Last Rights Read Free

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 healways 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,