The Thoughts and Happenings of Wilfred P

2

Mister Wilfred Price, Purveyor of Superior Funerals


The following morning Flora Myffanwy Edwards was in her bedroom bending down tucking in her bedsheet when she heard an ominous thud downstairs; there was a moment of silence before her mother’s voice rose up.

‘Decimus? Decimus!’ Then, ‘Flora! Come quick. Decimus!’

Alarmed by the anxiety in her mother’s voice, Flora stood up straight. She ran swiftly down both flights of stairs, one hand on the banister, the other on the wall to balance herself. In the hallway her mother was leaning over her father, who was slumped on the red hall rug, lying on his stomach.

‘He fell. He was talking, then he fell. He was right as rain, telling me about a carthorse he’d seen with a lame leg,’ her mother gabbled by way of explanation, ‘then he collapsed, just like that. Dihuna! Bryn. Dihuna! Wake up!’

Flora looked at her father lying prostrate. Her mind was suddenly extremely clear.

‘I’ll get a doctor.’ She stepped carefully around her father. She must sprint to the post office. No, she would cycle; it was quicker. She dashed round the back to the outhouse, jumped on her bicycle and set off. The rubber pedals were heavy at first, resisting her weight, but once she cycled up the incline it would be downhill, and then she would go much faster.

At the post office, she flung open the garden gate, crying out, ‘Mr Lewis – I need to use the telephone!’

The post-office master appeared from round the side of his house holding a cluster of India rubber bands. ‘What is it, Flora?’

‘It’s Father, he’s fallen.’

Mr Lewis, sensing Flora’s panic, immediately opened the red front door of the Stepaside post office, which was a one-roomed building tacked on the side of his cottage, and rushed to the wall telephone. He dialled one, nought, nought.

The telephone rang sonorously. Eventually a voice answered, ‘Operator speaking.’

‘Operator, it’s Bryn Lewis.’

‘Morning, Bryn, how are you then? I’ve heard they’ve put central heating in the post—’

‘Doctor Hedley. Immediately, please.’

‘Doctor Hedley’s not here, he’s gone to the British Empire Exhibition in London. There’s no doctor in Stepaside, you’ll have to get the doctor from Narberth.’

‘Narberth? But that’s almost seven miles away!’ exclaimed Flora, overhearing.

‘I’m connecting you right now.’ Flora heard a telephone bell reverberate feebly in the distance. She waited long seconds for someone on the other end to lift the receiver.

‘This is Narberth 102.’

‘We need a doctor. A doctor straight away,’ stated Mr Lewis. ‘At White Hook. On Cliff Road.’

Mrs Reece knew to write the address exactly.

‘Is that Kilgetty?’ she enquired.

‘No – further. Stepaside.’

A portentous voice came down the line. ‘This is Doctor Reece speaking.’ The doctor had taken the receiver from his wife. ‘What seems to be the matter?’

‘It’s Decimus Edwards of White Hook, Cliff Road, Doctor. Tell him, Flora.’

‘He’s fallen,’ said Flora urgently into the receiver.

‘Is he breathing?’

‘I think so.’

‘I will drive over promptly in my motorcar. Cliff Road, you say? White Hook. Stepaside. Wait outside the gate for me.’



When Flora reached White Hook, she pitched her bicycle against the gatepost, pinned back a curl of her brown hair and turned to the direction of Narberth. The exertion of cycling had tired her, her back was damp with sweat so that her cotton blouse was sticking to her skin and her hair was loose and dishevelled. She listened for the sound of a motorcar. Come on, Doctor, come on. She listened, but she couldn’t hear a car.

It began raining hard so Flora moved to stand under the branches of the cedar tree. What if her father was really sick? What if something had happened to him? No, he was fine. He had fallen, that’s all, she told herself. Probably he had banged his head and was unconscious. She would stay calm. He must have tripped on the stair carpet – she did it often herself, catching her foot on the corner. Of course her mam would have been frightened but, by now, he would have come round, her mam would have helped him into his armchair in the parlour, made a cold compress from a flannel and put it on his forehead, perhaps holding it to his temples as well.

Soon she would be able to have some lunch, warm soup and a leek pasty, then perhaps go to the cove and find some shells to photograph. Father would be mortified that she had called the doctor. ‘Dim byd oedd e, yr holl ffws am ddim,’ he would say. ‘All that fuss for nothing.’ He’d have a quiet rest of the day and a nasty bump, then no doubt be up and about tomorrow, back in the forge, levelling horses’ hooves and nailing on shoes.

