Arson and Ashes

The business is finished. The deed is done. The curtain has closed. 

Almost.

Mum is back home with Dad and her parents, not without a couple of rants from me of which they would have approved.

Mum’s original wish was for her ashes to be scattered in the grounds of Menzies Castle in Perthshire, an eight-hour drive from here. She later changed her mind and said she wanted to be scattered where we’d dispatched Dad, at Grune Point on the Solway Firth, northwest Cumbria. 

So, Mum having been cremated in May in Milton Keynes, we set about planning which church up north we should take her to for her final bit of God-bothering. Most options were either too far from Grune Point, too happy-clappy, or too closed down. Eventually we decided on the 12th-century Cistercian abbey that she and Dad had attended when they first retired and where Dad had played the organ. I emailed the abbey about a week before our trip as a matter of courtesy. The Revd Canon responded kindly, saying we’d be very welcome and reminding us it was Harvest Festival … Mum and Dad used to love Harvest Festival; God moves in mysterious ways.

Hubby and I drove up on a torrentially wet and windy Friday afternoon – ‘twas ever thus – and checked into a hotel on the shores of Bassenthwaite Lake. Cocktail before dinner – ‘twas ever thus – and, remembering the disastrous one I’d had in Stratford, I ordered a Kir Royale. Can’t go wrong with that. Hubby ordered an alcohol-free beer. (Why?) Did I say one can’t go wrong with a Kir Royale? The champers was a tad flat, not chilled, and tongue-numbingly cheap. I looked enviously at Hubby’s beer.

The next day, Hubby took his bike for a spin over Whinlatter Pass – the easier way round – and I set off on a five-mile hike. At least that was the plan. United Utilities, who own as much land in Cumbria as China does in Cambridge, have closed a footpath while they dig a trench to lay a new supply pipe, investment that Fearful Sharkey chooses to ignore because if he admitted that a water company was doing something right he'd lose Twitter followers and BBC idolisation.

First rant over.

The diversion was confusing and I ended up walking for nine miles, in the originally allotted time for five miles. Good job I’m fit.

Later that afternoon, we picked up Sis from Cockermouth and drove into Whitehaven for a wander down memory lane. We drifted around the old harbour (now mainly a poncey marina but still some commercial fishing going on) looking for Leopold, the stuffed toy-tiger I lost there when I was a toddler. We pranced over to our grandfather’s old music shop, which now sells washing machines, immensely proud that it’s the oldest extant shop in town (opened in 1922). We processed up King Street and into the market place, bemoaning how dead the town was on a Saturday afternoon, how many empty shops there were, thanks to the seeds of rot having been sown by Labour administrations that Dad had tried to temper as a town councillor back in the 60s. 

A proud industrial heritage that includes coalmining, the town wants the proposed coking-coal mine to re-open and provide hundreds of new, skilled, well-paid jobs. Despite the new mine promising a net global environmental benefit, the nay-sayers hear the word ‘coal’ and immediately fill their nappies, preferring to drive just Blighty towards net-zero at the expense of aspirations for the rest of the world. I reckon Rees-Moggy is on to something when he claims Russia’s influencing many of these anti energy-security protests.

Second rant over.

Cometh the Sunday, cometh the hour, Hubby dropped Sis and me off outside the abbey (Bro unfortunately couldn’t make it) and went to find a coffee. No way was he attending Sunday morning church. It’s as much as I can do to strongarm him into coming to the annual carol service in the village hall. We entered the abbey with trepidation. While the ancient red sandstone exterior looked glorious in the autumn sunshine, we shuddered to think how the interior might look after a devastating arson attack in 2006.

Well! Talk about impressed. The renovations were beautiful. The sandstone pillars were as imposing as ever, the wooden roof had been expertly replaced, the stained-glass windows sparkled, and the underfloor heating, fuelled by ground-source heat, worked wonders. Pity the organ had been destroyed. Insurance wouldn’t cover the cost of a replacement because it had been ‘priceless.’ Better not tell Dad. He’d be very upset.

We were warmly welcomed by, we assume, the lay preacher because the Revd Canon was presiding elsewhere. We chatted about the arson attack and the horrendous damage. Apparently it was a gang of local youths what done it but only one was ever caught. He still lives in the village and the preacher said she felt sorry for him because he had to live with the hurt he had caused. Really? Sis and I would’ve boxed his ears and tortured him until he’d implicated his mates. But then, we’re not proper Christians.

Talking of which, in amongst the Harvest Festival displays, they’d gone the extra mile and built a little shrine with a candle for Mum to sit next to, so that Sis and I could gaze at her ashes (in a wooden box not a plastic urn) during the service. And instead of just any old prayer, an actual committal prayer was recited to officially send Mum on her way. It was quite moving.

Once or twice Sis and I thought Mum was going to climb out of her box, because the readings and prayers weren’t taken from the Authorised Version of the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer but some 21st-Century dumb-down. And while I sang lustily We Plough The Fields and Scatter, I didn’t know the other two hymns. One of them was something like Who Put the Colours In the Rainbow. I leaned over to Sis and whispered Who put the bop in the bop shoo bop shoo bop. We had difficultly stifling our ‘teenage’ giggles. 

After the service, Hubby reappeared and drove us to Skinburness where we parked the car in the hotel carpark but the Victorian landmark, where we used to stay when we were very young, had been demolished a couple of years ago. The site is ripe for development. Where’s a planning application when you want one?

We walked along the path between the marshes and the gorse and got to where we thought Grune Point was. It’s a long spit of land breaking off from the marshes and rolling into the Solway Firth. It shifts around a bit because of the stormy weather, and we’ve never been sure exactly when we’ve arrived. This time, pretty confident we were thereabouts, we chose a spot on the beach where Mum could gaze at Criffel across the water, except it was a bit windy and she flew off in the opposite direction. We liked to think that’s because when we scattered Dad, we’d been a wee bit further north and she was now trying to find him.

Quick lunch in a Silloth café, where all the female staff seemed to have the hots for Hubby (perhaps it was his southern accent) then we took a smaller box of Mum’s ashes to the churchyard where her parents are buried, and sprinkled her at the base of the headstone and plonked some silk flowers (we couldn’t find fresh) in the flower holder.

We also placed some flowers on the adjacent grave where Mum’s brother’s in-laws are buried. Talking of whom, we had coffee with him – 94 years young and bright as a button – and one of our cousins in a Keswick hotel the next day before heading home. Hubby sat stoically as I reminisced about how an ex-boyfriend used to chef at this hotel but we preferred to drink in the hotel bar across the road.

So that’s the end of that episode of our lives, apart from the few ashes we’ve kept back. One day we'll take then to Castle Menzies and scatter them in the grounds where, it’s rumoured, Mum’s great-grandfather chopped down trees and her grandmother was rude to the Laird’s wife.