Saying goodbye. April 8th 2010

I wish you could have seen the church yesterday, dad. When we walked in behind your casket which was covered with beautiful red roses, for Lancashire, bright gerberas, and spring flowers, it was moving to see so many people.

Not bad for someone who was 91!

And we had your favourite psalm, 121, "I will lift up my eyes to the hills".

The hymns you wanted were all there.

And as I stood and sang, I thought,

"What a privilege to have had you for my dad"

I was speaking to someone last night on the telephone, when we had arrived home. The daughter of my mum and dad's closest friends.

She said, "I have been to a few funerals lately that have been very depressing, but this made us smile, laugh, and remember him as he was. It was such a lovely tribute to your dad. He was so well thought of by so many people."

It was indeed a celebration of a life well lived.

And when we went to lay you in the ground alongside my mother, looking out down the valley, and surrounded by the hills, we were all very touched when 5 of your carers from the Residential Home, and the two managers, came along, in amongst the family and friends who gathered for the committal . They all loved you, and enjoyed your stories and said you were a wonderful man. It was the carers' day off, and they made a special journey for you.

They brought a teddy bear and a Burnley scarf, which we placed alongside you in the earth.

Having dropped in a red rose, it was time to leave you there. That earthly part of you.

You had no fear of death, knowing it would be a fulfilment of your faith in the power of the Resurrection.

And I quote from the Message version of the Bible which puts this very succinctly and bluntly!

"And face it-if there's no resurrection for Christ, everything we told you about is smoke and mirrors, and everything you've staked your life on is smoke and mirrors.

Not only that but we would be guilty of telling you a string of barefaced lies about God, all these affidavits we passed on to you verifying that God raised Christ up- sheer fabrications if there is no resurrection.........

...........But the truth is Christ has been raised up............

Death swallowed up by triumphant life!!"

I will miss you dad terribly, but you are home now, all struggles over.

Love you.xx

Thanks For the Memories, dad.

Well, dad, I never thought that you would leave us all before you were 100 years old.

As I spoke to our oldest member at our church here yesterday morning, to tell him you would not make it after all, he had tears in his eyes.

I know that you and he had decided that you would celebrate being 100 one way or another. Various hilarious suggestions having been made!

He is now 96. And you would have reached 92 later this year.

You always made him laugh, and he and his wife always asked about you.

That seems to be a recurring theme. These are some of the things I have received in the last few days:

"Always interested in people........great raconteur.......always cheerful, and always

had a story to tell.........had my mum and dad in stitches, and I can still visualise them all laughing now, never a dull moment................... lucky to have had a such a lovely caring and funny uncle, the best, and a privilege............

Your dad had a full life, was greatly entertaining, and enjoyed company, will be greatly missed."

We miss him, warts and all. Another silence, where there was his voice at the end of the telephone, answering "Mr Smith" Another empty place.......

Another end of an era. A passing of a different age.........

A multitude of impressions in my mind.................the clash of wills between us........his stubborn black and white views at times, his pigheadedness!! Yes, but he was loyal to a fault, determined and courageous in his last couple of years, as his health and age took their toll.

I was there, in his beloved Valley, in my mind, the other evening, smelling the damp of the old stone walls on the hillsides, hearing the wind, looking at the lights twinkling down in the town, and along the roads which snake their way through until they reach the outskirts, where they climb up and then disappear out of sight eventually dropping down to the other side of the boundaries.

One into Yorkshire, one into Burnley, and one meandering along the Valley floor towards Manchester, the other into Accrington.

He never wanted to leave Rossendale, and his beloved hills. He and mum chose their place in the local cemetary and it comforted him to know he would be buried there.

My mother is already there, since 1990.

So, dad, we are going to say our very final goodbyes on Thursday this week, April 8th. and you will have your wish to have the service at St Mary's Church.

I must digress here and tell a very well-known story amongst the family which sums up how dad could be at times. He had been in his life time, an active member of three different churches, (not all at the same time! ) spending some years at the local Baptist church after the death of my mother. When his sister died, he decided to go back to his roots, where his family had worshipped, been christened, married and died. His sister, (my aunt) and her family being regular attenders at St Mary's Church. And we ourselves were members there and married there before we moved South.

Some time after his sister's funeral service, dad went to see the vicar at that time and said he had decided to "Come back to St Mary's, and did the vicar mind? and "Oh, by the way was it alright for him to have his own funeral service there?"

The vicar, David Parkin, who already knew dad, said "Certainly Mr Smith, " and then got out a small notebook and asked him "When would you like it?"

Dad, of course had been outwitted, but told the story with great relish, laughing at the telling!!

And I dreamt about dad last week, in the midst of all the multitude of things which had to be done, as I stayed with my cousins.

