My mothers family is often charitably termed ‘the normal side’ by onlookers and well-wishers. This is really only an exercise in comparison, and taken as an isolated case you would be hard pressed to accurately apply the term to any of them. To their credit though they do at least attempt to enter into situations with the requisite seriousness that tradition dictates. My maternal grandmothers funeral kicked off "The Death Jamboree" and the combined efforts of my mother and uncle meant that, for the most part, it was a normal, dignified affair, during which what my mother termed “the Savory’s folly” was kept comfortably at bay.
Things started drifting about mid-way through, though, when my cousin, during one of the many interminable ‘vicar monologues’, leaned over to me and whispered...
“Oh, fuck...”
I assumed this was a reflection on the monologue, but he followed it with...
“...I’ve left my phone on.”
I shrugged dismissively, “Ah, doesn’t matter, John, no one will notice.”
“No, no, you don’t understand...” he said, increasingly frenzied “Oh God! My ring tone - it’s The Poddington Peas.”
There was a pause as we both envisaged it, trilling it’s bouncy way though the service...
‘Down at the bottom of the garden, among the birds and the bees, a little lot of little pea-ple, they call the Poddington Peas! The Poddington Peas!’
(If you aren’t familiar with the Poddington Peas and want to get the full effect of this anecdote, give the theme a little youtube search, it’s very rewarding.)
...“Turn it off, then.” I hissed.
“No, no! I can’t! It plays a shorter snatch of the Poddington Peas when I turn it off,”
“What?”
“And on, and also... also when I get a text.”
I sat frozen for a while, reeling from the news that he had apparently completely Poddington Pimped his phone. He spent the remainder of the service with his hand hovering over his pocket and fear in his eyes. In spite of the narrative pull to the contrary however, he managed to leave the crematorium without treating everyone to a nostalgic blast of 80s children's television, but the very notion that he might have done effectively broke our collective concentration. Now that the idea of pea-based hilarity had been introduced, everything that followed instantly became less than serious. From the vicar's assertion that our grandmother was “at the high table with God and all the saints” (“All of history’s most holy and canonised, and one 92 year old woman from Sevenoaks?”) to the scattering of her ashes during which the same hyperbolic vicar, standing atop my grandfathers grave proclaimed...
“We will now scatter Dorothy’s ashes from this censor in the shape of the holy cross”
A small compartment in the bottom of his ash-scattering censor opened, but rather than running gently out and tracing said shape, the entirety of the ashes just slumped into a heavy grey heap which the vicar tentatively shoved into something marginally more cross like.
“Ah, the holy cross.” he said optimistically.
Nothing had ever been further from a cross and closer to a shapeless mound. Sidelong glances were exchanged. At the reception afterwards we got no end of kicks from pointing to piled plates of sandwiches and saying “Ah, I see someone has artfully arranged these sandwiches into the shape of the holy cross” or wandering up the garden with pieces of funereal battenburg cake and remarking “John! How did you manage to craft Dorothy’s compost heap into that attractive holy cross shape? I think that is a really nice touch.”
The trend, having been set, was only intensified at the funerals which followed. My great aunt’s took place in an unknown church somewhere near Portsmouth, and having driven to three wrong churches and been forced to stop when we saw a roadside stand that sold Caramac bars ("Look! Caramacs! Never mind Great Aunt Joyce! You just can't get those in the shops these days! Pull over so I can stock up.") we arrived, ten minutes late, screeching alongside the procession with our car doors flung open and people trying to clamber out long before we came to an actual halt.
There was this.
And then there was the music.
In spite of some loose Cockney ancestry I would maintain that Chaz and Dave’s “Rabbit, Rabbit” is a baffling choice for anyones funeral, unless that person is either Chaz, Dave, or perhaps some kind of disturbed Lapophile.
This sort of thing was as nothing however compared to the funerals that were to come on my fathers side. The side that even the most charitable onlooker could never describe as normal, comprised of people who even on a festive, non-somber occasion were already batting at an above-average rate in terms of the sinister yet hilarious. The side in which people made pets of tame jackdaws, and divined the weather from the texture of their garden toad’s skins. The side in which people cultivated mouse skull collections, communicated solely in Vivian Stanshall quotes, and, keeping all their prescription drugs in one massive carrier bag, simply took a lucky dip each morning. The Savorys.
“I think it’s only fair to tell you," said my father, replacing the phone in its holder and turning to my sister and me "Uncle Steve will be using the words ‘cat penis’ in the eulogy. So... forewarned is forearmed.”
As it was I’m really not sure whether it was better to have been forewarned about the content of my Grandfather eulogy, on the plus side I didn’t explode when my Uncle spent a paragraph of it talking about cat’s penises, but on the other hand I did spend the length of the funeral itself wondering how exactly he was going to manage it. “Maybe he will just open the eulogy by yelling “CAT PENIS”" my sister speculated "Maybe he will just throw it in among lots of sincere stuff - 'Robert was a kind, honest - cat penis - loving man.' - you know, just to see if anyone notices."
In actual fact the cat penis was part of a much larger penis anecdote detailing my Grandfather's concern that passing shoppers in Asda might mistake the "bright red" and "unusual angled" cat penis that my Grandmother was describing, for his own. They were looking at him, apparently, in a disgusted yet intrigued way that suggested that this was the case.
If you think this is an odd thing to bring up in somebody's eulogy then you are right, but the entire thing was like that. Little hilarious, but probably inappropriate, snapshots. Like the fact that my great grandmother, already scandalised by her daughter dating an Englishman and a protestant, spent the first year of their courtship genuinely believing that her future son in law was named "Bob Satan" or the additional fact that, in spite of years of being corrected, she never really stopped calling him this. The vicar slapped my uncle on the back after the ceremony and told him it was the funniest eulogy he had heard. This is ostensibly a compliment, but does serve to demonstrate gap between "Savory's Folly" and the rest of the world. Eulogies aren't meant to be funny, or at least, not primarily funny. Normally, when attempting to sum up somebody's life, you simply wouldn't mention the fact that a group of strangers once garnered a false impression of their penis. That sort of thing - it's just not done.
Another thing that is popularly not done is to lead your family in a bouncy song of your own design the lyrics to which are, simply "Granddad is dead! We buuuuurned him!" as you drive home from the crematorium, but then my father always was the foremost proponent of "Savory's Folly". His plans for his own funeral were testament to this. He was to be stuffed and placed at the entrance to where ever we held the thing. Attendants would be encouraged to shake his hand in a final gesture of friendship and then, if they cared to, drape their coats over his outstretched arm. When everything was over, he wanted us to keep any coats that people had left on him, and to place him "sensitively but still strikingly" under the glass of a coffee table, which we would then be free to use at our leisure - a ghoulish, but suitable gleeful family heirloom.
I'd never really given my own funeral all that much serious thought, at least, not since becoming aware that I have a family reputation for the ridiculous to uphold, but having had the time it took to write this to reflect, I now have a pretty clear idea of how it is all going to be. I think I would like, just for that one day, to broaden the experience of "Savory's Folly' to my guests more generally.
I can be stuffed, or unstuffed, depending on how much they value the cleanliness of their coats, though I will need to be de-coated and en-coffined in good time so that they can lower me in to the ground to the Poddington Peas theme. My sister can conduct the eulogy; a call and response affair in which she will yell “CAT...” and the congregation will yell back “...PENISES” four or five times.
"Anna is dead." the announcement in the local paper will read "We burnt her. Her mortal remains were deposited at the edge of her Uncles favorite Caramac stand in nr. Portsmouth, heaped into the shape of the holy cross."
Note it down, blog readers, I will be holding you to it - posthumously.
