Realised today that I hadn't blogged this part. Here goes.
But I was damned (see below ;-) ) if I was going to have a full-on Catholic service. I've been to one of those in Savignac church, and it was full of incense and involved a bizarre procession around the coffin that I definitely didn't want. Margaret wasn't religious, and neither are Cleodhna or I, and while respect for the local community demanded a religious service, it said nothing about how religious the service would be.
Due to various mix-ups and telephone tag, I only managed to speak to the priest (or deacon, or whatever - I never found out his full title) in charge of the funeral the day before it would take place. He turned up at Merlhiot, along with Catherine Lamy, the mother of a kid I was at school with in Savignac school in the early 80s - French practice is to have a member of the clergy, but also a member of the community, at a funeral. We went through the basics of Margaret's life (which I'd already researched for the Edinburgh service), and I emphasised that we wanted a minimally religious service.
(They asked me if Margaret was religious; I said no, she wasn't. Then they asked me if she was baptised. I carried on ducking the "atheist" word, and said that if there was any religion she wasn't of, it was Anglicanism. That seemed to satisfy them.)
We agreed that they'd sort out something between the two of them, muttering something about expat Sue, and we left it at that.
All that was left to do that day was pick up Ole from the train station. Ole is an old friend of the family; he worked with Bruce in the pre-FLS days, and we regularly holidayed in his house in St Pierre de Côle before we moved to Merlhiot full-time. (He since sold up and moved back to Copenhagen.) So we drove to Thiviers, and there was Ole, all by himself, without luggage, because he'd been robbed on the sleeper train somewhere in Germany.
During the night, Ole forgot about a flight of stairs and gave himself a nasty black eye tripping onto a door handle. I had visions of having to introduce Ole to people, and explain that he got robbed on the train, but no, he didn't get the black eye then, he got that later - thankfully this didn't happen.
Came the day of the funeral, and like the rest of the preceding week, it was a gorgeous day - slightly cloudy, just chilly enough to deter people from wandering mournfully in a cemetery for too long, but not chucking it down in a way that cinematographers love but real people hate because there's nothing worse (especially if you're a guest) than maintaining a proper pose of grief and mourning while the constant rain is slowly but surely making its way through your clothing, clammy finger by clammy finger.
We headed to the church and set up (the photo of Margaret we'd used at the Edinburgh service). The priest and Catherine were there, and so was Sue, who turned out to be Sue Palfreyman, who is a professional translator and knows the Anglican ceremony, which meant that she'd organised a bilingual catholic / anglican service, including a wonderful prayer from an Irish book of prayers which was all about plants, bees, birds and nature. The priest asked me if I wanted to do the Catholic "traipse around the coffin" thing, and I immediately declined; mostly because I thought the whole thing was just ceremony for the sake of it, and because it doesn't scale downwards very well. (Maybe 10 people can fit around a coffin; if all you've got is a casket of ashes, you can fit at most 4. A bunch of agèd expats queueing up in a narrow church aisle to do an awkward dance around a small wooden box is potentially amusing, and if somebody else wants to try it out, more power to them, but I wasn't going to have anything like that at Margaret's funeral.) Given that at least two of our guests needed crutches or walking sticks, I'm glad that I stuck by that decision.
It's an odd thing, waiting for guests at a funeral. Cleodhna doesn't speak French, so she mingled with expats while I waited for people to come along and be greeted (difficult when you don't always know everyone, or don't recognise people, and therefore don't know which language to greet them in - thankfully people mistake this caution for grief and introduce themselves). Someone ventured into the church, so I went forwards and said hello - and then I realised I had a God-botherer on my hands.
The conversation went something like this (I'm being slightly unfair to her, but she had it coming because she's a bigot):
Her: "Ahah! The church is open!" Me: "Yes, it's my mother's funeral. Margaret Kington." Her (ignoring all of this): "They keep on locking up the church. I try to come here every day, to pray for the souls of those in purgatory." Me: "It's not a particularly religious funeral." Her: "Are you religious?" Me: "No." Her: "Were you baptised?" Me: "No." Her: "But you at least know about the history of the world, how we were all saved because of Moses after the Flood?" Me: "Yes, I know my Literature."
She wasn't impressed, and grumbled off, announcing that she would pray for my soul, trying to make it sound like a promise rather than a menace.
The resulting service was remarkably tame in comparison :-). Having heard them side by side, I can confirm that the British translation of the Lord's Prayer and The Lord Is My Shepherd are marginally, but significantly, better than their French equivalents. The priest, Catherine and Sue did an admirable job of interchanging at the pulpit; we had Fauré's Requiem on CD, which they played at appropriate moments.
We then filed out of the church, and did a brief meet and greet while the Pompes Funèbres guy gathered the casket, flowers and other random stuff. We had a decent mix of Brits and French, including, wonderfully, Robert Maureau, my childhood primary school teacher in Savignac, who for some reason has been bad-mouthed in the area even though he was a wonderful teacher. (I won't go into a full list of guests, because I can't remember all who were there, and it would be a disservice to try and list only those I can accurately name.)
Eventually, we followed the hearse - ridiculously oversized for a casket of ashes - through the narrow streets of Savignac, and made our way to the cemetery. After another brief prayer, the casket was placed in a small hole at the head of the grave, right next to my father Bruce's grave, and we all filed past and sprinkled rose petals on it. (Which was just as well, as the typeface on the plaque was some horrible sans serif oblique monstrosity.) I made sure to avoid the pink and red rose petals, as Margaret was very much a white flower garden person ;-).
And that was it: job done. Handshakes, commiserations, exchanges of addresses followed; we had a bunch of the expats back to Merlhiot, where we all gathered around the kitchen table and talked about a whole bunch of things, some of which completely unrelated to Margaret, which is of course what she would have wanted.
We'll be back in February, to sort out Lawyer Stuff, and then thereafter probably every summer (I can work from home as easily from Glasgow as I can from Savignac, so that shouldn't be a problem).
*: Savignac les Eglises is called that because, at some point, it used to have 7 churches (as I recall). These days, it has one functioning church and one ruin. I'm not sure where the other 5 are supposed to have been - the wikipedia article is slightly more informative than I remember, but still not that useful.
