A month rarely goes by without a funeral these days. It’s disconcerting and sad, leaving gaps in one’s family and friendship circles, leaving questions in one’s mind about what might come next, what has gone before, and what on earth the secret of life might be. To be honest, it’s not easy, and I look back and wish that I had been more conscious of these concerns when my mother was moving through this stage of her life. And yet it is nature’s way that one is often in mid-life when parents age, and mid-life is probably the most stretching and demanding period of life’s journey: a moment where one needs to thrive in a career and yet be present and loving enough for partner and children. For me, it was a period when I was setting up my coaching business, Positiveworks, at the same time as attempting to be there enough for my sons plus endeavouring to help clients navigate their own priorities and balance of life. I remember all this as being both challenging and exhilarating.
Last month I sat quietly, with three friends, at a memorial service celebrating the life of a schoolfriend we had known some sixty years previously. We had not seen much of her since we left school, knew little of her adult life. She had ended up an actuary, we learnt, a partner in her firm, braving her way through the stereotypical beliefs of the 1960s-early 70s, that women would be expected to make the coffee, become a secretary or nurse.
As the registrar told the story of our friend’s life, she described the school we had shared, Cranborne Chase, as “progressive and Bohemian” and we listened, exchanged glances, reflected. Three women, when we thought about it, who had done more with our lives than any teacher had ever expected, for expectations were so incredibly low of women of our generation.
Sitting there, hearing about our friend, took us back down the journey of our lives, images and emotions unfolding behind us, stage by stage in our minds. Each of us had known untimely deaths close to our heart. This death, of another of our peers, could not be said to be close to our hearts exactly but more an intimation of mortality. Who would be next from our year group? For it was only last year that there was a reunion and two days later one of our number had fallen down the stairs and died. Is God playing a game of Agatha Christie with us? Are we supposed to guess who will be next?
The notes of the Schubert piano piece, played in our friend’s honour, drew all three of us back through the decades of our lives, and for me I thought about how each phase has required a reinvention of myself – from schoolgirl, to working woman, to wife, to mother, to divorce, to business owner, empty-nesting, dating, writing and now to that most precious experience of being a grandmother.
As the notes danced around the room, we were transported back to our schooldays, to the elegant assembly hall at Wardour Castle. There we metaphorically sat once more, surrounded by portraits of the Arundell family, with the tall windows looking out on the Wiltshire countryside. Here we had spent many hours listening to our Director of Music, Harrison Birtwhistle, play some innovative, some might say discordant, compositions. We had enjoyed concerts every weekend, perhaps a choral piece or a string quartet, oft times played by fellow students, occasionally visited by eminent musicians such as Julian Bream, or Peter Maxwell Davies. For it was a musical school, for sure. How lucky we were.
As our minds drifted back, we became, once more, those teenage girls, whose essence rests still just beneath our skin, the music taking us back down the years to the Palladian mansion, the rickety beds in cold dormitories, meeting boys at Old Wardour Castle, smoking in the rhododendrons, taking a bus to our brother school, Bryanston, for choir, a dance, or science, the freedom we enjoyed, the giggles and friendship. Afterwards, we shared the memories that had been stirred: being allowed to watch Top of the Pops in the Library on a Friday evening, a visit from the Liverpool poets, a walk with the poet Stevie Smith. In the background of our lives, of course, was the all-pervasive Beatlemania of the times, running away to see the Stones, marching against the bomb in fear of nuclear extinction under Russia’s continuous threat, questioning the pros and cons of Communism.
We remembered waving goodbye to our mothers at Waterloo Station that first term, with no idea what to expect at the end of that train journey. Then waving goodbye to one another that last term of July 1967 with no idea how life would unfold, knowing only that we were supposed to work “until” we found a husband and got married. There was little mention of career or profession.
We had shared five formative years together and yet, meeting again, knew little detail of what had become of those in our year group, what each had made of our ‘one wild and precious life’ as Mary Oliver describes it, what life had meant to us individually, nor how much joy or sadness had been experienced. What we did now consider, though, through nervous laughter, was what we might wish to make of the next stage of the journey of our lives, the end stage, and what kind of reinvention of ourselves might be required. We also wondered how bossy, or not, we might choose to be with our offspring about what our own Memorial Service should constitute – but hopefully that won’t be for a few more years yet!
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