My Mum died, on October 15th, which is why I haven’t been around for a while.

She was 83, a good age, and had had a fall which broke her leg, put her in an operation and she never quite recovered herself after that. The last few months at home had been getting increasingly difficult, she was beginning/was advancing into senility, losing the spark of her happy person and becoming a less kind individual, but as far as I know that can be quite common in the elderly.

When she had the fall (on my first night away in Budapest) she went into hospital, on to a care home and never got back home again. I have to say, both care home and hospital were good in terms of care but under-manned and over-stretched in terms of what they had to do.

I’m left supporting Dad who, understandably, is bereft. He’s lost his wife of 62 years, is juggling relief (that she is no longer suffering) and guilt (at feeling relief). He has a whole new life to adjust to. In one of those quirks of fate, I’m glad it happened this way round and so, too, would Mum be. She had a fraught relationship with some other people, and her suspicion would have been that if she were the survivor help might have been less happily offered. At least Dad, Grandad, has a harem happy to care for him and keep him occupied. I get time off, and don’t have to organise care homes, fees or intimate washing schedules around work and life in general.

Mum’s funeral is today, Tuesday, and I have the honour of presenting the Eulogy. Ten minutes to squeeze 83 years into and still keep it entertaining enough that the congregation smile and laugh. A big ask. I know not many of you will be there, but I hope you’ll indulge me if I share the Eulogy here. I think it captures Mum rather well.

I think I’ve got the nicest job there is available at a funeral: to present the eulogy.

From the Greek for ‘sweet words’, this is an opportunity for you to hear only the good, the best and the nicest about the dead person, My Mum.

It’s a positive, optimistic job. I get to act as a travel guide to Mum’s life, taking you through the parts you may not have realised existed, showing you the interesting corners that sometimes pass us by when we only know a person for a few hours a week, or for a few years in a whole life. It’s perhaps salutary to realise that there is no one now here present who knew Mum when she was born or, indeed, at any age less than 20. The glimpses I can show of her as a blonde, pigtailed tomboy are echoes of the stories that Mum and Nan both told me. I can only act as the voice for memories that are no longer stored here on earth. But I’m racing ahead.

I called myself a travel guide, and that’s what I intend to be, taking you on a whistlestop tour of Mum’s life, of Anne’s life. Let’s travel together, through the places and people that meant so much to her.

Mum’s story starts, surprisingly, in 1939 in Liverpool, in a department store, where her future parents, Leslie and Muriel, bought a rather thin, posh teddy bear, named Brian, in anticipation of the child they hoped to have. It took another two years before Brian finally got to meet the baby he belonged to.

Born in February 1941, Mum was a wartime baby and destined to be their only child. Her childhood years were spent in St Helens surrounded by cousins as during the war years they all lived in the same house in Laurel Road, with Mum’s maternal Grandmother. She barely remembered the day in 1944 when, aged three, her own mother sat her down to open the telegram that they hoped would be the good news of Grandad Leslie’s promotion. It wasn’t.

Which brings us to Bari, and the region of Puglia in Italy. Her Dad died there on his 29^th birthday, and rests there still in a Commonwealth war grave. Mum and Dad visited years later, and brought back photos of the grave. Mum was barely three when he died, and her world changed forever.

She was sent to Nursery a year before she was legally entitled to, and spent a lot of time, she told me, sat on the headteacher’s desk, almost literally a teacher’s pet. She attended schools in St Helens, Rainhill and Widnes, and hated maths although she loved English and scripture.

Mum’s childhood was happy, in parts. She loved her big cousin, Ronnie, and spent days hanging around after him. Ronnie and his friends said she was ‘alright, for a girl’, and she could climb the gate of the back alley as quickly as any of them… especially since they were usually being pursued by the Great Dane dog that guarded a workman’s yard nearby. She learned early that death is a part of life, losing her cousin, Jean, before she was ten. Mum said that was possibly her worst childhood memory.

Mum was a latch-key kid before it was fashionable and returned home every day to an empty and cold house. She had a dog, Beauty, who died too soon, but her real love was a blue budgerigar called Billy, who would call for her as she entered the house. Billy-go-out, and Billy-such-a-good-boy would echo round the house as she made the fire, cooked tea and waited for her Mother to return.

The early years obviously didn’t put Mum off school. In 1958 she went to Prescot, to C F Mot studying to be a primary school teacher. She spent free lunchtimes and afternoons at a little bar in Liverpool called The Cavern Club. It did good coffee, she said, and the music was alright. Apparently, it got packed a couple of years later when a small local band started performing regularly but by then Mum was in Longton’s Lane School, and teaching.

Back to Rainhill Hospital, and a January night in 1962. It was cold and a bit dismal, but Mum got dragged out by her cousin, Barbara, to a dance at Reeve Hall in the hospital. She nearly didn’t go because she’d left her eyeshadow palette in school, but she dug in her handbag and found a piece of blue chalk with which she hastily drew shadow on her eyelids, and set off as much to chaperone Barbara as for her own sake.

Enter a tall, dark Irishman that Mum said reminded her of Mr Rochester from Jane Eyre, Mum’s favourite book, or perhaps a little Sean Connery-ish. Whatever, he asked her to dance and she almost said no, but then Moon River came on, and she grudgingly agreed.

Now to the role that Hawaii plays in Anne’s story. When the tall, handsome Irish man asked her out on a date that Saturday, Anne again almost said no to Paddy…. Until he said Elvis was on in Blue Hawaii. She said yes, the date happened, the relationship started. Within a few months they were engaged and by October 1962, they were married.

