy herself, liked a drink and a fag and a dance, but home was where her heart was. One of the other things I inherited when Mam died was a long, thin, red strapless 1950s handbag – very fashionable at the time. It contained letters to and from my Dad in their courting days. He was stationed in Plymouth; she was here in Newport. They are mostly from 1956, leading up to their wedding in August of that year. These letters meant a huge amount to my mother, and in the four years after my father’s death she would read them over and over. They were part of him; part of their life together. In a way she had ceased to live too when he died, but these letters – and the many photographs she had – kept something of the life they had shared together intact.
The letters from my father to her are almost indecipherable: I don’t know whether that’s because they are written on very cheap paper that is now disintegrating or because my mother had read them and run her fingers over them a million times. But her letters to him are very clear and full of life and vivacity and sheer excitement at having met this handsome young marine she clearly adored.
She threw nothing away and the handbag contains several notes related to her wedding. The bill for the wedding cake – a whopping £6 15 shillings, from the aptly named Walter Sweeting on Corporation Road; a deposit of a pound for the flowers; a bill of £24 18 shillings from the Tredegar Arms Hotel for the reception; and a note from Mrs Skinner in Dorchester Road, Weymouth acknowledging receipt of Mam and Dad’s £2 deposit for their week-long honeymoon in her B&B.
What a glorious holiday that must have been: these two twentysomethings, totally free, totally in love, enjoying the sun and the sea and the fish and chips on the promenade. Mam talked about Weymouth as if it was heaven. They went back there for their 60th wedding anniversary in 2016 – their last holiday really, before my father was diagnosed with cancer, and I made a point of going down on the very day of their anniversary, the 11th of August, to surprise them.
I knew they wouldn’t have strayed far from the hotel and there they were at about 11.30am sitting on the front at a café in the sun, Dad asleep – he was already fading – but Mam in huge sunglasses soaking up every ray of sunshine. Her eyesight was by now very poor – the effect of long-term macular degeneration – and she didn’t recognise me as I approached, so, putting on a slightly disguised voice, I asked if I could sit at her table. She looked a bit surprised as there were other tables free, but said OK. I was going to start making polite conversation, but couldn’t keep up the pretence any longer and revealed myself.
We had a nice day, though even then I think I felt the poignant contrast of the eager, fit 20-year-olds with everything to look forward to and the creaky 80-year-olds with only a lifetime of memories. I bought them a 350-million-year-old fossil from a nearby shop to prove they weren’t the oldest things in Weymouth, but I don’t know if they appreciated the joke.
I’m glad I made that trip, but I think even then I knew it was the end. My father didn’t have much more strength, and without him and despite her resilience my mother struggled. They were completely co-dependent. Mam adored my Dad, and her wedding was one of the great days of her life, which is why we have put her wedding photograph on the back of the order-of-service booklet today and why her wedding dress, which she kept close by all her life, is with her in her coffin today.
After my Dad retired in the early 1990s they had a lovely 25 years of retirement: mooching around in town; spending a whole day at M&S in Spytty; hanging out in cafés – they were very partial to cafés; spending time at Porthcawl; never quite getting to Spain, though they thought about it often. The Costa del Sol boom came a bit too late for them, which is sad because my mother would have adored Tenerife.
They loved seeing my son Tim as he grew up but, because he lived in London, they saw much more of Kevin and Julie’s son Dan. They looked after him when he was very young and during the school holidays, and they enjoyed it hugely, giving him their full attention, building elaborate dens for him to play in, letting his toys and games overflow the entire house, giving him complete freedom.
His grandparents were wonderful role models for him. They cherished him and he kept them young. They were in their seventies when he was growing up, but they never seemed anything like that – because having to be on Dan’s wavelength kept them youthful and in touch. Mam hated the idea of getting old and was always telling me about taxi drivers who thought she was 20 years younger than she actually was. To the very end she wanted her hair and nails done. She always thought she looked beautiful – and she did.
On the last occasion I saw her, a week or so before she died, she could barely speak. She was at the Fields Nursing Home next to the Civic Centre, and hadn’t been able to get out of bed for months. I put on a record of Al Jolson songs and we sang along. Or rather I sang and she mouthed the words – which is all she could do by then. But despite the dementia she remembered all the lyrics. We duetted in Jolson’s Rock a Bye Your Baby: “Weep no more, my lady./ Sing that song again for me./ Soft and low, just as though/ You had me on your knee./ A million baby kisses I’d deliver,/ If you would only sing that Swanee River./ Rock-a-bye your rock-a-bye baby with a Dixie melody.”
Music filled her soul. My father was less musical, but he put up with the constant sound – if she wasn’t singing, she was talking, endlessly talking! When she played the piano, though, you could see how proud he was of her talent. I hope they will be together again now and that he is once more willing to put up with the racket, because if there is a heaven she will be singing through all eternity. Just don’t expect sweet celestial sounds: it will be loud and jazzy and she will be jiving, forever jiving.
A shortened form of this eulogy was read at my mother’s funeral at Langstone Vale crematorium, Newport, in January 2022. Covid limited the number of attendees to 30. Hymns had to be sung through masks. The intro music was Ken Dodd’s Tears. The outro music was Kenny Ball’s Midnight in Moscow, which I think she would have appreciated.
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