This morning was Norman Parker' funeral.
I went early to the church to put the heating on, and chatted to the grave-digger (the grandson and nephew of the grave-diggers I have met before) about the problems he was having shifting the solid chalk which starts under about 3 inches of topsoil here. At least he didn't hit some seventeenth or eighteenth century burial unmarked on our plans and have to start again. Fifty years ago they stumbled on Vikings!
By spreadng ourselves out our short nave was made reasonably full with 18 family members plus just 5 neighbours - Pa, Basil, Joy, Geoff (representing the Parish Council of which Norman was a member before Geoff was elected over thirty years ago) and me, plus the funeral director. But it is sad that after 50 years living in one place (albeit half a mile from the village itself) there should be so few villagers to remember him.
Ian Robinson did the eulogy very nicely for someone he didn't actually know and read 1 Corinthians 13. We sang Love Divine and Abide with Me, and I was interested to hear the grandads in the pew behind singing in two pure clear tenor voices undiminished in their eighties even on the high notes. I've always been vaguely aware that Daddy could sing, but he's never been one like myself, my mother and grandmother to sing almost constantly when working (not teaching work: housework), and I had no idea that Basil sang so well.
You can't really grieve much when someone in his eighties dies quite suddenly and is spared all the indignities of extreme old age, but it was a very sad little funeral unlike the last half-dozen or so funerals in Swallow which have been very much celebrations of the liife of a person who has been well-known, well-liked and very active in the village and elsewhere with the church packed so full that we have had to use the Sunday School benches, borrow chairs from the village hall, put the family in the choir stalls in the chancel and sit or stand in the porch with the door open.
(For information: we generally tell people for weddings that 60 to 70 is the top limit on numbers if they want everybody able to sit down in the pews in something approaching comfort.)