Suddenly she saw a dark green Austin Seven approaching. Flora started waving desperately. ‘Doctor! Here!’ The car slowed and Flora pointed the way up the drive, towards her family home. At the top of the drive, Dr Reece stopped the car by the kitchen window and stepped out. Flora was startled by how tall and severe he looked.

‘This way, Doctor. You came quickly,’ she added gratefully. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing, but thank you for coming anyway.’

Dr Reece nodded, unsmiling. At the porch he stopped, wiped his feet on the mat and said, ‘After you,’ so Flora entered her home first, walking hurriedly through the kitchen and into the hall. Her father was still there on the red rug in exactly the same position but her mother was no longer with him.

‘Mam?’ she called. ‘The doctor is here. Mam?’

Mrs Edwards emerged from the parlour, eyes rimmed red; she was tucking a handkerchief into her cuff and there was the sharp smell of ammonia in the air. She must have been inhaling her smelling salts.

‘Good morning, Doctor Reece.’ Mrs Edwards spoke formally to the doctor who was already down on one knee by her husband’s head. The doctor was searching for a pulse in his patient’s wrist and simultaneously studying his pocket watch. He then opened his doctor’s bag and brought out a stethoscope.

‘Would you mind helping?’ he asked. Flora moved forward, her mother hesitated. ‘I need to turn him on to his back.’

Flora, Dr Reece and her mother carefully rolled her father over, Flora holding his head in both hands, and he sighed loudly as they laid him supine. Flora’s heart skipped at the sound of his breath, though his face was almost mauve.

The doctor leaned over, swiftly unknotting her father’s tie and undoing his shirt, accidentally ripping free a button. The button fell on the tiles and bounced a few times before coming to a standstill. Dr Reece pressed the stethoscope to her father’s chest and listened intently. The room was hushed while he concentrated, his eyes shut. As he got up from his knees, he picked up the small bone button, offered it to Flora and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

She rushed forward, taking the button from the doctor’s hand. ‘I can easily sew it on later,’ she said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘I can easily sew on the shirt-button later, it won’t take a moment.’

‘No, I’m sorry, your father has passed away.’



‘Could it not wait until tomorrow night, Da?’ Wilfred asked, putting down a half-eaten pie on the Daily Express crossword and finally taking his mind away from Grace and his guilt over hurting her. He sat back in the chair and watched his da ready himself to leave. It was dark outside and rain was drumming heavily on the windowpane. His da would get soaked – absolutely drenched – within a few minutes of going out of the back door despite his felt hat, fustian coat and the heavy leather gloves sticking out of the pockets. At least it wasn’t cold.

‘You could always dig tomorrow night,’ Wilfred suggested, stretching his arm along the back of the chair.

‘No,’ his da replied, tying some twine around his coat for a belt. ‘If it rains again the ground will be waterlogged.’ He was right: it rained frequently in South Wales. ‘No point putting it off. Got to be done. Should be home by around four in the morning,’ his da said, adjusting his hat.

The grave was for a chap from right out Stepaside way. He’d keeled over yesterday, just like that. Wasn’t ill. Been nothing wrong with him at all, as far as his wife could see. Out of the blue, she’d told Wilfred when he’d gone to collect the body on Sunday evening. Must have been a stroke.

‘The deceased was five foot seven, or thereabouts,’ Wilfred stated, taking a bite of steak and kidney pie, ‘and portly around the middle.’

‘I’ll dig a standard size grave, then,’ his da replied, while looking around for his muffler, ‘maybe slightly larger girth. The Reverend Waldo Williams said to dig next to the fenced plot belonging to the Nicholas family.’

‘Nice spot. Crowded part of the graveyard, mind,’ Wilfred remarked, brushing crumbs off the newspaper.

‘You’re right. I’ll take the oilcloth and put it over Edward Thomas and his son’s headstone to stop it getting splattered with mud.’

‘But Da, you’ll be digging up to your knees in water once you’re a few feet down.’

‘Aye, aye,’ his da replied, pulling the end of his muffler out from under a tin of Smith’s potato crisps.

Wilfred sometimes wished his father didn’t dig graves for a living. Funerals, like this one on Thursday for a man in his late fifties, the same age as his da – and surely someone’s father – brought it home to Wilfred. His father might catch something on his chest digging in hinderable rain like this. Wilfred knew from his work that you could never be too careful with a cough. On a night like this he would have liked to see his da inside by the fire. But his da wouldn’t be hearing of it.

