Aunt Helen

DPIADEN

By LORD EGREMONT

- ' SAMUEL PEPYS wrote in ) a his diary about the funeral

. of his brother, to whom he

7‘.....-■ ..0 , was deeply attached, so all broke up, and I

Dr Pierson. the minister

i '‘. f. 04 of the parish, did read

the service for burial, and

--Ai%ola"611 , so I saw my poor brother , / laid into the grave; and ladritlig and my wife and Madam Turner and her family to my brother's, and by and by fell to a barrel of oysters, cake, and cheese, being too merry for so late a sad work. But. Lord! to see how the world makes nothing of the memory of a man an hour after he is dead! And, indeed, I must blame myself; for though at the sight of him dead and dying. I had real grief for a while, while he was in my sight, yet presently after, and ever since, I have had very little grief indeed for him.

Pepys obviously had a guilty conscience about having been so merry so soon after the funeral. He was wrong. There is nothing to be done about a-corpse except to bury it. There may be some- thing to be done about a soul. Those of us who believe in an. gter-life should rejoice about after- life, pray for the soul and get on with our own

lives here below as happily as we can. Grief isn't going to help anybody.

For my funeral, Easter hymns, please. And for the survivors, good cheer.

For winter's rains and ruins are over,

And all the season of snows and sins; The days dividing lover and lover.

The light that loses, the night that wins: And time remembered is grief forgotten, And frosts are slain and flowers begotten, And in green underwood and cover Blossom by blossom the spring begins.

Thus wrote Swinburne.

I had a potty old great-aunt, Aunt Helen. She lived with her widowed father, who was shy, taciturn and innately solitary. His affections were strong but not diffuse: they embraced his wife, his children and the chase. His wife, a Miss Fanny Blunt, came of an old Sussex family. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, of Crabbett, diarist, poet, revo- lutionary and breeder of Arabian horses, was her nephew. She was of a strong evangelical turn of mind. She died in 1863, after which Helen's father never asked a stranger into the house again.

There he lived on with Helen in a shared lone- liness. Helen would dither about doing nothing very much in particular except needlework and going for walks in the park in front of the house.

And the hoofed heel of a satyr crushes The chestnut-husk at the chestnut-root.

That sort of thing was not up Helen's street: Her chief, and indeed probably only, diversion was going to tea at the rectory, a few yards' walk from one of the lodges.

Helen's father showed her much kindness and affection. Helen seemed to be devoted to him in return.

I doubt whether Helen would have been able to animadvert on the thoughts behind what either Pepys or Swinburne wrote, or that she and I would have had much in common except about death.

When Helen's father died they were all very worried about how to break the news to her. Fearing that to a mind already feeble, such sad news might be especially bad, they took in- finite care to prepare her as best they could for the blow. She heard them with composure as they gently broke the news and, when they had finished, all she said was, calmly, with a quiet inner smile, 'Now at last I can use the downstairs lavatory.'