Memorial

To Cumbria for the memorial service for my aunt, the last of her generation.  When someone dies at ninety-five, full of years, there is a sense of completeness.

This is St Mungo's church, Bromfield.  There has been a church here since Norman times and possibly earlier.  My mother's family went to primary school at Bromfield, walking the couple of miles from their farm.  Whether they actually attended this church is less certain, as in those days you were "church or chapel" and I think that they were "chapel".

My cousins had prepared a summary of the key events of my aunt's early life: losing her mother at eleven and having to leave the grammar school at fourteen since the family moved to a more remote farm.

At nineteen she joined the ATS.  World War Two was in progress but she was a cook in barracks at Edinburgh, so it was a positive change for her. After the war ended she continued to work as a cook, moving from job to job as the fancy took her.

 

In this same churchyard is buried my cousin Betty, whose death from polio at the age of eighteen plunged her family into tragedy.  My aunt returned home to care for her elder sister. It was a devastating loss.

The churchyard is full of early nineteenth century tombstones, moved over and ranked in rows.  They tell of families in which every child died in infancy, or of sisters dying in their twenties, perhaps of TB.  

The wind sweeps through this churchyard, across open farmland from the Solway Firth, but these memorials are remarkably well-preserved, dignified as standing stones.