‘They need me,’ he would say. ‘And I need them.’



It was the day of the funeral. Flora looked at her shoes – they were polished to what her father would have called ‘within an inch of their life’, and were reflecting tangents of light. Her father had always expected gleaming shoes, probably because of his days in the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Her silk stockings were new, her hair was finger-waved and she was wearing an ebony-coloured blouse that was stiff with starch. They were her silk crêpe mourning clothes which she’d last worn for her fiancé’s funeral, that unbearable, soul-destroying day six years ago.

Flora was waiting in the kitchen with her mother for the funeral director to come from Narberth at half past two. It would make sense to wait for the undertaker in the hall but since Daddy had passed away – so abruptly and unexpectedly – in the hallway, neither she nor her mam wanted to linger there so instead they were huddled by the gas stove.

‘Have you got everything?’ her mother asked, warming her hands. ‘You won’t be taking your camera with you?’

‘No, of course not,’ Flora replied, though she felt almost naked without her Kodak Brownie.

Flora clicked open her handbag. She had two linen handkerchiefs with her. At the funeral service for her fiancé, Albert, she had only taken one hanky – her best one, naturally, the one edged with her grandmother’s handmade lace – and by the end of the service it was sodden and useless. That was when she’d realized lace handkerchiefs weren’t only genteel accessories for ladies but necessary and hardworking objects that helped to keep one respectful and one’s grief discreet. All her handkerchiefs had a small, cursive F embroidered in sea-green on them – her grandmother’s work again. It was as if the tears dabbed into her handkerchiefs were named and labelled.

‘A stiff upper lip for Daddy’s sake,’ her mam encouraged.

‘Yes, Mam,’ Flora said, moving closer to her mother. Flora felt it was more a case of a numb upper lip, numb face, numb – everything. She had been so utterly shocked to see her daddy there, dead, in the hall on Sunday morning, lying on the red rug and the geometric tiles, that she hadn’t been able to feel anything else since. She’d gone through the motions of getting up, washing herself, dressing, eating – at her mam’s insistence – small amounts at each meal but really she could barely swallow water, never mind eat food. Somehow she’d done what she needed to do for five, dazed days.

‘Daddy would appreciate the effort you’ve made with your shoes,’ her mam commented, her voice quavering.

Flora checked the time on the kitchen clock. People spoke about funerals honouring the dead. Flora, though, only wanted the funeral service to be over with because the day felt so intolerable. She knew there would be a service, a burial, and high tea afterwards but she felt benumbed and was expecting nothing from the day.

‘He’ll be here in a minute. He knows the way,’ her mam said anxiously.

The undertaker had come immediately to collect the body, so soon it was almost unseemly. Flora had been unable to go downstairs to meet him – she was too upset and had told her mam to say she was resting in her room. A few days later the funeral hymns had been chosen: ‘When I Survey the Wondrous Cross’ and – Daddy’s favourite – ‘Bydd Myrdd o Rhyfeddodau’, then the order of service had been printed on thick white card with a black rim. She imagined the grave had also been dug. Finally, she had hand-washed her best blouse which she had last worn, utterly heartbroken, in 1918, and now again.

‘I thought we would grow old together,’ her mother confided plaintively to the quiet room.

‘Don’t fret, Mam.’

‘I didn’t think it would come to this.’

The mantelpiece clock chimed half past the hour. At the sound of the car’s tyres approaching the house, Flora and her mother went through the porch. A moment before she left the house Flora pulled her veil from her hat and placed it across her face. All I have to do, she thought to herself, is get through this day.



Wilfred opened the back doors of the car for the two women who were waiting on the doorstep.

‘Good afternoon, mam. Good afternoon, miss,’ he intoned, doffing his top hat. His apprentice-master, Mr Auden, had taught him that, drummed into him the importance of good manners. ‘A funeral director is always polite,’ he’d state. ‘No effing and blinding around a corpse, Wilfred.’ Mr Auden would say it like an aphorism every time he settled into the driving seat and revved the hearse engine, the coffin in the back, before they pulled out of the garage and drove to another funeral. ‘No damn and bloody blasting around the dead, Wilfred.’