I dreamt that I was with dad once again, walking along the track to the local farm, and for some obscure reason I noticed he had cut himself when shaving!

It was a beautiful day, and the wind was stirring the leaves in the trees, in the warmth of the sun.

I asked him "What are you doing here?"

"I've been doing all this organising for you to have your funeral. What shall I do now?"

" Don't cancel it" said dad, " You all go ahead and enjoy it! The doctor says my heart is fine" !!!

Well, dad, to me that just about sums up how you were........and on Thursday, we will go ahead, as you wished when you first asked David some years ago.

Dad's Obituary in the Rossendale Free Press

Leslie Smith

APRIL 01, 2010

A LOCAL government worker and Free Press contributor, Mr Leslie Smith, latterly of Haslingden Hall Residential Home, died on Sunday March 28 after a short illness aged 91.

Born in Rawtenstall, he worked for many years in local government, serving in senior positions in the rates offices in both Bury and then Manchester up to his retirement.

He served in the Royal Army Pay Corps in London during the Blitz, before joining the Signals Regiment and landing in Normandy on D-Day.

Married to Ethel in 1942, he was a widower for the last 20 years of his life.

He loved to write and was a regular contributor to the Rossendale Free Press under the pseudonym of Owd Nick. A series of his short stories was read on Radio Blackburn and he had a contribution published in The Bedside Guardian.

He had a lifelong interest in Lancashire dialect and was an active member of the Edwin Waugh Society and the Lancashire Authors Association, writing many short stories himself and becoming a speaker at various societies in Rossendale.

He served as church warden at St Paul’s Constable Lee for many years, then was a regular attender at Kay Street Baptist Church and latterly at St Mary’s Church, Rawtenstall.

He leaves daughters Vivien and Shirley, sons-in-law Stephen and Neil, grandsons James, Jonathan and Alan and their partners, nieces and nephew and many good friends.

His funeral will be at St Mary’s Church, Rawtenstall on Thursday April 8 at 1pm, followed by interment at Rawtenstall Cemetery.

Family flowers only. Donations welcome for the Guide Dogs for the Blind Association and the Stroke Association, via the funeral director Dawn Johnson for Fred Hamer Funeral Services, Rawtenstall.

To sleep.......perchance to dream....

What is it about not being able to sleep?

When my routine, such as it is! is disturbed, or I come back again from up North where I have spent 3 nights in another place, I find it hard to settle down.......

Trying to get to sleep is an art in itself........so many thoughts whirl round my head...........in random succession......

I have always been a light sleeper and have resorted in the past to putting the bedside clock in a drawer....sometimes wrapped in tights!

It's a bit like the Princess and The Pea but with a different slant!

I am not like my cat who can sleep anywhere...........and cats even have a poem written about it!

Cats sleep anywhere

Any table, any chair

Top of piano, window ledge

In the middle, on the edge

Open drawer, empty shoe

Anybody’s lap will do

Fitted in a cardboard box

In a cupboard with your frocks

Anywhere, they don’t care

Cats sleep anywhere

Then my dear Timelord husband can sleep at the drop of a hat.........oh that I could!

When I was small, I did not sleep then either, keeping my parents awake, or waking them very early!! When apparently my dad asked the doctor about it, he told him I had "too much nervous energy".

I woke my parents one morning about 6.00am or so, to ask them what a brontosaurus was! I had a full set of Arthur Mee's encyclopaedias, and I loved the pictures and stories.I got the answer I was expecting!!

I read at an early age, and I had the joy of teaching Matt to read before he went to school at 5 years old.

Schools in the area then, near Portsmouth, had 3 intakes a year, so he went just after his 5th birthday in April.

Not all children are ready to read at the same rates.

But I digress.......

Sleep.......according to Shakespeare........"knits up the ravelled sleeve of care" quote from Macbeth.

"Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care,

The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast"

I love the thought of sleep being the balm of hurt minds........ nothing better than a refreshing night's sleep, a natural sleep, which comes creeping in like a wave and closes over our heads.

I wish....................!

I had to take sleeping tablets for a short time around Christmas, as the doctor felt I wouldn't cope well without them after a very stressful few months.

I would take one, only to wake 4 hours later in the small hours, back to where I began!

It's interesting to decide what to listen too in the wee small hours........

I have a digital radio walkman, so I don't disturb my slumbering hubby.

Radio 2 is too stimulating,

Radio 3 too full on, as I get involved in the music and then am wide awake!

Radio 4 .........no

Radio 7.........well the jury's out on this one, as it serves it's purpose if I really cannot sleep and there is a story, or classic serial.........trouble is then, when I get to 6.00am I am too tired to think about another day!

Jazz FM same as Radio 2!!

