Diaries 1969-1979_ The Python Years - Michael Palin [236]
Saturday, April 30th, Southwold
We troop off to the church, taking Mrs Pratt1 with us, in time for the service at two. Father had been cremated at Gorleston during the week, and so it’s more of a memorial service than a cremation. There is a representative of the Funeral Directors – heavy dark coat matching his eyebrows, despite the warm afternoon. Then there is the vicar, muted, grave and cold.
Quite a small congregation – thirty or forty at most. Father’s ashes are in a small wooden box at the end of the aisle. I am quite severely nervous for the first part of the service – ‘The Lord’s My Shepherd’ – as I am to read the lesson, a heavy piece of Revelations. But that goes well, as does the service, and even the vicar’s little address (about my father being a man of patience, bearing with extreme tolerance and fortitude the slings and arrows. I suppose in a sense he was patient – for a man carrying a severe stammer for much of his life. I just remember so many moments of impatience and intolerance).
At the end we process out behind the box of ashes and into the churchyard. The solemnity and dignity of the occasion is somehow less easy to maintain the further we process from the organ and the hymn singers, and I find that we are wending our way in a direct line towards the Southwold Cottage Hospital where I have an awful feeling that Father’s spirit was finally broken last autumn.
His ashes are lowered in – ‘Dust to dust’, etc, etc – and the ceremony is over. Shake the vicar’s hand and receive in exchange a bland smile. Still, Father would have loved the church today, filled with sunlight, the mediaeval pews and the fine old screen which has witnessed funeral services for 500 years.
Back to Croft Cottage for tea. No tears, except from Camilla, a little, and Angela, a sniffle. Mother quite composed about the whole thing. Tea turns into a jolly family reunion in the best tradition of funeral teas, and we leave for London at about five.
Thursday, May 5th, Tow Law and Durham
Birthday on location again. Thirty-four, and I feel it.
Out in the bus to Tow Law. This is an exposed and underprivileged sort of town. A long line of small houses and not much more. No green, no parks, no opulent houses or even well-off areas – just the skeleton of a town custom-built for mining, in the days when there was something to mine. A cold wind whips through the grid-frame streets and all in all it’s a depressing place to spend a birthday.
I organise free drinks at lunchtime for the crew and all at the Tow Law Hotel. A blind pianist plays ‘Happy Birthday’, with lush holiday camp trills thrown in, on an organ. I am presented with a shovel, signed by all the crew, which is very touching. I’m also given a birthday cake with one candle. But it’s a celebration only just on this side of tragic. The place, the town, the hotel are all grim.
Friday, May 6th, Durham
We were supposed to return home yesterday, but the bad weather on Tuesday put us a day behind.
Somewhere away to our north-east, ten or fifteen miles, President Carter is pressing the flesh in Newcastle. The Tories have swept Labour under the carpet in the local government elections – Wearside and Durham County are amongst a tiny handful of councils where Labour has held on. I fear for Helen’s Ma, so vociferous is the reaction against the government, Labour and their sympathisers.
At the very moment that Peter has set up a skyline shot with a colliery wheel in the background, Eddie Stuart appears over the hill with a man in a suit and helmet who looks very unhappy. This turns out to be the colliery manager, who is concerned, as it turns out, about the image of the National Coal Board.
With much palaver and banging of helmets and raising of spectacles, the manager pronounces that we can film on, provided we go easy on shots of the slag heaps.
We then move on to a windswept line of stone-built