I can’t decide whether the next place to take you should be Blackpool, where they honeymooned, or Cuba, and the Cuban Missile Crisis, which happened while they were on honeymoon. Mum always said that having children in the depth of the cold war was truly an example of hope in the face of dark places. Within seven years Anne and Paddy had four children: Andrew, in October 1963, Chris in November a year later, Me in May 1968 and Jon in December 1969.

Whiston Hospital next: Mum had several health issues and operations in her time, and most of them happened in Whiston. It is perhaps fitting that she died in Whiston Hospital in the end, having spent a lot of time there as both a patient and a teacher.

Next location: Armenia: the place where St Bartholomew was martyred, and St Bartholomew’s School was where Mum worked for part of the 60s and returned to work in the early 70s, and where she finished work once and for all in 1990. For the twenty-plus years she was there, Mum spent all bar one in Reception. She did once get asked by a parent whether if she passed some more exams she could ever teach older children. She was a very good teacher, and watching her in my teens and college years was excellent experience. Mum was passionate about reading, and about creating readers who loved reading. When she pushed for St Barts to be a pilot school for Oxford Reading Tree, nobody had ever heard of Biff, Chip and Kipper. Mum loved the work, and she loved knowing what her old pupils were up to.

After many holidays in the Uk especially in Devon, Germany was the first country Mum visited when we started going abroad in 1979, initially as part of our family holidays but increasingly as summer-long adventures with Dad in their freedom years: Mum and Dad went to anywhere that caught their attention and they could reach by caravan.

They went to France, for several years. Mum and Dad loved Lourdes, and the grotto, which Mum said is the most peaceful and spiritual place she knew on earth. They travelled to Santiago de Compostella, to Santander, to Carcassonne.  They took guided pilgrimages to Rome and Assisi, they travelled to Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Malta, to Spain, and of course to Ireland. They spent many holidays with family, in the UK and abroad, and loved spending time with their grandchildren.

Mum and Dad loved Omagh, in Ireland, where Dad is from, and the large family there so much, they went to as many family events as they could, always welcomed the family over here and even celebrated their 40^th wedding anniversary over there. Mum, having never had a large, close family of her own, loved spending time with Dad’s.

She loved having a larger than usual family, and welcomed all her children’s partners in with open arms. She laughingly used to say that Rent a Mob had arrived whenever we turned up at an event. Between parents, children, partners, grandchildren, in-laws and out-laws, we could number 30 easily. Out-laws, by the way, was her term for partners and their families before marriage. Peter’s Dad, Bill, heard her use it one day and from then onwards was proud to call himself Billy the Kid. She loved her family: husband, children, grandchildren and great grandchildren. She would probably have said her proudest days were spent with them: graduations, weddings, births.

She loved her grandchildren, Eve, Michael, Tim, Libby, Ruth, Helena, David, James, Josh, Sarah and Beth, and in her later years her great-grandchildren have been her absolute joy. Nobody who has visited recently could possibly get away without being told about Esther, Angus, Bobbie and Amos, where they were up to, what they did when they were in her house and how much she loved them. Mum loved children, and I can’t remember a meal, a trip, a holiday where Mum didn’t charm any child nearby. Even as her health declined, she still found time to smile and talk to babies and toddlers.

As Mum got older, her health got worse, and through the slow accretion of illness upon illness, her travels stopped. Covid, in 2020, had a massive effect on Mum and Dad’s ability to be adventurers, and the real-life story of Caravanning and careering across countries stopped.

But that didn’t stop them travelling inside their minds.

Afternoons with Mum and Dad became adventures in opal mining in Australia, Ice Road trucking in Canada and escaping to just about anywhere in the world. Mum loved watching quiz shows, and was good at them, too. She enjoyed reading, embroidery, knitting (until the arthritis bit in) and hoarding material for dressmaking and upholstery. She always had a project bag somewhere next to her seat, and always a plan to do something else.

The last few years have been hard on everyone: this is where my travelog ends. Eulogies, as I said before, are the good words, the good times. Go forward from here with a smile on your face: think of your best memory of Anne, of Mum, of Ma Annie, of Mrs Mimnagh or however you knew her. Take that memory out from here, and share it with those around you. Remember the good lessons she taught: whether that was fastening your laces, writing your name, or cutting from the edge of a felt square and not the middle.

Her last travel destination, then, hopefully is Heaven. Mum believed very strongly in God, in Jesus and the Holy Spirit. She had a deep faith, although perhaps not a tremendously orthodox religion. She believed in life after death and life eternal, and spent most of her life hoping that her Mum and Dad would be finally reunited in Heaven. You could spend hours discussing theology, divinity and scripture with her. She had studied it well, and knew C S Lewis first as a Christian Apologeticist. Her heaven is a lot like his imagined Heaven in the Last Battle: like this world, but better, more real and full of those we love. She’s waiting for me there: she told me so and when the time is right I shall be happy to meet her once more.

Mum died on October 15^th: coincidentally, her mum and dad’s 88^th wedding anniversary. It also happens to be the saint’s day for Theresa of Avila, and I will leave you with her words.

“Let nothing disturb you. Let nothing make you afraid. All things are passing. God alone never changes. If you have God, you will want for nothing. God alone suffices.”

And on we go, to the crematorium and the final farewell to the husk of her body. I will always love her, I will always miss her dreadfully, but I know that her best wish would be for me to live a life I love, to take care of my husband and children, to help Dad with whatever life he has left and to meet her once again at the top of the stairs… where, in her last, brief lucid moment with me, she told me she’s waiting.

May she rest in peace, in the arms of the Lord. Amen.