Last Rights (2 page)

That I ended up in a graveyard was funny. St Mary Magdalene’s is an ancient, creepy one too. Half the tombs are broken and
sinking, and in places there are weeds up to your neck. All dressed in black, my top hat with its veil on my head, I must
have looked like something out of a ghost story.

‘Your dad buried my mum,’ one of the potatoes said, as he took his cap off his head to show respect. ‘Done her handsome.’

I tried to thank him but nothing would come out. When I run like this, my mind sort of goes back to the first lot, and while
I’m there I don’t know what I might be doing here. And even when it stops, as it had done when the men spoke to me, I’m still
not right. My sister Aggie’s old man used to say I was a basket case – and that was before any of this madness was even on
the cards. Sometimes he’d say it to my face.

The man whose mug had caved in came over to look at
me. He was holding something up to his nose to catch the blood. I think it was a vest.

‘Blimey,’ he said. ‘Gone bleedin’ white by the look of him.’

The men laughed again – and so did I. You have to.

‘What you doin’ out here, Mr H?’ It was a familiar voice, although I couldn’t for the life of me place it at the time.

‘I-I-I went for a walk,’ I stuttered. I hate it when I do that.

‘Funny time to go strolling,’ another voice cut in, ‘in the middle of a raid. Do this often, do you?’

‘Y-yee . . .’

‘Does it all the time so I’ve heard. Barmy!’ someone else said, and they all laughed yet again.

Barmy. Yes. There’s so much about me that is barmy. Funny, really, when you look at it. Francis Thomas Hancock, old soldier
at forty-seven, undertaker, wog – out of his tiny mind.

There was one of those long whistling sounds then and a breathless moment before the bomb hit something close. Like I imagine
an earthquake, like the endless pounding of the guns in the trenches.

‘Blimey, that was close!’

‘I think that’s going to be that for tonight, gents,’ someone said.

Men, some of them bloodied, started to walk towards the cemetery gates. The old leather-faced geezer, still in front of me,
said, ‘Come on, Mr H, get you ’ome. Don’t want to have to answer questions from no nosy coppers or none of them bleedin’ wardens,
do we?’ He took one of
my elbows in his hand and led me on behind the others.

I’d heard that bare-knuckle fights sometimes took place in graveyards at night – you pick up whispers about such things in
my trade – but I hadn’t expected to come across one during a raid. Not that I’d ever really thought about coming on one at
all. I’m not a betting man myself. There’s enough risk in life without courting it.

When we got out on to High Street South, the old fellow let my arm go and pushed ahead. Suddenly I was totally alone. I stopped.
There had to have been at least thirty men at the fight, but as I began slowly to walk back up towards the Barking Road, in
the general direction of my home, I couldn’t see a soul. Funny that, in the middle of a raid, no one about. Of course, most
people were down the shelters or hiding under their stairs. You would’ve thought you’d see police and firemen and wardens
about, though – at least, that’s what I’d thought before the raids got going. But there couldn’t ever be enough of them: the
fires and the destruction are like the end of the world, what can they do?

When I think about it now, I suppose I don’t know what I thought it would be like coming under attack from the Germans by
air. In the first lot you could see their faces, frightened just like ours, scrambling to their deaths over the top of the
trenches. But at such a distance it’s different. Faceless machines come, drop bombs, people die. And yet in spite of this
you get up, go to work and carry on – at least, that’s what we’ve done so far. But not in a normal way. Normal ways for me
used to include going to the house of the deceased, sometimes,
sometimes not, laying them out and then burying them – not being given a head and a bag of bits by some copper telling me
to ‘Cobble this bloke together for his family, will you, Mr H?’

And they call me mad . . .

It was only a matter of a couple of minutes later when I met him. Lurching, just like I was, over piles of something that
had once been someone’s home. The sky was red and yellow with him silhouetted black against the beauty of the bombing. If
he hadn’t been waving his arms around so much, I wouldn’t have taken any notice of him. But he was, and even though I don’t
always stop and help – you can’t – this time I did. Perhaps I thought he was raving. There’s a sort of bond between madmen
that almost forces you to get involved. I was in a couple of hospitals during the first lot. Gassed twice. But I knew who
my own were in those places. They were the ones who ran like me, who howled and screamed like this chap now.