He waited, standing to his full height while the two ladies quietly came forward. Mrs Edwards and a younger woman – that must be her daughter – stepped into the motorcar. His eyes were drawn towards her. Wilfred noticed the younger woman’s well-shaped ankles in delicate stockings. Her head was slightly lowered and Wilfred couldn’t see her face clearly because she was wearing a black veil and, besides, he could only glance as it would be unkind to look closely into the face of someone who was so newly bereaved. Nevertheless, Wilfred noticed beneath the fine netting of her veil the elegant lines of her profile: her graceful brow and her delicate neck. Her hand was to her throat, touching her jet beads, and he saw her slender golden arm. The young woman had the straitened air of someone in great shock, and beneath her veil her face glistened with the wet of recent tears. Wilfred was used to this, but it never failed to move him.

At Mrs Edwards’s request, Wilfred was to drive the chief mourners to the funeral and, as Wilfred didn’t have a car – apart from the motorized hearse – Mrs Edwards had offered the use of her late husband’s motorcar. Though unfamiliar with the car, Wilfred deftly swung the vehicle in a wide arc so it was facing the opposite direction then he peered in his driving mirror to check that the two ladies were settled before embarking on the slow drive to the funeral. The younger woman was beautiful, arrestingly so – and looked familiar to him. He felt as if he had seen the softness of her face before, but couldn’t think where. That abundant pile of brown hair, her quietude … was he acquainted with her? He tried to think. Surely he would have remembered. He could not ask her now, of course, that would be the greatest impropriety, but he felt he knew her.

Wilfred glanced in the mirror again. He saw that the young woman looked pink and hot from the heat and an inner anguish. These people, he thought as he drove, this endless parade of people journeying to the newly dug grave of the person they loved. Sometimes Wilfred wanted to stop the car and turn around and reach out to his passengers, to this young woman here, and touch them very lightly on the wrist, that place above the wrist where a person’s forearm tapers and which Wilfred thought seemed a vulnerable part on a human body. Wilfred imagined stretching out his hand and gently touching the narrowness in the forearm and looking into his passengers’ eyes. Usually they had red, swollen eyes. He imagined saying something. What would he say, though? It would be a difficult moment for the speaker and the listener. He could say, ‘It will be all right.’ But that would be audacious. If Wilfred spoke, the person might be offended, might not believe what Wilfred said. But it would be all right in a way, Wilfred knew.

He had, of course, never reached out to any of his broken passengers.



Flora was feverish beneath her lace veil. She knew her cheeks were red and she needed to blow her nose. She removed her gloves to look in her beaded handbag for a handkerchief. Her mam was bearing up well, sitting upright and looking straight ahead. Her mam was older though, forty-seven. Middle-aged people, Flora had learned, knew death happened, were calmer around it, less shocked, unlike the young who didn’t believe in its existence until they experienced it for themselves.

They drove majestically past Saundersfoot railway station. Flora felt impatient to get to St Andrew’s Church. I want to go and I don’t want to go, all at the same time, she realized. This restlessness was grief. She couldn’t keep her hands still, kept reaching for the beads of her French jet glass necklace. Really, there was nowhere in the world she wanted to be, if it was a world without her father. And Albert.

The car turned regally around the corner and the Pembrokeshire coast came swinging into view. She had often photographed this vista. And there was the cove. Flora had come here with her father many times when she was a small girl. He had shown her how to build a dam and block the stream. Together they would place flattish pebbles one on top of the other, making several rows until a small pond grew. They watched and waited until the pebbles were eventually dislodged and the wall broken by the force of the water. For a long time, building a dam in the stream had been Flora’s favourite game. On Sundays after St Issell’s Chapel and before Sunday dinner she would ask her father to take her to the cove and, if the weather was clement and he thought the stream wouldn’t be too icy, they would walk down the hill together and spend an hour or so splashing in the water. That innocence felt a long time ago to Flora now. It was painful to remember.

Flora turned her gaze away from the window. The undertaker, she noticed, was looking at her in the driving mirror. Perhaps it was her grief – she was crying – perhaps he was discomforted by that. But he was an undertaker, he must be used to grief. She adjusted her veil. He glanced at her again. Their eyes met. He had blue eyes – dark blue, watchful eyes – the eyes of a man who observed life and saw death. And he was looking at her. Flora stared down at the palms of her hands. This was unexpected. A man was giving her the glad eye on the way to her father’s funeral. And what was even more shocking to Flora was that she didn’t altogether mind.



