Magdalene Mary

This is the hamlet where my Great Auntie Mary spent the majority of her 98 years. The family met here today for her funeral at Broadhembury church, where Mary did flowers and attended services for decades. She moved here from the nearby hamlet of Fenny Bridges, where she and her sisters (including my nana Joyce) were born, when she married a local lad named Maurice. They married in 1943 and he was killed in action (he was a stretcher bearer) in Italy in 1944. His name is on the WW2 memorial just behind where I'm standing to take this picture. She never married again and devoted her remaining 73 years to community life, the church, her family and great and great-great nieces and nephews. She nursed Maurice's father when he was dying in the 1960s, and in the 1980s with Maurice's sister Eileen left the UK for the only time to visit her husband's grave in northern Italy where he's buried alongside several hundred other Brits.

My Dad gave a fantastic and very touching eulogy to a life short on comfort and big on devotion. Mary's birth name was Magdalene, which most of us only found out today. Not surprisingly given the bereavement she suffered young and what was a relatively lonely life in some ways, Mary suffered from serious depression in later years, at times living with my nana and grandad in nearby Honiton where I vividly remember them taking care of her affairs, collecting her pension money when she wasn't able, and keeping it safe in a cupboard next to the fridge. My Auntie Gloria sorted out Mary's move into a care home and the funeral arrangements, and said although it would be nicer to imagine Mary slipping away peacefully, in fact her death was as feisty as her life had been, when she ultimately died fighting as a result of complications from a bowel operation decades earlier.

Mary outlived her three sisters by two decades, dying almost 20 years to the day since my nana. I was wrong in an earlier post to say she was the last of her generation as my grandad's younger sister Hilda is alive in Newton Abbott. When my grandad died in 2005 his regular trip to Broadhembury to visit his sister-in-law was the last time he ventured out before he was admitted to Plymouth Hospital with terminal stomach cancer.

In our family we seem to be introverts or extroverts with no middle ground. Gloria, my Dad's older sister, has a lot of the 'heart on sleeve' DNA, and she is a great laugh. My Mum had to shush us as we bellowed through the peaceful village atmosphere about Sudan, which is where they all thought I was. Gloria's opener to my sister was about how her breasts had shrunk after losing some weight.

After the service at the church and then the crematorium we went to a country pub for a family meal, washed down by lots of lager and Prosecco. Mary may have been horrified at the splurging of money, but we wanted to have as riotous a time as possible, as with no weddings on the horizon, funerals are basically the only excuse for a decent get together.