A school letter for Miriam having taken leave for Grandpa’s Funeral

     Would you believe it was Valentine’s Day the ould feller chose to shuffle of his mortal coil? He certainly loved Queenie, tho’ she gone five or is it six years before - thank the Lord she was given time to teach Miriam the meaning of ‘pink’. She had waited a long time for a grand-daughter, and didn’t she rejoice in it so?
     So Grandpa got away on Valentine’s Day - slipped his cable, crossed the bar, cut loose on the ebb tide- what you will, but Miriam was in Foreign Parts (at your behest) so we held the necessary over until Monday 3rd of March, and didn’t we do him proud? No Coldstreamer would complain at the send-off we gave to the demon barber of Purbright Camp. I polished his brass, and and we gave him his bugles and drums, and a slow march, and it was a hero’s farewell, and I didn’t begrudge him at all.
     But you don’t know- this was in the frozen wastes of North Yorkshire, where the wind hits heavy on the border line (as Dylan has it) and tho’ we gave him no wake, the darkness and the lateness set in early. And so, the grand-daughter of Coldstream Guardsman Harold George Darwent Carter, Gentlemen’s Hairdresser, barber to the soldiers of his Britannic Majesty, King George the Sixth, did not get back to Norfolk until well into Tuesday 4th of March.
     Now what we have to ask ourselves, you and I, Maggie, is this. When we each breathe our last, when we are card indexed, crated and consigned, will we be favoured by the dalliance of even one such pink, gold spirit of an angel of a girl as Miriam? If, as those doughty, dark overcoats take the strain on the straps, and lower us to our rest, beneath the hallowed sod, if just one such shining child pauses to drop even one tear into our grave, will not our passing be honoured beyond princes?