| NOTES |
My grandmother Rosa's funeral was a very simple affair, attended by three people - my mother, myself and my Aunt Aggie, who had travelled from Colchester. Rosa's son Frank was not well enough to make the journey from South London. I'm not sure I was aware of the deep pathos of this tiny gathering at the time. |
| Rose had the same surname as mine, despite being my maternal grandmother, for reasons given in Chapter 1 | Rosa Coughtrey was born four years after the death of Charles Dickens and well before the first motor cars appeared on the streets of London. She was 27 when Queen Victoria died. By the time the Wright brothers managed to get the first aeroplane off the ground under its own power she was 29, but she had reached 40 before aircraft were first used for warfare, at the start of the First World War. In late middle age she experienced the General Strike, the Depression and no doubt argued about whether it was a good or bad thing that Hitler had come to power in Germany. She was 66 when she found out for certain that it had been a bad thing, when the Second World War started and she was uprooted as an evacuee. |
| She was 68 when I was born and 78 when the present Queen came to the throne. When she watched the Coronation a year later, it was the first time she had seen television. Yet she lived long enough to be disgusted by Elvis, the Beatles and hippies, to become a great fan of Coronation Street and to hear that men had landed on the moon. By her hundredth year, Concorde was flying and computers were coming into general use in offices. |
| A quick comparison of the decade of her birth with that of her death soon shows that she lived through revolutionary changes, not only in technology, but in attitudes, morals and fashions in art, architecture, music and personal appearance. Though she never travelled north of St Albans nor west of Bognor Regis, she must have known and been known to hundreds of people during her lifetime of living in various parts of London, yet here were just the three of us watching her being put in the ground with the very minimum of ceremony. Her grave, like that of her husband, her son-in-law (my father) and her daughter (my mother), is somewhere in Bell's Hill cemetery, High Barnet and, like theirs, remains unmarked. |