1987: Nearly The Abyss

     When something like this happens with such swiftness it emphasises just how fragile and fleeting life is. There one minute, gone the next. With father in law it was quite different; a merciful release for him and us from the slow, lingering deterioration. Father in law’s death was far more draining.

     For me, I can’t say the loss of my father was particularly difficult or traumatic. There’d never been that much communication and closeness. He’d been a distant, stern figure when I was a boy, so that as I grew up the gap grew wider. It’s true to say that the only conversations we ever had or moments of close contact were to do with football and the games we saw at Burnley. I should be grateful for that I suppose. To this day I still have an image of journeys in the car on a Sunday to see relations in Newton Le Willows and I’d read him the report of the match as we drove along.
 
     The ashes were scattered (eventually) in a small graveyard up on the hills at Mankinholes. The old chapel had been demolished and all that remained was half an acre of worn and weathered headstones.  What was the Sunday School was a private house. We added his name to that of my grandparents on the family headstone. The hamlet of Mankinholes is a remnant of a long-gone age when a small collection of stone cottages would endure harsh winters and the moorland winds that swept the hills. Traders brought their line of ponies laden with goods along the pack horse tracks and carried away the cloth that the villagers had produced on their simple hand looms. My great and great, great grandparents had endured a similar life on the opposite side of the valley at Blackshawhead.  This was not quite Wuthering Heights but almost, a wild and windswept place where, when the wind howled and the rain came out of black and thunderous skies, you struggled to see your hand in front of your face. But, on a beautiful, blue-sky summer’s day with skylarks singing overhead and curlews in the fields, there was nowhere quite as beautiful.
 
     The ashes in fact had remained in the back of the car for several weeks until we had the headstone finally sorted. It felt quite strange with him in the back and there was one day when I put the urn on a cushion on the front seat next to me so that he could see better. He always did enjoy car journeys. I did the same with the skeletons once that I used to borrow from the School’s Museum Service in Leeds. This was a place deep in the bowels of one of the civic buildings that was crammed with models and stuffed things that could be used in schools. I had a couple of members of staff that I would love to have seen stuffed. Anyway, I used to borrow a life-sized skeleton (plastic) every now and then and always enjoyed driving through Leeds with it on the front seat of the car. Sometimes I put a Burnley scarf round its neck. There was always somebody, when I stopped at traffic lights or a pedestrian-crossing, whose mouth would drop wide open and nudge the person next to them when they saw it. I’d watch people on buses who could see into the car and the looks on their faces......

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