Monday 15th May 2017
Mrs Bone, the last of our old retainers, has died ay 91. She was seven years in the nursing home, always knowing us but often variable as to where exactly she was.
Her funeral followed quite swiftly at the crem, Friday last.
At Christmas we couldn’t visit her as usual because the Gay Mother wasn’t well (same cold as the Queen). We could have gone in February or even March but idleness prevailed or a feeling that she wouldn’t have noticed anyway whether we’d visited or not.
But maybe she did. Maybe she died in agony that her old employer never came. Although the Gay Mother did go in January.
Anyway she never got her Christmas present from me.
The Gay Mother was present at the crem. She went in by taxi because of road works nearby. In the end quite a few attended. It was feared that Mrs Bone’s world had gone on before, but it hadn’t quite. In truth she never courted popularity and was given to bizarre outbursts of hostility even in her prime but her work was excellent. The dining room floorboards under the windows after her attentions with the Mansion wax! She’d been trained in a farmhouse from 14. She did the drawing room on Fridays – you couldn’t believe it was the same room afterwards, so did it purr with new life and luxury.
‘New Every Morning’ was sung at her funeral but really it was a farewell to one who’d gone many years before. Afterwards Mrs Bone’s son, who rose beyond the village, drove the Gay Mother on to her next appointment, in a last gesture of service to the Gentry perhaps. She’d planned a taxi but Mrs Bone’s son drove her instead.
How will you repurpose Mrs. Bone’s Christmas present?
I find that it is a box of miniature hand creams from Italy. Maybe of interest to ladies as we career about Scotland in a van next week… To have luxury hands will surely be a comfort
That’s obviously what I was hinting at. Or give them all to me, as I have very hard hands.