I lost someone else this weekend. I have to call him “Cousin Craig”, as though that’s a title, and not because I know any other Craigs, but because for many years that’s how we addressed each other. “Cousin.” Factually correct, but also a term of endearment. Often, he would sign my birthday cards
– always a week late, prompted by mine to him – ‘your favourite cousin’– as if that would absolve him from having forgotten. Again.
To be fair, it did. It amused me. It amused me that but for the coincidence of our birthdays being only a week apart, I would never have had a card from him…but it amused me also that he bothered, after the event.
I was asked to fill in some of the early information for his eulogy and I am surprised at how little I know for sure. We came together and drifted apart and came back together. My visual of our life-pattern is one of a loose plait – that weaving with gaps in between. When I think of him, I have vignettes, literal windows through which I peer at very precise memories. But the thing is: I know that when he thought of me, he also remembered those same moments.
He was twelve years older than me. In the Chinese astrology we are both Tiger. In the Western astrology we are both Scorpio. No wonder we got on. We were programmed to do so.
His father was my Dad’s brother, the fourth of eight, whereas my Dad was the seventh. There was nearly ten years between those brothers, so when I think of Craig as a big brother, despite the age gap, it doesn’t feel at all strange. I don’t remember his Dad very strongly, but I do remember his Mam, my Aunty Marj. She was the most cheerful person I have ever come across. She had a fabulous black country accent and always had a story to tell and something to laugh about. Whenever I remember my Aunty Marj, I remember her at parties…I remember her at home…I remember her laughing.
The first I remember of them as a family they were living in Tamworth. I think Craig would have been a teenager. We had ‘called in’ on the way back from a camping trip. Craig came home from a football match – his beloved Wolves – somewhat bloodied and his first comment was “don’t worry it's not mine”. I don’t remember the whole of that story. If he was a teenager, I would have been quite small. I remember him taking me into his bedroom to show me the view – it was dark, and the view looked down over Birmingham (I guess) – I remember that it was like looking down at the sky – constellations fallen to earth. The fact that he wanted to show it to me is something I never wondered about. I do now.
Craig’s relationship history was a bit rocky – and I suspect this had something to do with his gradual drifting away from most of the family. For some reason, I was the one he remained in touch with. Perhaps our common tigerish approach to the world. We often drifted apart, but we always came back together – and when I lost Clive, he was the one who was always there, making sure I was ok, not just in the immediate aftermath, but through the months and years that followed. I suspect Claire prodded him into some of this, so she gets her share of thanks…but then he returned the favour, making sure I knew when her birthday was, talking about what she enjoyed, how her life
was. I had a feeling that he wanted us to connect, as women, to cover the gaps that he had no understanding of. Of course, I may be making that last bit up.
Memories
Our first real connection, the one I always come back to, and the one he sometimes liked me to talk about and sometimes told me to keep schtum about, was my 18th birthday. Uncle Jim had passed away by then, but Craig and Aunty Marj came up for my family party. He & I sat up talking long after everyone else had gone or gone to bed. I remember we sat on the floor in front of the fire. He told me to ‘live dangerously’. I don’t know what other advice he might have given me that night. ‘Live dangerously’ is the bit that stuck.
I don’t think he meant that I should be a stupid-risk taker, rather that I should not play it too safe, that I should really live, even if that was dangerously. He was telling me to follow my heart, regardless of what anyone else might think of my choices.
He was also the first person I remember speaking of me as a woman, rather than a girl. I grew up slowly, and do not regret that. I was very young at 18 – being told that my kicking off my heels to “stomp onto the floor” was one of the sexiest things he’d seen in a while, was a bit of shock. A good shock, but still. Witness the fact it has stayed in mind. I remember the dress I wore that night. Green and black and stupidly expensive, bought at a shop called 'Mugwump' in Durham. I’d been coveting it for months. It was very much a hippy earth-mother dress…but I wore it with black stockings and stilettoes. Until I needed to dance, obviously.
The song was Lynyrd Skynyrd's Freebird.
A few years later, he came to my brother’s wedding. Mam was going through her mediaeval phase and had the front door of our council house mock-Tudor with fake nail studs and a Lion’s Head knocker: all plastic and not very robust. I remember Craig on the doorstep, with a doorknocker in his hand…Erm…sorry…. Subtlety was not his strong suit. Just as it is not mine.
We didn’t really talk about work, but at one stage he was working for Newey & Eyre. In my head he was Company Secretary, but again, I may have made that up. The only relevance is that he came to East Anglia for a stock-take or an audit or some such corporate thing – and so came to visit.