So, here I am, sun pouring in on a beautiful day, after a night of sleeping and waking.........

Here I go..............................and the first thoughts I always have are always the same.........that will never change.

Love you Matt. It's one of " Your" days. Glorious sunshine, and blue skies, birds singing, and maybe, just maybe a promise of spring?

New beginnings.

Last July we had a visitor from Down Under. Brisbane, to be precise, and it just so happened that at the time it was like summer!

Tim, pictured here with Stephen, had come for an interview in Birmingham for a job with Scripture Union. http://www.scriptureunion.org.uk/YouthEncounter/41589.id

It is as though a wheel had come full circle as Alan, our younger son, went to work with SU in Queensland in 2003 for just under a year. He stayed with Tim, who was SE Queensland co-ordinator. Tim along with his wife and 2 and a half year old daughter, arrived yesterday in London.

They drive to Brum today. Pancake Day.

Pancake Day was the day we arrived in Australia in 2004 to stay with Tim and see Alan, for a few weeks. Alan made us pancakes that evening!! I have photos of him tossing them in the air! A family tradition here, and also nationwide.

The job Tim will be involved in is one which Matt would have loved. It is promoting better relationships between Muslims and Christian youth.

he would've been so excited about this project!

So for us there is a sense of delicious continuity here.

A kind of what goes round, comes round!

But Tim and family have left beautiful sunny blue-skied warm Brisbane for the biting cold of this English winter, which has seemed to last and last this year.

A lot to get used to.

A life lived outdoors for a life of warmer clothing and central heating, and lets face it, in Tim's own words yesterday

" London is so cold and grey and gloomy today - a long way from the blue, bright heat of Brisbane. Glad to be here and gearing up for drive to Birmingham tomorrow."

And this morning, it was lighter earlier, and I watched as the sun began to creep over the horizon through the trees. Eventually pouring in through the bedroom window.

Blue sky day for Tim.

I heard a blackbird sing................and I thought, well he thinks spring is around the corner, even though we cannot see much evidence of it yet.

It was encouraging on a day when I'm streaming with the cold virus kindly given to me by my Timelord husband!

Stops me feeling too sorry for myself.

And hopefully I will be able to make myself pancakes at teatime!

Timelord is not a fan!!

Looking back, looking forward........ Birthdays February 2010

The beginning of February for us is one of a flurry of
birthdays.
Friends and family. Six in all from the 4th to the 18th.
What to buy? What to send?
This resulted in us going to the Touchwood Centre in Solihull, early in the month, for a "once in a blue moon" shop!
We are not shoppers, preferring other pastimes.
Timelord calls the place Torchwood, I wonder why?! He really thought it was so named! Must run in his Timelord veins.
It was an absolutely gloriously sunny afternoon, but also extremely cold.
The sunset afterwards in the cold blue sky, just beginning to have a sprinkling of stars, was amazing.
It's hard to believe that this was our 4th year of birthdays without Matt.
The first of those February's was spent in stressful anticipation of the trial at Stafford Crown Court of the lorry driver who was instrumental in the deaths of Matt and Chris. Later in the month we scattered Matt's ashes at the Lizard.
It also snowed very hard then too.
Seemed to match all our moods.
But this year we actually enjoyed ourselves and laughed a lot and had a lot of fun. It was the first time in 4 years where there was a sense of life returning. It was the same at Christmas and New Year. A new sensation. A sense of, and I almost daren't say it, anticipation of what the year can bring, instead of another year knowing we had to somehow go from January to December, and then heave a sigh of relief........

We seem to have been in a land like Narnia, where it was "always winter and never Christmas".
Well, I think I can sense a thaw.............
This new sensation brings it own peculiar thoughts.
As Matt is frozen in time, and we move forwards, and our lives pick up a new rhythm, is it as though we forget?
No, and he would have been pleased that we enjoyed our birthdays.
I have discovered that writing about him, talking about him, looking at his photo, and listening to him talk on the videos we have of him, we take him with us.
I know I felt at first that in time he would somehow fade, and I would have to work hard to cling on to him.
But I can see him as large as life, laughing, smiling, pensive, and I carry him in my heart.
Yes, I missed him phoning me on my birthday and saying "Happy Birthday mum" and going out together as a complete family for a meal. I will always, always miss him. That pain is forever.
And as Matt once wrote on a postcard he sent to us, we will see him again, in time.

End of an Era December 2nd 2009

End of an era.

