Wray Parish Church, 6 November 2019
I deliver many eulogies in my line of work, but this is one I never imagined I’d be giving when Diana and I moved back up north just a short drive from here early last year, after almost a decade in the West Country, happy to now have the opportunity to renew one of our oldest, closest friendships, with Jim and Glen, and - well it hurts, but yes, I’ll say it, looking forward to our all growing old together. So it’s raw, this occasion. It hurts us all to say goodbye to this beautiful, generous, gentle spirit of a woman so soon, and we feel desperately and pray hard for Jim, Katie and Genie and all the family in your loss.
Many significant moments in life with Glen were shared over a cup of tea, and so it was perhaps inevitable that on a gorgeous sunny Thursday last July, after the four of us had enjoyed a picnic on the lawn of tiny Eldroth Church, in our garden back at our house in Austwick, supping tea, Glen broke the news of her brain tumour - and something shifted in our world……
I say ‘a cup of tea’ - for I love a good strong treacly cup of Yorkshire, myself - but in Glen’s case ‘a cup of tea’ meant a cup of water which had had a tea bag fleetingly introduced to it, I could never understand that.
There were a few things I never quite understood about Glen, thinking about it, and maybe you feel the same way, for she did carry a certain mystique around her, in all sorts of ways. This was endearing. Let’s talk about her name, for instance. Glenys Davies, she was born with - no relation, as far as I know, though I’d be happy if I were. But at some point into her maturity she started to introduce this other persona, Pippy, or Pip, or Pips, or for all I know maybe to some of you: Pipster.
And then to her climbing fraternity she introduced herself as Tim - did no-one ever think to ask why? Jim of course would call her ‘Chap’ but that was their private thing, the likes of which many loved-up couples have. More recently Pippy told Jim that she has started to feel more comfortable about herself as Glen again, which is why she’s mostly Glen or Glenys in this service today - but in your heart and mind whenever you hear me say that name, you’ll be using the name she shared with you.
What other things did she share with you? I’m told that Glen’s siblings will remember her in her younger days as the ironer - as each of the brothers and sisters were given a defined housekeeping role Glen was the one who perfected the fine art of ironing, producing piles of perfectly smoothed and folded clothing and bedding and so on - something she proudly did throughout her life.
What did she share with you? Glen’s daughters tell me that this domesticity never really stretched to cooking - that’s more Jim’s forte. Glen would have a go, having maybe found, or been given, a recipe, and if it worked then she’d simply repeat it ad infinitum. So Katie and Genie talk about Chick Pea Curry, as being ‘the only thing they lived on for a whole school year’…
Some of you are here because Glen - Pip - Tim - shared some form of sporting or outdoor pursuits with you. She was an award-winning young runner, and later an accomplished fell runner, who also variously enjoyed climbing and caving. No wonder she loved this second half of her life spent here in the Forest, the Dales and the Lakes with all that this area offered her in the outdoor life. Glen was always intent on keeping fit, and Katie and Genie tell me that for a long long time wherever she went, maybe visiting relatives on Merseyside or even on holiday, their Mum would take her Cindy Crawford exercise video with her, which she had to work out with every day.
Glen had her musical side, her guitar-playing - an interest she shared with Jim, and for a season she was out and about enjoying performing. She loved her garden, of course. And wherever she was in the outdoors Glen shared with us her love of its creatures: birds and butterflies and all the bugs she’d find in the hedgerows, all the amphibia she’d discover in ponds and streams, moths at night-time, the Great Crested Newt whilst she was out surveying.
Glen had a number of jobs in her life and I always thought her surveying work was remarkable. How she used to spend the small hours of her mornings in the dark in all sorts of weather standing in ditches counting bat numbers, or recording sightings of rare newts on scrubby patches of land earmarked for industrial or commercial development. One afternoon a decade or so ago Glen walked me around Sutton Manor Wood outside St Helens, the site of an old colliery, talking enthusiastically about how a colleague of hers had organised the planting of trees on the old spoil heaps, developing the area so that it was becoming a pleasant, living arena for varieties of flora, fauna and human beings. This work brought great joy to Glen I know.
