Ashes to Ashes

"That's the Vale of Trent" my elder brother solemnly announced as we looked out across the valley which spread itself below the hilltop village where my father was born and where my mother and father had been married, almost sixty years ago.

The nimbo-cumulus clouds, some threatening imminent rain, filled the massive sky which was the impressive backdrop to the fields which lay, like a cottage hand-woven quilt, beneath the glowering skies. Fields where my father had played, ridden ponies bareback, hunted rabbits and brought home food for the family table, and cowered below German Luftwaffe bombers during the course of a lifetime of visits here.

The fields stood behind the barbed wire fence and through the rustic gate at the end of the road where my dad, Walter William, was born in 1934. Coleby hilltop was the entrance to his field of dreams, or at least to the fields where he could escape the harsh reality of his family and their life of near-but-not-quite sufficiency.

Below, in the verdant valley, were the many pathways and copses where he had escaped the village schoolmistress. She, who had a drawer full of specially fashioned switches with which to beat the hands of recalcitrant students such as my father, who after breaking into the same drawer destroyed them all by burning them in her stove before taking refuge on the roof of the school. The copses where he had discovered his first swarm of bees which he had returned home with in a cardboard box and founded his first hive and thus begun his interest in apiary. Where he and Sam Butler had learned to smoke the butt ends of Woodbine cigarettes, scavenged from outside the blacksmith's where they had hung around long enough for my dad to have learned the skills of making wrought iron and for converting the bullet cases left behind during the Army's mobilisation into cigarette lighters.

These fields, whereupon my father had made his last wish to be scattered as ashes, by his family, when he died.

I had been for Sunday lunch with my mother, brother, sister, and her two children at a local pub where, in spite of a wait for the pre-booked table and a small altercation with the barman over the non-arrival of my drink - and a heated dispute over whether or not he had charged for it - we had managed to calm our nerves about the seriousness of our purpose. "You know you always wanted to take dad to the pub?" I asked my brother rhetorically. Having gained his attention I added "Well here he is!" handing the carrier bag across the table towards him. The confusion on his face was quickly replaced by amusement as he realised the bag contained the box, about the size of a shoebox and which contained what the label described as 'The earthly remains of Walter William …'.

It was surprisingly heavy (6lbs) to the extent that the undertaker had warned my sister about it and which I realised having now repeatedly handled it might easily cause physical strain if lifted carelessly. My brother laughed nervously but my teenage niece looked rather disturbed and I was forced to explain that the real reason we had taken 'Granddad' into the pub was to ensure that if anyone did steal my car, at least we wouldn't lose him. Lunch over, we left the pub and I drove my mother towards our date with destiny, further along the cliff top road where my dad grew up and to where my mother had come as a young woman, having met my father whilst both serving in the RAF, nevermore to return to the Welsh valleys of her own origin.

The conversation we shared was interrupted by the choking sensation which we had both been experiencing since my dad died six months previously from a ruptured Aorta, the direct result of a lifetime of cigarette smoking, to which my father had directed himself uninterrupted for over 60 years of his life. Born into an age which held no prejudice for the voracious consumption of the evil weed, dad had puffed his way through literally millions of Park Drives and Woodbines before a very lengthy relationship with Embassy (the red packet) which had furnished parts of our house through their coupon and catalogue reward scheme. This eventually matured into a dalliance with Benson and Hedges which was ultimately replaced, at my suggestion, with the more economical - if no less hazardous - roll-your-own option, culminating in many thousands of Rizla wrapped Golden Virginia and Samson 'coffin-nails' as he would prosaically describe them.

My mother, herself a part-time smoker for many years, had stopped in her early fifties, but only after my father had suffered his first heart-attack. This resulted in him living a somewhat limited existence from his early fifties onwards where, in spite of his great energy and enterprise in business, he had required my brother's enlistment as a business partner to make good his own practical and visionary genius, which continued to support the family, despite his failing vitality, for a further 25 years.

