Hallsands was once a busy fishing village but is now totally abandoned, having been ravaged by a series of storms during the early part of the 1900s. It was finally evacuated in 1917 after numerous houses and the village pub had fallen into the sea, all the result of a protective bank of sand and gravel being greedily and negligently removed for construction use at a dockyard on the edge of Plymouth by a local MP. Hallsands women were a notoriously tough breed, rescuing crew from sinking ships and habitually wading out to the fishing boats with their husbands on their backs to save their menfolk’s feet from getting wet prior to a day’s work. One of them, Elizabeth Prettejohn, remained stubbornly and heroically in her house right up until her death in 1964, at the age of eighty, surviving on fish and crabs she caught herself and eggs from a tough gang of hens which roamed through the glorified rubble that constituted the remainder of the village. When tourists came to see the infamous place that the sea had swallowed, Prettejohn, as its one remaining resident, was only too happy to show them around, but you can’t help wondering what else she did for amusement. ‘I know! I’ll found the Hallsands WI!’ you can imagine her saying in a lightbulb moment. Then, with a sigh, ‘Oh.’ Prettejohn could have moved but didn’t. She chose solitude instead, a tie to landscape instead of people. On a night like this it was possible to get a mental picture of what that solitude must have felt like here, at the edge of the world, and on fiercer nights when, in her own description, ‘the sea was like mountains’.
It was lung cancer that finally killed my nan, although she’d only narrowly survived another heart attack a couple of years prior to that. For somebody who’d talked up her own frailty and imminent demise for a long time, she was very keen to hold on at the end. Her repeated refrain was that before she went she wanted to know everyone was OK. Going through the break-up of a marriage at the time, I found it a little more difficult to convince her on this front than everyone else, but I think she believed me. She died at home, surrounded by almost all of her closest family except for me. It was hard to know when the end would come and, living over three hours away by car or train, to ensure that I would be there for it. She died listening not to the fake swells and rip tides of motorway traffic but to a CD of birdsong, which continued to play at a lowish volume after the moment of her death. My cousin Jeff arrived at this point and stayed with her in her bedroom while my mum, Jayne and Mal went downstairs to make the appropriate phone calls. This was during a lull in the birdsong CD so Jeff had not been aware that it was playing. As he sat with my nan’s body the recorded sound of a vituperative crow pierced the room as if out of nowhere, causing Jeff, in a fitting final tribute, to levitate even further than my nan used to when her phone rang.
I can put an exact date to the last time I was clean-shaven because it was the day of my nan’s funeral. She disliked beards, and I thought it was the least I could do for her to get rid of mine. I might shave again, but in seven and a half years I have not felt compelled to. I can look back at my nan’s funeral and see that it represents a threshold for me: the moment when I put on a couple of permanent extra layers – one made of hair, one made of something else less tangible. In the weeks before her death I returned the gold wedding band she’d passed down to me as the first of her grandchildren to get married, the same ring Tom had bought her. At her funeral in Nottingham each of us took turns to touch her coffin to say goodbye. I did not cry. I felt solid and accepting and slightly insulated from what had happened, as if I had an additional coat on made of nothing. Afterwards, I went for a drink with my cousins and hoped we’d all stay in touch, having lost the main glue that held us together. That night, in the space between wakefulness and sleep, I heard a light, gossamer Scouse voice say, ‘It’s all going to be OK, son.’ Whether I had willed it or it had come from some other place was not important; the important thing was that it was nice.
My nan was the final grandparent I lost, but I believe I have had a relatively easy ride as far as the death of those close to me is concerned. Age brings the perspective to see this, but something that sometimes gives me an additional insight is that I have two friends who are funeral directors. The funeral directors’ names are Ru and