‘Excuse me, Miss Edwards, if you wouldn’t mind coming this way, down the nave,’ Wilfred said in a confident voice, once the service was over. He put a guiding hand a few inches from the young woman’s back. She followed him towards the west doors at the end of the church, her skirt rustling and her heels clicking on the mosaic of tiles. He noticed a perceptible vitality in her step, and there was something intangible about her that inspired him, as if her beauty gleamed from her. She had beautiful, enchanting posture. That’s what he liked about women, their grace, the poise with which they moved. It wasn’t true of all women but it was true of most; they moved in a way that men couldn’t. Except perhaps male ballet dancers, like that Russian chap Nijinsky in the newspaper.

The church was dim and musty. Other mourners collected their service sheets, neatened their ties and adjusted their hats, but Wilfred was less aware of them than he would usually be as he walked beside Flora to the end of the aisle. He glanced at her. It would be ridiculous, he thought, to say a woman moved like a deer: that would mean she skipped on all fours, but Wilfred could understand, looking at Flora’s slender figure, what people meant when they said a woman had a deer-like grace.

At the last pew she stopped for a moment and rested, as if to gather her strength. She lifted her eyes up to him as if she sensed he was thinking about her. He looked at her gentle, sad eyes and warm mouth, and smiled consolingly. The young lady had deepset brown eyes and a startled look, as if she had been hurt, like the shocked eyes of an animal caught in a trap. But perhaps that was because she was grieving now. Then he did something he never expected to do as an undertaker; he put his hand on her bare forearm for a moment, looking down at her golden skin.

As they were walking along the uneven gravel path in St Andrew’s churchyard, Wilfred said in a low, earnest voice, ‘It would be best if you stand close to the grave and then it will be that bit easier for you to drop your handful of earth in.’

Wilfred wanted the funeral to go well. No hitches was his constant aim. A hitch was never a good thing at a funeral. His job was to oversee the small details so that the family, lost in the enormity of their grief, would be free to mourn their loved one.

‘It’s a windy day,’ the undertaker continued. ‘If you move forward you will be better able to hear the Reverend Williams speaking.’ Wilfred liked to give advice to his mourners, to ‘help them’, as Mr Ogmore Auden used to say, ‘get the most from the day’. That was true, Wilfred knew. A guiding word here or there, even the most obvious advice, was often needed – people at funerals sometimes looked so lost they appreciated being shown the way.

They reached the newly dug grave with its neat corners and pile of displaced, raw earth lying beside it.

‘Just by here, now,’ Wilfred said to Flora. ‘There we are then,’ he added, placing his hand gently and close – very close – to the curve of her back.



‘Thank you again, Mr Price, it’s been an exemplary service.’ Mrs Edwards shook Wilfred’s hand. Once the funeral was over, he had driven Mrs Edwards and her daughter home as carefully and surely as he had driven them to the funeral earlier in the day. They were all standing on the gravel outside the front door of White Hook.

‘Not at all, Mrs Edwards,’ Wilfred replied, bowing slightly and feeling obsequious.

‘And a bright day too! My husband would have appreciated that. He always liked a sunny day – it helped if the horse’s hooves were dry, made it that much easier for him than the rain.’ Wilfred knew that Mrs Edwards’s jollity was forced. He was used to the bereaved trying too hard.

‘Yes, Mrs Edwards, we were most fortunate with the weather. Most fortunate,’ he added self-consciously. Wilfred knew there weren’t many things more desolate than a funeral in the freezing cold and pouring rain. Actually it had been a surprisingly blowy day – bright but blustery – though it was always best to agree with the recently bereaved. Mr Ogmore Auden had made a rule of it: ‘Agree with them, Wilfred, or there’ll be a to-do about the bill.’ Wilfred understood why. People who were grieving were in so much pain they could easily be argumentative.

Flora Myffanwy dallied with the button on the wrist of her glove, listening to the exchange. Inside the silk-lined gloves her hands were dirty because the earth she had scattered over the grave while the Reverend was intoning, ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,’ had been sodden – almost mud. The sludge had seeped under her nails, forming brown half-moons, and her fingers would hold the scent of the earth. She imagined when she was an old lady being constantly stained with earth because she probably would spend all her days gardening and her hands would get dirty. That’s what many old ladies did, tended to the earth and covered it with flowers, before eventually being laid down in it. Suddenly Flora felt spent; it had been a long day.