As I got closer to him, I could hear that he was shouting something. And even though I knew he wouldn’t be able to hear me
any more than I could hear him, I said, ‘It’s all right, pal, I’m coming.’

I don’t know how old I thought he was at the time. Flames always, in my experience, draw the features down making people look
much older. What I did know was that he was in trouble. He kept clawing at his chest as if there was something in there he
wanted rid of.

‘What is it?’

‘I’ve been fucking stabbed!’ He was a Londoner, I
could tell from his voice, and now that I was next to him I could see that he was dark. Black hair and a long, thin nose.
I thought that maybe he was a Jew – either that or he was like me, us not being unlike each other.

‘Stabbed? How?’

It was bright now, the ground lit by I don’t know how many fires, some madness going on in the sky. Like daylight some of
the raids, like the world melting into white heat. He was dirty, covered in brick-dust, and his hair was reeking of cordite,
just like mine must have been, but I couldn’t see any blood on him.

Mad.

‘Look here!’ he said, and he moved his hand away from his chest. ‘Look at it, there!’

There wasn’t much blood. Not like an artery hit or anything like that.

‘Nasty flesh wound is all you’ve got,’ I said.

One thin, sinewy hand reached out and grabbed me by the collar. ‘She fucking stabbed me, I tell you,’ he said, through gritted
teeth.

‘Hold on!’

His breath smelled of beer and there were gaps in his mouth where some of his teeth had once been. A fighter, maybe even one
of them I’d just come upon in the graveyard. I didn’t recognise him, but I wouldn’t have recognised any of them at the time
had my life depended on it. What I wouldn’t forget, though, even in my dreams, was the look of hatred on his face as he turned
away from me with a curse. ‘Fucking whore!’

And then he was off. He pushed past me, skidding
down a pile of bricks, heading for Beckton and the real heart of the inferno. To be honest, I didn’t try and stop him. I knew
he was hurt, but he was in the grip of something too – and I know all about that and how unwise it can be to interfere with
it. Sometimes helping those in the grip of madness can be worse than just letting the thing take its course. But then sometimes
you read the situation wrong and it all goes phut. So I made my way home. I didn’t see the man with hate on his face and beer
on his breath again until two days later when he turned up unexpectedly at my shop.

H
ancocks have been burying people in the London Borough of West Ham for two generations, three if you count me. Apart from
the Hitchcocks’ firm, which also has premises on the Barking Road, I think we’re the oldest undertaker’s shop around these
parts. My grandad, Francis, who I’m named for, started the company in 1885. Back in those days Hancock’s was a building firm
as well as an undertaker’s, but Francis got out of the bricking and chippying around the turn of the century. So when Grandad
died in 1913, my old dad took over the burying of poor men and women for a living. Because our shop is, and always has been,
roughly at the centre of the borough, we’ve always got business from all over. And although in more recent years other firms
have opened up in Stratford, Plaistow and further down towards the docks around Canning Town, we’ve managed to stay close
to the people we serve.

Tom Hancock, my dad, was a lovely chap. All the old wags round here used to call him ‘The Morgue’, but he
always took it in good part. When I was a nipper at school you couldn’t count the number of lads whose dads took their belt
off to them. Not my dad, though. He loved us: Mum, my sisters Nancy and Aggie and me. He didn’t care what people round here
said and they’ve always said quite a lot about most things.

Before Dad joined Francis in the business, he was a soldier and was posted out to India. He liked it there – partial to the
heat Dad was – and when he met a local girl called Mary Fernandez, he liked it even better. They met in Calcutta, Mum and
Dad – she was working at a convent that looked after orphans. Dad, Tom, wasn’t exactly honest when he told his parents about
her in one of his letters. He used to say, ‘I wrote it like this: “I’ve met this smashing girl. She’s a good Christian but
a little bit dark. I’m going to marry her.”’ Then he’d laugh. Gran and Grandad nearly died when they saw Mum for the first
time. Nancy was a year old and Mum was pregnant with me when they first arrived in West Ham. Grandad was nice about it, but
Gran always called us wogs – all except my younger sister Aggie, the only one of us who took Dad’s light hair and fair skin.