My brother and I were also smokers of some vigour; my brother preferring cigars, I having experimented with cigarettes, pipes and finally becoming a roll-your-own expert. I had struggled and made successive attempts and subsequent failures to quit, sometimes lasting years at-a-time, but I was at the time of my father's death smoking quite heavily. My dad's last words to myself and my brother, before he was wheeled off to the operating theatre where urgent surgery proved inadequate against the years of self-abuse still rang in my ears. "It's too late for me, but not for you and your brother ... yet!"

It took me three and-a-half months after his passing to act, but by the time we drove him to his final destination, I was clean. I hadn't smoked for over a month. There was no ash on my clothing or in my car. Honestly dad! Mum, who had spent the months since my father's death trying to erase the residue of tar and stench of the agent which had robbed her of her lifetime companion, had herself suffered from the toxic fumes, long after she had herself quit, by passively smoking my dad's. Ironically, and rather dramatically, she had herself just been in hospital where the effects of this and her denied grief had resulted in her experiencing heart failure, leaving her with angina and many similar symptoms to those which had finally overcome dad.

No longer able to climb the stairs to the upstairs bedroom, she now slept in a single bed in what had formerly been my father's office, and where he had consumed many hundreds of thousands of the 'fags' as he would call them, that had reduced both of their lives to the box of ashes we now carried in the foot well of my car. I remembered how, as he sat poring over the accounts of one, or another, of his business ventures, he would tap the butt of his cigarette on one of the ferrules of the grey ashtray, the ‘demon’ ashtray, which featured four spokes - two ‘imps’ (fallen angels) and two channels on which to rest one's cigarette - before curling all four of his right-hand fingers and thumb into a 'cage' in which the fingers and tips of the thumb caressed the yellowed end of the filter. He would then place the very end of the overheating filter between his lips and suck greedily upon it as its embers glowed angrily from within the 'cage' which, as the white paper disappeared left only the brown flecked tip. This was then hastily positioned over the ashtray before it could allow the remaining glow to deposit its coal onto the carpet or, by burning the filter itself, create an acrid stench unpleasant even to the heaviest of smokers. The 'art' of smoking had and has many subtle rituals, and I had learned nearly all of them from my father, a high-priest of smoking.

The cortege of cars arrived in the narrow street where my father and his family of six had pressed together in the cottage which featured an open fire, and coal burning kitchen stove but had no running water. I walked past the street water pump which had not only ensured he was late for school every washing day, as his young hands and arms had strained to fill and carry the buckets for the copper on the stove, in the remorseless cold of a winter’s morning, but which had also accounted for the life of my grandfather’s first wife in an outbreak of typhoid poisoning during the 1920’s.I carried the weighty box under one arm as my mother linked her forearm into the inside crook of my elbow.

My sister, and her two teenage children, arrived first at the gate from which she hurriedly retreated having discovered a grey dappled pony on the other side of the fence. She was, to my surprise, somewhat disconcerted by this inquisitive creature’s appearance. My surprise was based on my sister’s former love of horse riding, a passion she shared with both my father and I. I couldn’t quite understand how she had allowed this animal, who stood about the same height as me, to spook her so completely when, like me she had shared my dad’s love of horsemanship which had taken us so far and on so many exciting dashes across country, but nevertheless here she was refusing to share a field with this admittedly flighty animal.

I strode into the field rather more confidently than I felt, and tried to assuage the animal’s familiarity by first stroking its muzzle, and when it attempted to bite me, an act not missed by my once again retreating sister, slapping its neck and pushing it boldly backwards. We stood around a huge concrete plinth into which was set a manhole cover giving access to its unknown purpose and depth upon which the pony now reared both of its front legs and placed its hooves, thereby dominating this peculiar scene from which my sister, accompanied by her slightly less fearful daughter, scuttled back and forth.