None of us were to know that last Christmas would be my dad’s final Christmas in his old home, before he moved into residential care in April this year.
I was staying with him for a week before he came to us eventually on December 21st
But he had flu and did not really remember much about Christmas after that at all.
I had taken a small artificial Christmas tree, and lights, up there with me to have some sense of festive cheer, and hung his cards on the wall. My mum loved Christmas and she would shop for weeks, squirreling things away, saying it would “come in handy” or stockpiling nuts, dates and fruit! boxes of biscuits and other treats.
Each time she went down to the small town she would climb back up the hill again with loaded bags of assorted sizes, unless she came up on the bus, which just stopped a short distance from the door. It was a single decker serving the three estates, which are situated on three sides of the valley. A circular route.
So, we could time our visit to my aunt’s by catching the bus as it was on its way to the next estate. It would meander its way down to the centre of town and then stop to disgorge the passengers, whilst those of us staying on, paid again for the next stage.

And now, I drive those routes myself. I never thought when I was younger that I would live in the Midlands let alone drive a car. Why is it that when we are older, life seemed less complicated then? It wasn’t of course. To the young, who have the wonderful security of two loving parents, and a welcoming home, as we did, some of the struggles which went on in people’s lives would pass unnoticed, until we became of an age to understand it more fully.

Life in its rawness had not touched us then, that was to happen later.

But, to go back to the beginning, which is about dad’s old home.

Yesterday, 2nd December, it was handed over to its next occupants, who happen to live in the same road and have bought it for their daughter. We like that sense of continuity. Dad knows the family.
That indeed is the end of an era, but I began to think back through the years we all lived there, having moved from a small terraced house further up the valley. I was 13 and my sister 8 years old.
It felt so light and spacious and we had a garden. I loved the garden, and it was a positive suntrap at the back in the summer, on days when the sun shone!
Dad began to grow his roses, which he nurtured and tended. They rewarded him with glorious blooms. Mum liked bedding plants and we would have antirrhinums, petunias, begonias and tubs of splashing colour.
After my mum died in August 1990, when the roses were as beautiful as I’ve ever known them, dad still kept up with his gardening, when he could, and also with help from others. He had two hanging baskets at the front door each summer and tubs of bedding plants.
As he became unable to manage it was hard to watch the roses suffer.

So, a new address for him, and one where he feels “at home” and cared for so well.

But my memories are there in each room. Even the sound the various doors made. The glass vestibule door into the kitchen, the front door when it finally shut, which rattled the letterbox, and the garden gate, closing with the familiar metallic click.
If walls could speak, what conversations and dramas they would unfold!!
My old room on the front looked up the valley to the north. I could see the lights on the hillsides twinkling at night. On wet days often the hills would be shrouded in mist.
It is strange what springs to mind.
Snatches of moments in time,…………
I can see our kitchen on a Sunday morning as we came back from church, (further up the valley at that time) having walked either across the fields opposite or along the main road and up the hill.
My mum always had so many pans on the go at once, boiling cabbage, carrots, potatoes, (before roasting them,) and sometimes cauliflower, which I could take or leave(!) that the window would be open and if it was a nice day, the back door.
The smells of Sunday roast wafting outside.
We would always sit down together on a Sunday for roast dinner. And I still do not know anyone yet, who can make gravy quite like my mum’s! She made it using a Tupperware plastic beaker with a lid, to mix it first, a bit like she was shaking a cocktail!! Using the meat juices and flour.
After a lovely dinner there was always pudding. Sponge pudding or steamed pudding, apple pie, or a stomach filler of an apple suet steamed pudding!!

These steamed ones used to make the kitchen walls run with condensation! They were done in a steamer pan with a lid, sitting on top of a pan with boiling water on the go. It took for ever. But the end result was extremely satisfying.

My sister was good at cooking, and also at organisation. She went on to do an Hotel and Catering Course at College of FE. So, as you can imagine, two women in a kitchen is bad enough, three is a definite no go! And anyway, I freely admit it all mystified me. I liked being outside, or doing something else. I was often told I used to play the piano after Sunday lunch to avoid the washing up! I leave you to judge for yourselves.
Dad would ask me to play a tune, so I obliged!
It was a house where people popped in and were given a cup of tea. Or they would stop at the gate and chat, if either mum or dad was outside. Then they would be asked “Would you like a cup of tea?”
Friends came to visit. Relatives came to visit. Our friends came and were always given a real welcome and usually a massive tea!

It has been a happy house, even though it has seen some extremely sad times, and difficulties. My dad always said in the years he has lived there latterly, as he had found it harder to cope,
“I always know when I go in through the door and close it behind me, that I am safe. I’m back at home”.

The other week, as I was taking him back to his new home, after lunch out at a nearby pub, he suddenly said to me, when I told him we had reached the end of the road where his care home is situated
“We’re nearly back home then. “

I said I was glad he felt like that.
He said to me
“It’s home to me now, and I feel pampered to death in it” So, although there is sadness, there is a sense of peace for dad who has been able to move on.