She turned to look at the undertaker: his black hair shone brightly with hair oil, his side parting was exact. He is a man, she thought, who visits the barber often. In her mind’s eye she framed him. He would make an interesting – and handsome – subject for a portrait photograph. He was broad, and taller than her, but the same age, she would suppose – a little older perhaps. Twenty-seven? Perhaps twenty-eight. He was wearing a crisp white shirt, and his sideburns were precisely trimmed and he was carefully and closely shaved, and she imagined that gave an unnatural smoothness to his cheeks. It was a long time since she had touched a man’s face. There were Albert’s stubbly cheeks, scratchy like the corn stubble they had laid in that last August of his life, but Albert was blond, sandy-coloured. This man – the undertaker – would have dark stubble.

The undertaker was looking at her again, offering his outstretched hand. They shook hands. His hand was warm and strong, not cold and flaccid like that of a corpse, which was what her father’s fingers had been when she kissed them before the lid had been placed – presumably later on nailed down – on the coffin.

‘It has been a pleasure,’ Wilfred said to her. Flora noticed her mam’s slight surprise at his choice of words, but Flora knew what Wilfred meant.



Wilfred sat down heavily on the wooden seat, his thick woollen trousers settling around his ankles. It was always a relief to use the lavatory after a funeral. He put his feet wide apart and opened up the Narberth & Whitland Observer. He tried reading: PATIENT NOT ADMITTED TO HOSPITAL. WAS THE PROCEDURE CORRECT? The unusual occurrence of a patient who was sent to the County Hospital for an operation and then was sent back home – but he couldn’t concentrate on the story. His mind was on that young lady – he had heard her mother call her Flora. That was a nice name. He couldn’t imagine anyone called Flora being horrible.

He would like to see her again. But how? He turned the front page of the newspaper absentmindedly. If he was truthful with himself he hadn’t been able to stop looking at her, although he was certain that she hadn’t noticed. He had needed to be attentive to the funeral proceedings; indeed, he had kept his eye on the ball, but it was also true that, while the Revd Waldo Williams had delivered his eulogy and when Flora – he liked saying her name in his head – and when Flora had been seated in the pew in front of him with the other chief mourners, Wilfred had had what Mr Ogmore Auden once referred to as ‘lustful thoughts’.

‘Young men’, Mr Ogmore Auden had announced confidently as Wilfred was cleaning some gummy sawdust off the saw-blade, ‘are prone to lustful thoughts. Wilfred, do not be prone to lustful thoughts.’

Wilfred had looked up. ‘No, Mr Auden.’

‘Refrain from dwelling on thoughts of a lewd nature while in the presence of the deceased. Especially when using a sharp tool.’

‘Yes, Mr Auden.’ Wilfred had been using the new motorized saw when Mr Ogmore Auden had made his wholly unexpected pronouncement. He was seventeen at the time.

Wilfred shook the newspaper to flatten the creases and rested his elbows on his knees. Maybe Flora went to the tea dances or fancy-dress parties in the Queen’s Hall; perhaps he could meet her again accidentally – well, accidentally on purpose – at a dance. Lord knew it would look better than meeting her at a funeral. But she wouldn’t go dancing, Wilfred realized, because she was in mourning. Weeks, months of misery, drawn blinds, draped mirrors and plain dark clothes in lifeless crêpe. It would probably be autumn, he thought sadly, before Flora would be in her glad rags and doing the Foxtrot or the Twinkle. He liked the thought of Flora dancing, and lingered on it. Then he wondered what she would be like when she laughed.

He glanced at the Notes of the Week column. Opening the Narberth Nurses Fête last week Miss Lewis of Trefilan paid quite a neat little compliment to our town, which she described as ‘a wonderful place’. Her eulogy was inspired by the remarkable fact that in connection with nursing services the town raises between £400 and £500 yearly, which we should imagine stands unique in Pembrokeshire.

Then it occurred to Wilfred: he could call at White Hook with the invoice for the funeral. He decided to do it as soon as possible, but not too soon or it might look as if he was being greedy or avaricious. Though it might be better to appear avaricious than lustful. But he was a man too, not just an undertaker! And at that thought, Wilfred stood up.

There were no newspaper squares again on the nail in the wall. By damn, that was awkward. It was difficult to remember to rip up old newspaper when there was a funeral to organize. Both he and his da always forgot to tear up old copies of the Radio Times or the Narberth & Whitland Observer. Wilfred would have to use a piece of today’s Observer, so that when his da sat down by the fire this evening to read the paper and found the centre pages missing, he would be under no illusions as to what Wilfred had done with it.