Last Rights Read Free Page A

have never had much that wasn’t essential.
    Of course, where you’ve got poverty you’ve also gotignorance 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 thekitchen, 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.
    She took some bread out of the larder then, with what little Stork margarine there was left.
    ‘Sit down, my son,’ she said to me, as she pulled Dad’s chair out from its place at the head of the table.
    ‘Duchess . . .’
    She walked up to me, limping a bit like she does when her arthritis is bad, her long black skirts swishing against the lino
     as she moved. The Duchess has never worn short dresses in her life or anything other than mourning since Dad died. Her dignity,
     as well as what she always calls her ‘convent training’, just won’t allow it.
    ‘Sit down, Francis, and please do eat,’ she said, as she ran one knotted brown hand across my forehead. Her arthritis had