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As individuals, there are some things we never think of and yet, for others those same topics are virtually all consuming. I was reminded of this the other week reading someone writing on the web about death and saying that his Father who appeared to have died in his early 70’s telling him that he would have liked perhaps 5 more years. Why I asked silently…as I contemplated my childhood.

As a RC boy who served on the altar in the 1950s, I loved funerals with a simplicity of view that nowadays is long forgotten, an acceptance of reality and a natural leaning to what works best for you personally. As a 7 year old junior altar boy, weddings where the “MC” altar boy copped the cash from the Best Man, the “trickle down” was little short of disgusting.

Anyway, back to being an altar boy.

The point was, that for my Grandmother being a proud Irish lady, it was a matter of principle that her two grandsons were up there serving on the altar of the Parish Church for all to see. Perhaps unfortunately, at the age of 6, I did have a tendency to fall asleep during the sermon at evening service (Benediction) and as a result, it became a strategy that I was always wedged between two other altar boys during such services so that I could be given a nudge in the ribs, or pinched, at appropriate moments. Eventually, I was to rise to great prominence as an altar boy but in all truth by unusual means.

Weddings

Weddings always took place on a Saturday complete with a Nuptial Mass which required the services of numerous altar boys and I came to detest them. There were two reasons really, firstly my duties prevented me from going out and playing with my friends, getting terribly dirty and tearing my clothes on tree branches, nettles and all the other things that small boys do. But secondly and to add insult to injury, at weddings it was the custom for the Best Man to give a sum of money to the Head Altar Boy to be shared with all of us but as the Head Altar Boy was a very “Big Boy” being probably 14 compared to our 6-8 years of age, the trickle down amount of money was paltry.

Consequently for me, weddings were a total waste of time because I lost my play time and received inadequate financial compensation for participating in them but funerals, they were another matter and by accident, I became the “Funeral King” for some years.

An Accidental Racket…

The thing to understand is that this was a very working class area so people worked in factories or did labouring, all very physical work up until the age of 65 when they retired. However, theirs had been a hard life and few had hobbies and past times to occupy them in retirement so typically, two years after they retired, they died probably out of boredom and much to the relief of their wives who had never adjusted to them hanging around all day once they had stopped working.

The net result was that there were plenty of funerals to be done and if weddings happened on a Saturday, funerals tended to be Tuesdays and Thursdays and generally when it was raining, I have engraved on my memory that it rained constantly on Roehampton Cemetery. The truly brilliant thing as for any schoolboy was that I would get out of morning lessons and the Head Master just wouldn’t refuse the Parish Priest over the minor matter of my scholastic advancement being effected by missing them.

Team Work

Now a funeral required two altar boys but there were only two other boys in the school who were qualified to do it and were not within two years of their exams and of the three of us, my command of the Latin service was far better than theirs, these being the days of purely Latin services.

Anyway, after the first couple of funerals where we found that quite spontaneously, people would give you some money as a thank you after the service which made funerals at a stroke, far more profitable than weddings, we hit upon an idea to “up the take”.

Clean Linen

Having noted that women tended to cry a lot at funerals so that their handkerchiefs were pretty sodden affairs very quickly and this pre-dated the Kleenex Age of paper tissues, we set about collecting white linen handkerchiefs which we got one of the lad’s sisters to launder for us so that they were absolutely pristine.

Offering a clean handkerchief to a grieving woman at the right moment would inevitably lead to a financial recognition of this “kindness” at the end however, we quickly learned to ignore single women, they had to have a man with them if you were to get a “bung” because it would not have been correct to have been tipped by a woman and “undignified” for her – how times have changed !

Unfortunate Circumstances

Because I had the funeral service down pat so that it would always go smoothly well, apart from the time that the grave edge gave way and the grieving widow almost followed her husband in but that wasn’t my fault, heavy rain the night before and clay soil…anyway that combined with my Latin meant that I almost always got to go and the other two took it in turns.

We had arrived at a method of pooling the money we got and divided it between us though I did get more than the other two taking 40% of the total and the other two taking 30% each but them looking after the expenses of paying off the “laundry sisters” for their time plus them keeping quiet about the scam.

Bolt On Enhancements

However, another opportunity presented itself and we took full advantage.

Quite apart from being good at the job, I seemed to know more about the particular families attending the burials than my two fellow conspirators did however; my two friends had very good singing voices, one could do a stunning “Danny Boy ” whilst the other’s “Ave Maria” was to be marvelled at so, under the right circumstances, an unaccompanied graveside rendition of either seemed to finish things off to everyone’s satisfaction plus produce a rustle of paper rather than the chink of coins.

We kept this going very successfully for some years but unfortunately a combination of a new Parish Priest and our impending 11+, at the age of nine and a half, we were forced to retire from our lucrative racket ! Even now I like to imagine that funerals at St Thomas West Hill, probably deteriorated somewhat with our departure from the event…