The title of this piece is taken from ‘For the Fallen’ by Laurence Binyon. June 1978, my husband, a colour-sergeant serving with 1A&SH, was posted to Gordon Barracks, Bridge of Don. There we met Corporal and Mrs Osborne, Roddy and Margaret. With our husbands as members of different Messes, a friendship never progressed and just a few months later, Roddy was posted back to the battalion. In 1980, he was promoted to Sergeant and posted back to Gordon Barracks for two years and this time friendship between the two couples flourished. The two surviving members of this delinquent quartet remain in touch, although live at different ends of the country.
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THEY SIT NO MORE AT FAMILIAR TABLES OF HOME
Long forgotten, the time and place of our first meeting. The summer of 1978, possibly, Margaret would remember. Her mind the sharpest and most complicated I ever encountered. Her friendship one of the most enduring I had the privilege to enjoy. The heaviest burden I carry into advancing old age is the loss of those I love, particularly those taken too soon.
In 1992, following a messy divorce, failed business venture and health problems, she was invited to live with us. She stayed five years and helped even the numbers in a predominantly male household. Each evening, when I finally stopped work and went upstairs, she was often awake enjoying a late night film, and my favourite wind down was to talk. She was, by profession a technical writer, compiling instruction manuals for the Blood Transfusion Service and always planned to write ‘the book’ based on her varied life experiences. Write what you know, love and enjoy was her advice to me. My reply, with tongue very firmly in cheek, was that would be family, sewing and sex. Interesting comment from someone who’s sole contribution to the written word, was a set of client’s measurements on a record card. She obviously knew something I didn’t.
When Margaret moved out, I missed her strange taste in men and films. A fan of Gerald Depardieu and Raul Julia, but most of all I missed our late night conversations. Years passed, we travelled different roads. Contact became sporadic. When my husband passed away in 2002 she was the first to arrive, the last to leave.
In Margaret’s opinion, we would become, in our twilight years, two cantankerous old biddies. Delight derived from tormenting our carers. Long suffering staff, would dance attendance. Her intention was for us to grow old disgracefully. Sitting outside our care home, on all but the most inclement of days, in vintage, cane bathchairs. Protected from the elements by tartan blankets. Our endless conversations would right the wrongs of an ailing world. We would enjoy spectacular views. Rugged mountains, waterfalls, blazing sunsets and a cherry tree. I know the scenery she described so intimately, the Highlands of Scotland. Everything except the cherry tree and there was always a cherry tree in her very specific fantasy.
We lost touch completely after more than thirty years. In 2014 I searched for her. Nothing, no Facebook, no contact with her family or ex-husband. She no longer worked for the NHS in London. I contacted a company who traced people. Within forty eight hours the puzzle had been solved, but not the resolution I expected. There would be no reunion. Margaret had passed away, two years earlier, age just fifty nine. I received a copy of her death certificate and continued my inquiries. Eventually after much frustration and anger vented at the ‘Data Protection Act’ I pieced together most of her story. Diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, she chose to leave this life and tell no-one, dying in a Leicester hospice. Her flat cleared by the council and belongings sold to cover the cost of a funeral. The more I discovered, the more painful it became. The final heartbreaking piece of the jigsaw, the location of her ashes. For over two years her ashes sat unclaimed on a shelf at the Co-op funeral parlour in Leicester.
I contacted her ex-husband and he informed her sister. Roddy and I met in Leicester and collected her ashes. A weekend of conversation, memories, tears and laughter. Years rolled back for the two surviving members of a delinquent quartet. Good times and bad. Tours of duty, Saturday nights in the Mess, children now grown, illness, divorce.
I brought Margaret home to Scotland and waited for information regarding the scattering of her ashes. I waited two years. Annoyed by the apparent disinterest of others, I made the arrangements. Frazer, my youngest son, Margaret’s adored godson, accompanied me. We crossed on the Corran ferry at Ardgour and drove along the single track road until we could see my cottage, a tiny, white speck on the opposite shore of Loch Linnhe. We scattered most of her ashes, on an overcast, grey day at Inversanda.
She never achieved her fantasy old age, but if I do, my memories will be for both of us. The cherry tree was planted along with the remainder of her ashes in the front garden of my previous home. A cottage which enjoyed spectacular views across Loch Linnhe. From my kitchen window I could look out and talk to her. I told her of my characters, their adventures and my hopes for a published trilogy. Things I would never tell anyone else and the night I woke at two-o-clock and wrote on a pad next to my bed the word Bo’et, I knew the information came from Margaret. Why else would the Afrikaans word for brother wake me at such an ungodly hour. A word I never even knew existed until I Googled it, later that morning. The perfect name for an alien race, featured in a story centred around twin brothers.
Thank you, Margaret.