Who watches the Wedgeman?

So my aunt Jane was buried last Friday in Highgate Cemetery and I chose to speak at the memorial service held on Sunday. Here's what I said:

 

"This section is perhaps rather strangely entitled 'memories of a favourite aunt'. There is, however, no hyperbole or romanticism in the statement. Jane was my favourite aunt. One of the things about being very young is that there’s no pressure to treat people equally. If you have two children, you can’t possibly say to one of them that you love them more than the other, even if the first is a little angel and the second a vicious monster. Not, of course, to imply that my other aunts are monstrous in any way. It’s just that I was always closest to Jane. She always insisted we called her just 'Jane' and not 'Aunt Jane' or 'Aunty Jane' or anything like that. Because of that, I always felt treated like an equal. We had a lot of things in common: love of reading and books; of good food and drink and even of wearing black.

Going to London as a child was always interesting. There were children’s books from Victor Gollancz in the room my brother and I shared in Corsica Street and I remember reading some of them again and again, especially an illustrated version of Oscar Wilde’s The Selfish Giant.

I remember always being slightly afraid of London when I was very young. Having grown up in a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, I was totally unused to all the sights, smells and especially the light pollution and noise at night. But seeing Jane and how at ease she was with buses and the tube and everything else in the big city somehow convinced me that it couldn’t be such a strange place after all.

Years later, I asked her to help me in getting some work experience. At the time, she was working for John Murray and I spent a couple of happy weeks one summer, being treated to all sorts of new experiences and Jane’s delicious sandwiches in our packed lunches, usually enjoyed in the Green Park sunshine. It was quite fun to be part of something larger than just myself for the first time and on that trip, my ‘fear’ finally left me.

The holidays we shared in Cornwall have already been discussed a little, but I wanted to say that it was always nice to be able to see Jane just relaxing, usually with a book and a cushion on the lawn. Sitting in the sun and looking totally peaceful. Jane bought me my first necklace from Polzeath one year. It was a fairly simple beaded wooden thing on a piece of elastic and fairly cheap too, as I recall, but it meant a lot to me. It was an assertion of my own identity, the first awkward teenage attempt not to turn into ones parents. I started growing my hair longer around that time too and I still have the necklace, repaired a couple of times since she first bought it, but undoubtedly the same item and certainly holding the same meaning for me.

All these memories of the past with Jane, from my very earliest to the Waitrose Cloudy Lemonade almost invariably awaiting my brother and I in recent months, will not be forgotten. They will be shared again and again with my immediate family and, if I ever settle down and have children of my own, I’ll tell them all about the amazing great aunt the never had a chance to know.

There’s a section in Neil Gaiman’s series of fantasy graphic novels where the character of Death describes herself:

“I'm not blessed or merciful. I'm just me. I've got a job to do and I do it. Listen: even as we're talking, I'm there for old and young, innocent and guilty, those who die together and those who die alone. I'm in cars and boats and planes, in hospitals and forests and abattoirs. For some folks death is a release and for others death is an abomination, a terrible thing. But in the end, I'm there for all of them.” She later says to another character, who is dying and questioning why it has to be so soon.

“You lived what anybody gets, Bernie. You got a lifetime. No more. No less.”

That always struck a chord with me. I like to think that no matter what people say of Jane, she had her lifetime and lived it to the full. Jane was one of the very, very few people I’ve ever known who wanted nothing more from her life. She was happy with how she behaved, everything she did and all other aspects of her life. I only hope that when I die, I can say the same thing for myself.'

In spite of the fact I started crying around the Green Park section, I received quite a few compliments from the people there for my courage, bravery and for the words themselves. Other people there had given a view of Jane from the point of view of the publishing world, but I wanted to make sure that someone spoke from the heart. Every word of that was heartfelt and incredibly poignant for me. Dad asked me to share this, and I'm happy to. Maybe those of you reading this who never met her, never even knew she existed, even, will have a bit of a portrait of one of the most incredible people I've ever met.

 

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