Our elderly parishioner of St Maeve’s sends the following:
On a school trip, I had been thrilled by all the sights and sounds of Paris, which , like any visitor there, I have never forgotten. And it was not all visiting churches, although there is one I do remember, Ste Odile’s, I think. It had the parish hall underneath it, the part under the altar being kept for corpses lying overnight for a funeral service next day. I didn’t know if Apache dancers really existed in Paris, but remembering how easily even eightsome reels at parish ceilidhs could degenerate into aerobatics, it could have been that resting in peace in this parish might exclude being struck by a flying brunette. Wakes in Glasgow were handled much better.
When I was about ten, my grandmother McKerrell’s best pal, Mrs Fox, died. All I remember of Mrs Fox, alive, was an always warm and welcoming smile for her pal’s first grandson. Many may feel nowadays- if they’ve never watched some children’s TV cartoons, that is- that I was too young to be exposed to the fact of death. But it happened then, and my grandmother obviously chose that wake with some care. I don’t know now what Mrs Fox died of, but as I came into the room where she lay in her coffin, still with the same smile which I knew so well from afternoon visits and cups of tea, I got the message. Mrs Fox had died; her soul was in heaven; but her body was still here for a while; and she didn’t look at all as if the whole thing had been any kind of a problem.
This was possible, of course, only because her body looked quite unaffected by death. I have since been at wakes where my grandmother would never have let me see the body. My father suffered all his life from what we would now call insecurity. In old age, he was inclined to attribute this not just to seeing such a corpse as a child, but being held over the coffin to kiss it.
The wake was one of the very few Irish customs which survived emigration, although in a much tamer form. Death, given the working and living conditions in nineteenth century Glasgow, was very familiar indeed to the Glasgow Irish. The modern euphemism for a funeral service is to call it “a celebration of the life of…”.An earlier generation with an Irish background may have misunderstood exactly what “celebration” means here, but were perfectly happy with their own version. Because there was a celebratory element, shall we say.
The Irish and the Highlanders were not going to let a twelve hour working day in Glasgow inhibit their sociability. Weddings were important. My great-grandfather was self-employed as a blacksmith, and his lasted for three days, until a misunderstanding about the expression “best man”, the guests simply appearing as they got off work. Funerals were just as important, and could also last , given our climate, for three days. Inevitably there were refreshments, sometimes card schools and , less often than in Irish and Irish-American wakes, a little horseplay.
Enter the Man Who Was Barred From Wakes, who operated mostly in the north of the city, as meek looking a wee man as you would ask for at a funeral. He would move respectfully to the open coffin, break down in a paroxysm of grief over the deceased, and attach a loop of linen thread to a finger. He would then unobtrusively pay out the thread, and sit at the side of the room until late in the evening or early in the morning, pull the cord and shout “Look!” There was a tendency to make for the exits. At one wake, two country cousins, unaccustomed to tenement life, chose to do this by the window, which was unfortunately two stories up.
Death as a social phenomenon made itself known to the Glasgow Irish household in the simplest possible but most irrelevant terms: the trestles appeared. Polished wooden triangular structures, in their very functionalism they indicated an impersonal and therefore terrifying attitude to death, by their irrelevance to everyday life. I mean who needs trestles in a room and kitchen? Morning-coated acolytes would close the room door for a short time-their very intrusion into the family home indicating in itself the presence of another world- and then the coffin was open to inspection.
Until quite recently in Glasgow, before it became the custom to have the body remain in the undertaker’s parlour, the old, traditional wake was statutory. A running buffet, at morning rolls on corned beef, cheese, tomato and scrambled egg sandwiches level was kept going for a day or two, and an extensive range of alcoholic refreshments, none of this doing any harm at all, and ,if nothing else, keeping the relatives of the dead person distracted from their grief.
The evening rosary was the watershed of the evening, but eventually it would be time for the “screwing down”. When the final rosary had finished, there was the first movement of the coffin, which was to the church, where it normally lies overnight. In a few Glasgow parishes, where there was a church with a bell-tower, there was a knell, and a procession behind the hearse. At any rate, there would be the moment when the coffin would be hoisted on the shoulders of the chief mourners, its edges remarkably sharp on the shoulders, the close contact with it sometimes bringing a quite powerful whiff of corruption, then the slow movement up the aisle to where the coffin would lie before the altar.
This could involve a movement up external steps in the older churches, always a crisis point for the undertaker’s helpers. I don’t know of any occasions where the mourners actually dropped the coffin, but there is one case where the professional integrity of the undertaker was found wanting in the most spectacular way: the bottom vertical panel fell out, and the shrouded corpse slid out, like some latter day Lazarus, to bump its way down the stairs, for a last unexpected visit to the main road, through a crowd of instantly and spectacularly prayerful mourners.