Looking around for some alternative solution to this impasse I decided the next field along the hilltop, about 70-80 metres distance, might be preferable, provided my mother, with her respiratory difficulties and angina, was capable of walking such a distance and that, should we also find some way past the apparent obstacle of the stile between the two, could be coaxed and supported into making the return journey. The pony, now intent on eating the remains of my father, continued its rude intrusions, and succeeded in making the decision for us all.

With some fuss we made the traverse across the hilltop, as first the wind blew and then the inevitable rain began to fall upon our distressed funereal party.Luckily mum squeezed between the dry stone wall and the stiles barbed wire as the notion of lifting her was both undignified and perhaps impractical given her bulk. We assembled on the muddy path as the wind howled into our faces, threatening any attempt at scattering Walter William with the inevitability of him decorating the windows of the nearby bungalows and cottages. I opened the box and revealed within a red plastic jar, not unlike those which abounded upon the shelves of shopkeepers during my childhood which were clear plastic and contained the multitudinous varieties of boiled sweets such as sherbet lemons, acid and pear drops and Jamaican Limes, all sold by the quarter pound weight. Inside was a creamy-grey residue of granules and powder, the ‘ashes’ and earthly remains of my dear old dad. Mum was the first to take a handful, and as she released them she exclaimed “I let you go”!

We all took our turns, decided on seniority to take a handful and as we released this into the fierce wind stating our parting wish, mine being to thank him for the life I have. The wind, now whipped up into a frenzy, and in spite of our attempts to release each handful low to the ground, as advised by the undertakers, caused the ashes to fly all around us, coating our clothes, once black, now grey, and even getting into our hair, eyes and mouths.

The rain hurtled down and we were possessed to walk further down hill where now only my brother, my young nephew and I took command of the task which was to scatter almost all of my dad’s remains on the fields of his childhood and youth. I finally assumed full responsibility, throwing great handfuls and then scattering directly from the mouth of the receptacle great swathes of granules and clouds of powdered dust, taking care to preserve sufficient to satisfy mum’s request to retain a small amount to fertilise the garden at home. I recalled aloud to my brother and nephew how the Nazis had used the ashes from the crematoriums of Auschwitz to lay paths upon which they symbolically would stride.

Soon, as the wind continued to blow father in all directions, and as the accompanying rain washed him into our skin, hair and clothes, our task was completed. By now my mum, sister and niece had retired from the hillside and were leaving the field, still pestered by the grey pony, and as my brother and I regained the pathway we were confronted by a solitary jogger, wet and sweating from his exertions, and whose path we had inadvertently blocked as we rejoined the muddy walkway.

He turned out to be someone that I not only knew personally but a local chiropodist of some repute who had, in the last months of my dad’s life, taken some professional interest in his feet and toe-nails! Our brief conversation was of course interrupted by the unwelcome attentions of our skittish equine friend who butted us peremptorily out of the field.

The wind immediately fell. The rain ceased, and the dark clouds gave way to sunlight which spread across the valley as if someone had drawn away a dark cloak. Turning away from the transformed landscape to check my mother’s whereabouts and wellbeing I was astonished to see, describing a majestic arc above the Norman church spire under which she had married my father, a beautiful rainbow, garishly exhibited against the blue-grey background of the sky.No-one took a photograph, and little was said other than to ensure everyone in the family group had witnessed this unlikely yet timely transformation.

Dust to dust. Ashes to ashes I thought silently, adding secretly ‘funk to funky, we know Major Tom’s a junkie, strung out on heaven’s high, living an all-time low’ … the lyrics to a David Bowie song popular with my brother and myself as adolescents and despised by my father as ‘absolute rubbish’. But then we never knew his favourite song was Bohemian Rhapsody, until after his death.

After driving mum home and having a cup of tea together, she decided to have a little moan about him. He certainly was stubborn. I delayed having a shower until much later that day when I watched carefully but observed no visible trace, as the water from my hair ran down the drain. Particles of him will always remain. I’ll never be able to completely wash him away.