After the short evening service, next day there was the Requiem Mass- and the mourners. It was the custom in Naples, well within living memory, should there be a lack of mourning relatives, to hire an impressive mourner or two, known as a “Zio di Roma”, an uncle from Rome. In Anderston, the equivalent, unhired, were “Cousins from Partick”. At almost all my family’s funerals there were two mourners, exemplary in their demonstration of regret, personifications of sadness at the passing, and, by their presence, ostentatiously indicative of a faith in the next life into which the deceased would, inevitably, pass. The only problem was that none of us ever knew who they were..
One of the last flings of the so-called Native American, in an attempt to avoid meeting modern life and its problems, like hygiene and not torturing people was, in the 1890s, the Ghost Dancers, who believed that by following certain rituals they would be impervious to bullets. The Glasgow equivalent is the Coffin Dancers, professional mourners, whose first daily action is a look at the “Deaths” in “The Herald”. Immediately identifiable in the Forties by the possession of a Crombie overcoat, a garment capable of standing up by itself, and guaranteed to be impervious to a cross-bow bolt, but generally replaced nowadays by an anorak, they are to be found at all Glasgow funerals, while their professional colleagues do their work
Coffin Dancers enjoy funerals. There is the dark thrill of the familiar sombre prayers, the “De Profundis”, when present, always with that familiar increase in volume at “From the morning watch even until night”, then the fade after it, even an actual pat on the light oak of the coffin, as one goes up to Communion, maybe even the whiff of corruption. And, above all, as the coffin is carried out into the fresh air- and a bit of rain’s fine here-the sound of the traffic registering more intensely than usual, there is the ultimate thrill of knowing that , once again, it’s not me this time, and that another coffin has been danced on, an emotional situation described by a literary American undertaker as “the exhilaration of survival”.
From the graveside, the path is normally direct. For the spiritually minded, it is the memory of the deceased into their subconscious , always to be part of their memories. For others, it was to the City Bakeries, or to one of the many hotels which depend on funerals for their existence. The Coffin Dancers have their roots firmly based on real life. They are disciples of Cyril Connolly, who described funerals as ultimately cocktail parties for the over-sixties. One of these locally is known to have carried a knife and fork in his pocket in case of a deficient purvey. They are less concerned to play tag with the Grim Reaper than to make sure, by drifting carefully towards whatever relatives seem to be running things, that they hear the magic invitation to join the family for the funeral breakfast. Among the many problems, not all of them spiritual, which this group has is the regular impact on the digestion of a breakfast preceded by the choice of whisky, sherry or orange juice, then tomato soup, steak pie and Black Forest gateau. And, of course, the worry of whether there may not be another funeral for a couple of days.
. The final movement of the coffin is, of course, to the cemetery. A local motoring sport unaccountably overlooked by satellite and cable is “Keeping Up With The Hearse”. Hearse drivers don’t go any faster than anyone else, no doubt to the astonishment of psychologists , given their cargoes, but it is a fact that trying to keep up with a vehicle going at 30 mph often calls for travelling at a considerably higher rate. If only through superstition, hearses are granted precedence at amber lights; other less immediately identifiable members of the retinue are considered merely to be incompetents..
Conversation for primary mourners on the journey to the cemetery, can be restricted and a little strained. It may deal with new and hitherto unsuspected traffic lights, new and hitherto unsuspected supermarkets, and why JCB drivers expect to be treated like ordinary motorists. Anything, in fact, but the point at which the limo will halt for apparently interminable negotiations, before a movement to a point in the cemetery usually so far from the city that buses in the livery of Edinburgh Public Transport can just be detected in the distance.
The priest always seemed to have got there first, and, with surplice and stole, intoned the eternal verities of the requiem service, often paralleled antiphonally by less religious comments from mourners who have stumbled over concealed graves into damp potholes. Across the gaping rectangle of the grave there will still lie rough wooden boards, earth-stained and in themselves symbolic of ongoing life’s lack of concern. Around it the gravediggers are gathered, twisting their caps like fugitives from Millais’s “The Angelus”. The service finished, there is the distribution of cords, the purple tightly knit, silken or man-made, fibres, ending in a heavy, stylised artificial knot, are attached, all six of them, to strategic points of the coffin.
The distribution of cords was and is rigorously allotted to relatives in terms of closeness, the offer of a surplus cord being regarded as perhaps the ultimate compliment to a friend of the family. The perceptive, cynical teenager may detect here the possibility of post-funerary conflict. They may well be right. But, with symbolic inevitability, there would come that most evocative of funeral sounds- the thump of the knot on the end of the cord on the top of the coffin, on the brass plate, if aimed correctly, and the interment, and the last interface with the deceased was over.
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