And then she was a beauty therapist - driving around with her cumbersome massage couch taking up all the room in her car, which she, that tiny woman, had to pull out and then shove back into the car each time she used it - and I wonder if anyone here today has had hairs removed by Glen’s fair hand? I can’t imagine why anyone would want to put themselves through that - when my wife does it to me, taking me unawares, it hurts… badly… I guess that the service Glen provided, with the pleasing scents of aromatherapy, also came with that other great gift of hers - conversation. Her questions to her clients, I imagine, would go beyond the level of ‘are you going anywhere nice on your holidays this year?’ for Glen was - in a nice way, most of the time - inquisitive, keen to get to the heart of what a person was about, and well practiced at the sorts of questions you’d never see coming, you’d never had anyone ever ask you before, which opened out whole new areas of discussion. Or maybe she was just nosey.
I think this side of her character was what brought Glen and Jim together, for they share a natural inquisitiveness about life, the world, its creatures and people, both sharing a scientific perspective, but also a wider, deeper outlook. They first got to know each other, and take a keen interest in each other, on a holiday shared with friends in the Lake District. I wasn’t there, which gives me licence to imagine the scene: one evening, sat by a roaring solid fuel fire, over a cup of tea - if you could call it that, in Glen’s case - them discussing, what would it be, let’s say: the love life of the common beetle; Jim speaking authoritatively based on a Radio Four documentary on the subject he’d recently heard, Glen speculating on the inner life of the beetle, imagining herself into the beetle’s heart and mind to try to understand their emotions and motivations. A conversation which I imagine would have lasted well into the wee small hours.
Glen took pride in her looks, maybe at times she worried too much about them. Katie and Genie smile about her obsession with here fringe: did she suit having a fringe or no fringe? She might change her opinion on this several times a day. And her compromise - brushing just five pieces of hair forward - really didn’t work at all.
And fashion, likewise - she took it seriously, although she could be distracted. There was that legendary day she took herself to Manchester shopping for a dress - and came back with a tarantula….
Recently Jim has dusted off an old shoebox containing, among other things, an old photo of her which she must have kept there because she liked it - a soft-focus portrait of Glen made up to look like, as Jim said, Joanna Lumley as Purdey.
The box is full of Glen’s personal papers - letters and postcards sent to her by others, pages of poems she has written, ranging from some delightful nonsense verse to some teenage-angsty sometimes angry stuff which shows another side of Glen she may have moved on from in later life. There are also some notebooks in which Glen has written short stories. Often they’re observational, seemingly based on real-life encounters she’d had, often the most fleeting or mundane incidents which she’s embellished and embroidered with great skill and entertainment value.
There’s one entitled ‘Omar’ which is about a shifty antiques seller who she refuses to buy from after he guesses her age wrong and - whereas most people guess lower than she actually is - he puts ten years on her. Then there’s the one called ‘Anything Brown’ which invites us to picture Glen sitting in the lobby of an Insurance building waiting for Jim to emerge from the lift, eavesdropping a conversation between colleagues who are that coming weekend sharing a meal together at the home of one of them. He asks brightly, “Is there anything you don’t eat?” to which the other replies, “Anything brown.” At this point Glen - who is hiding her face behind an in-house magazine she’s picked up - imagines the host’s face becoming crestfallen and as his colleague departs she pictures him slumping back upstairs to the office demoralised at the thought of having to come up with a meal that contains nothing brown in it….
These stories get to the heart of something really special about Glen. She loved people, she was fascinated by them. She loved observing, and speculating on people’s lives. She loved engaging and learning through conversation.
In their first home at Hougoumont Grove, Waterloo, Glen started playing a game of postal chess with her next-door-but-one neighbour the elderly and long-since passed Ron. He’d drop a card through her letterbox with his move on it, and she’d respond by posting her next move though his door. After just three moves into their first game, Glen, studying the chess board, said to Jim, “I know three things about Ron now: he doesn’t like losing his Knights; he thought hard about that last move; and his wife’s a little bit jealous of him.”
Ah, Glen, we love you and we’ll miss you so much for all this joy in life, this joie-de-vivre, as they say in Formby. You’ve showed us how to embrace it in all its fullness, and - though I don’t think you were big on legacy or anything oppressive of that sort - surely to honour your memory and continue in your spirit we should learn from your wonderful nature and take every opportunity to live, love and grow, to embrace the earth and its wonderful creatures, to embrace people, and shine.
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