Lady in the Van

the undertakers to arrange the funeral, and the manager apologises for their response when I had originally phoned. A woman had answered, saying:
    “What exactly is it you want?”
    Not thinking callers rang undertakers with a great variety of requests, I was nonplussed. Then she said briskly:
    “Do you want someone taking away?”
    The undertaker explains that her seemingly unhelpful manner was because she thought my call wasn’t genuine.
    “We get so many hoaxes these days. I’ve often gone to collect a corpse only to have it open the door.”
9 May
    Miss Shepherd’s funeral is at Our Lady of Hal, the Catholic church round the corner. The service has been slotted into the ten o’clock Mass so that, in addition to a contingent of neighbours, the congregation includes what I take to be regulars: the fat little man in thick glasses and trainers who hobbles along to the church every day from Arlington House; several nuns, among them the 99-year-old sister who was in charge when Miss S. was briefly a novice; a woman in a green straw hat like an upturned plant pot who eats toffees throughout; and another lady who plays the harmonium in tan slacks and a tea-cosy wig. The server, a middle-aged man with white hair, doesn’t wear a surplice, just ordinary clothes with an open-necked shirt, and but for knowing all the sacred drill, might have been roped in from the group on the corner outside The Good Mixer. The priest is a young Irish boy with a big red peasant face and sandy hair and he, too, stripped of his cream-coloured cassock, could be wielding a pneumatic drill in the roadworks outside. I keep thinking about these characters during the terrible service and it reinforces what I have always known: that I could never be a Catholic because I’m such a snob and that the biggest sacrifice Newman made when he turned his back on the C of E was the social one.
    Yet kindness abounds. In front of us is a thin old man who knows the service backwards, and seeing we have no prayer-books, he lays down his own on top of his copy of the Sun , goes back up the aisle to fetch us some and hands them round, all the time saying the responses without faltering. The first hymn is Newman’s ‘Lead Kindly Light’ which I try and sing, while making no attempt at the second hymn, which is ‘Kum Ba Ya’. The priest turns out to have a good strong voice, though its tone is more suited to ‘Kum Ba Ya’ than Newman and J.B. Dykes. The service itself is wet and wandering, even more so than the current Anglican equivalent, though occasionally one catches in the watered-down language a distant echo of 1662. Now, though, arrives the bit I dread, the celebration of fellowship, which always reminded me of the warm-up Ned Sherrin insisted on inflicting on the studio audience before Not so much a programme , when everyone had to shake hands with their neighbour. But again the nice man who fetched us the prayer-books shames me when he turns round without any fuss or embarrassment and smilingly shakes my hand. Then it is the Mass proper, the priest distributing the wafers to the 99-year-old nun and the lady with the plant pot on her head, as Miss S. lies in her coffin at his elbow.
    Finally there is another hymn, this one by the (to me) unknown hymnodist Kevin Norton, who’s obviously reworked it from his unsuccessful entry for the Eurovision Song Contest; and with the young priest acting as lead singer and the congregation a rather subdued backing group, Miss Shepherd is carried out.
    The neighbours, who are not quite mourners, wait on the pavement outside as the coffin is hoisted onto the hearse.
    “A cut above her previous vehicle,” remarks Colin H.; and comedy persists when the car accompanying the hearse to the cemetery refuses to start. It’s a familiar scene and one which I’ve played many times, with Miss S. waiting inside her vehicle as well-wishers lift the bonnet, fetch leads and give it a jump start. Except this time she’s dead.
    Only A. and I and Clare, the ex-nurse who lately befriended Miss S., accompany the body, swept over Hampstead Heath at a less than funereal pace, down Bishop’s Avenue and up to the St Pancras Cemetery, green and lush this warm sunny day. We drive beyond the scattered woods to the furthest edge where stand long lines of new gravestones, mostly in black polished granite. Appropriately, in view of her lifelong love of the car, Miss S. is being buried within sight and sound of the North Circular