At The Graveside

12th January 2013

The wooden tub of plants that I choose at Otter Nurseries to take to our parents' grave is pretty but overall pale - the primoses white and mauve, the helibore creamy, the striated grasses flimsy. More to my mother’s taste than my father’s. The pot of bright yellow primulas which we leave at the base of the Peace Pole at the Baptist Church represent him more - quintessentially English but catching the African sun in their petals.

I drive through the back lanes to meet my sister in HonitonTesco’s car park as the other road is closed  - flooding under the bridge. Everywhere red rivulets are flowing off the fields onto the roads making slushy pools in the potholes, the steep banks collapsing in mud slides which I have to swerve to avoid. They say the West Country is sodden now, weeping from the sky and the moors and the fields and forests  - nowhere for all this water to go.....

The oak cross at the grave is stark black against the whiteout sky with the two brass plaques washed clean by the rain. It holds off as my sister and I carry the pale planted tub across the slippery grass and place it on the concrete plinth. We remember how it was a muddy lake on the day we buried our father - holding on to each other then so as not to slip into that deep ochre red slash in the ground.....just holding each other now....

The rain comes as we dodge into the Boston Tea Party cafe for a baked potato lunch and sit with our backs to the piano which the ex-president of Zambia played on the day he came to honour his friend, our father.....who would have held my  cold hand in his big warm one at the graveside if only he had been with us. Which of course he was....