All through my life I’ve been called ‘wog’. Not by everyone, and not always in bad spirit. I’ve had some very good mates in
my time, still do. But some of these names and comments have hurt my sister Nancy who is the darkest and, in truth, the most
Indian-looking of us all. I know this has held her back from maybe finding a bloke or bettering herself in some way and I
must say it does make me angry at times. Although not that often now.
There’s worse things than names in this world. I learned that on the Somme; I learned that when my mates dragged me kicking
and screaming back to our trench that first time I lost what was left of my mind and made a run for it. At the time I hated
those lads, called them every name a man can lay his tongue to. But they saved me – Ken White, Stanley Wheeler, Georgie Pepper
and Izzy Weisz. The top brass would have done me for deserting as sure as eggs is eggs. Then I’d have been shot – not blown
up like Stanley, not drowned in mud like Georgie and Izzy: shot.

What none of them could have known, though, was that running was going to become a way of life for me. Loud noises, violence
– it all makes me want to do it. The Great War started me doing it and I’ve never stopped running since. Ken, who was the
only mate of mine to get out with me, knows. We talk about it on occasion. It’s as if my head, sometimes like that night at
the knuckle fight in the graveyard, is bringing my body along with it – running. From life, from my own thoughts, now from
bombs and guns, from women’s screams and men’s cries of despair – Mr H the undertaker runs and runs and then when he gets
back to his shop he hides among any bodies he might have out the back. We’re one of the few firms who can take bodies on the
premises round here. I even know a bloke up West who embalms for a price – not that there’s much call for that in West Ham.
We’re a poor borough. People here, even before rationing, have never had much that wasn’t essential.

Of course, where you’ve got poverty you’ve also got
ignorance so quite a lot of people in the borough believe in ghosts and spirits and all that rubbish. But not me. The dead
are gone and can’t harm anyone – perhaps that’s why I like to work with them. Innocent. I make sure the dead get where they
want to be in spite of the actions of the living. I’ve seen it all. Widows digging in their old men’s pockets for every last
farthing, drunks burying their kids in paupers’ graves, and now the Luftwaffe bombing the departed up into the light again,
spinning their shredded grave clothes into the yew trees. The cruelty of the living is something that has no end.

I was back in our parlour with a pot of tea almost brewed when Mum, my sisters – the girls, I call them – and our lad Arthur
came up out of the Anderson the following morning. Nancy went straight away to look to our horses, who had bashed themselves
silly against their stall again in the night. Poor creatures, there’s no knowing what they’ll do to themselves once a raid
begins. Aggie, as usual, was more concerned about what she looked like. She has a pretty, heart-shaped face with big blue
eyes, the image of Dad’s. Not that she’s satisfied with what she’s got. Stood in front of the fan-shaped glass in the parlour
she pulled faces at herself, mucked about with her hair and went on about how ‘rotten’ everything was.

‘I hate this rotten war with its rotten food and rotten muck all over the place,’ she said. ‘Blimey, I look as if I’m about
Mum’s age!’

‘What? That young?’ I said, trying to be playful.

Aggie turned towards me and glared. Then, when I told her I’d made a rotten pot of tea, she stomped off into the
kitchen, her harshly bleached-up hair, full of brick-dust, flapping behind her like a dull mat. Poor Aggie, with her husband
gone off with another woman, her little ’uns evacuated away somewhere in Essex, all she wants is a little bit of fun, but
every time she looks in a mirror she gets depressed. Little or no sleep doesn’t do a lot for anyone’s looks, including Aggie’s.
There’s a shadow of loneliness that hangs around her lovely eyes sometimes too.

Mum poured out for everyone into cups and saucers she’d come straight in and slowly washed up at the sink. You never know
whether or not you’re going to have water on after a raid but on this occasion we did. Aggie carried her tea up to her room
while Arthur took his own and Nancy’s out to the yard. Mum, her cup trembling on its saucer in her hand, looked at me as I
stood against the door-post and said, ‘I’m going to make you something to eat, Francis.’

‘I’m all right.’

‘No, you’re not, you’re skin and bone!’ Her eyes started to fill then, but she held it back gamely. Mary Hancock, my mum,
nearly seventy years old and still beautiful. Tall and slim, like me, she has the most amazing black hair – she uses no dyes
to my knowledge – pleated up into a long, thick roll at the back of her head. Nicely spoken, with an Indian accent still,
and a real lady. Like a duchess, my old dad used to say and he called her that too, just like I started doing after he passed
away.