Clive & I insisted that he stay over in the City and come out with us. It was a Friday; we would go to Whites and then to “the Fez” – The FestivalHouse – or rather Samantha’s that was above it. We told him it was a night-club. Technically, it was. The best in the city, frankly. It didn’t occur to us to tell him what kind of club. He lived in Edgbaston. He socialised in Birmingham. He wasn’t used to the sticks.
So, he turned up, quite naturally, all suited and booted. A tie. I didn’t know anyone who wore a tie voluntarily. The rest of us were in our best Friday-night kit: jeans, t-shirts, hippy-chic and leathers. Whoops!
On the upside, he did love the music!
Music was to be our next connection…it can’t have been very long afterwards. We’d got tickets to see Eric Clapton in Birmingham, and I said I’d blag a bed at Craig’s. Turned out he also had tickets. The bed turned out to be sleeping bags on the floor – but hey! Not the first or last gig to end like that – and he earned his keep that night by pointing out that we were going to the NIA not the NEC! I’m not sure Clive would ever have forgiven me. It was a great gig. Next morning, he left a note and left us sleeping on his living room floor while he went off to work.
Our lives got busy. We caught up now and then. Always a birthday card, not always on time. Always a Christmas card. Random phone calls. Holiday chats. Life chats. Deep conversations. Silliness. Whatever was going on for either of us, he always made me smile. There was always something to make us laugh. That was his Mam in him, I reckon.
He’d moved into personnel management and representation. Sometimes he’d call me at work if he had a client that worked in my sector – could I shed any light on our ‘industry standards’ or ethos. I think I may have done the same to him, when I was up against my own management challenges. No names, no pack-drill, but can I pick your brains.
He came to my Dad’s funeral. All of my family were drifting apart by then. Dying off at one level, and not really connected the next tier down. I found that sad, and still do, but it is the way it is. My Mam was the anchor point for many of the connections, when she went, many of the links just rusted away. No blame – I played my part in it.
Craig came. So did Linda and James and Aunty Mary and Uncle Den – disparate branches of the family – but not so very many, really, given how it used to be. Times change.
I was close to my Dad, so my memories of that day are sketchy. I can see Craig standing in our old kitchen. I can see him saying goodbye in a pub carpark. I can see him smiling. I can see him looking at me seriously and asking me not to talk about the old stuff. So I didn’t.
He did not come to Clive’s funeral. He came later. And invited me back. He phoned a lot in the weeks, months, years after. Sometimes prodded, often not. I called him. We talked about nothing at all. It wasn’t about what we had to say or didn’t have to say. It was about: I’m glad you’re still here, in my life, and thank you. It was about holding space for each other, maybe it was about holding each other. It was about reckoning that we were doing ok.
We went out for meals, him and Claire and me. We met at my beach hut and on his home turf. Claire cooked for us. We went to his local pub and what might pass for mine, if I had one. We walked around my river, in the dark, and stopped at every pub on the way. We walked around his lake and looked at the birds. We walked around my lake: there were no birds. His pace was already slowing, the illness already taking hold. We watched football. We joked. We hugged.
When asked to fill in the gaps…
I discovered I cannot do so. I am shocked at how little I know.
I do not know where he went to school, or how few qualifications he left with. I do know that he then educated himself at what we used to call ‘night school’. I know he was a life-long Wolves fan, that he loved Bowie, that he was more sensitive than most people gave him credit for.
I have only a fragmentary notion of what he did for a living.
I know he liked a bet, a gamble – and that he had a not-real-money fund for playing with.
I know he looked after his Mam. I know he looked after me.
I don’t know what his favourite colour was, or his favourite food, or whether he’d rather swim or cycle or just sit in the sun. I do know he was severely stung by a jellyfish, and it could have killed him. I do know that he loved Disneyland.
I couldn’t tell you the last film he saw and loved, or the last book he read. Or whether he ever went out to watch the meteor showers. I do know sitting in a pub garden listening to live music made him happy.
I do know that he did not like green vegetables – and that nevertheless he could cook!
Above all I know that he cared. I know how much he cared about the people around him, and how far he would go to make sure he did not upset them. I know how much he cared about Claire. I know how much he cared about me.
And if I’m brutally honest, I’m sad at how few people cared as much about him.
I hope he knew I was one who did. I hope this man knew how much I loved him, as a cousin, as an almost-brother, as a person. I hope he understands that my prayer for swift passage was kindly meant and that I will feel the space he has left behind.
