Eulogy

Laura squeezed a full life into less time than she thought she had. I can’t fit that whole life into this eulogy. She would have tried to, as someone whose undergraduate dissertation was 18,000 words, when the word-limit was 12,000.

I didn’t know Laura when she was growing up. Home, family, and school in Potters Bar, and then school in Hatfield, together with friends all around, started her down the path she trod: a life of kindness and drive, with a love of history, animals, and the countryside.

Laura missed much of sixth-form, severe ME rendering her bed-bound, and unable to raise her head. She told me of the time her parents drove her around the old haunts of their youth. She loved it, and was so touched that they’d found a way to take her on a trip while she was so ill. Despite her illness, she flew through her exams.

Having gained a place to study maths at Cambridge, she was quickly let down by a maths department which claimed to welcome women from non-public-school backgrounds. In reality, she was academically abandoned. She compensated by building a wonderful circle of friends, often insisting on communal “fun” activities, such as circumnavigating the city, village-to-village, on foot. At night.

Laura then made the huge leap of faith to abandon the maths which had abandoned her, and threw herself into Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Celtic. I was studying this same mainstream subject, and so we met. She excelled, despite not having been an arts or humanities student at school.

At university, Laura volunteered for a home-decorating project for the elderly and disabled, a homeless shelter, and a drama society who put on shows in special educational needs schools and nursing homes. Our friend Dan dropped the keyboard, somehow thereby transposing his accompaniment to Laura’s Oliver! solo far too high for her to sing. She re-formed the Troubadours, and put on concerts of medieval music.

As a Tudor re-enactor, Laura cooked and baked for hundreds. She taught children Elizabethan dance and song with English Heritage at Bessie Surtees’ in Newcastle. She worked with the curator at Corbridge Roman town. She helped Beamish, Woodhorn, and countless other museums in the North East and beyond at the Arts Council and as trustee of the Association of Heritage Interpretation. And she gave her best years to Bede’s World and Wearmouth-Jarrow. Max the dog went to work with her there, and barked at John Prescott.

Laura achieved so much with her writing. She edited a new guide book for Bede’s World, she published an article on Anglo-Saxon music, and she coordinated the enormous documents which formed Wearmouth-Jarrow’s World Heritage bid. She was so proud to work on The Sill’s successful application for funding of eight million pounds, to promote a landscape she had loved since childhood holidays. As an adoring fan of that dreadful Robin Hood film, the loss of the tree at Sycamore Gap hurt her very deeply.

And she loved Falstone and the North Tyne. She met many other local mums, including a surprising and regrettable number of fellow Cockneys, with whom we’ve remained friends ever since. She was a Friends of Greenhaugh School committee member for many years, as well as a Greenhaugh governor, almost single-handedly writing the business plan demanded by the Council to save the school from closure. She briefly played the organ here at St Peter’s. And before Alys and Barnaby arrived to deny us that pleasure, we spent many happy evenings in the Blackcock.

Laura gave everything for her family. She supported me at the start of my career, then with the deaths of my dad, my sister, and my brother, and through Mum’s dementia. She arranged Alys’s volunteering at Kielder Observatory, and has lined up Barnaby to volunteer at Kielder Birds of Prey Centre once he’s older. She got Alys onto the Folkworks summer school, and encouraged Barnaby to perform with the Bellingham and District Dramatic Society.

Laura helped her mum through serious illness, and supported her dad after we so sadly lost Janet a few years ago. She couldn’t do as much as she wanted, and she was so deeply grateful to Brenda and her family for doing as much as her, and then more, despite their living at the other end of the land.

Laura’s ill health forced her to withdraw, one by one, from many of these aspects of her life. She had to stop volunteering, and lost touch with many of her friends. A fall last year prevented her from walking the dogs any more. She railed against it, but knew that her strength was diminishing. These were the necessary sacrifices to allow her to plough her remaining energy into work and family.

She worked right up until her final hospital admission, and was planning to go to another university open day with Alys next month. She was looking forward to Barnaby’s school show Oliver. In her last two weeks, she helped her dad at home after an operation, and she chose the flowers for the pots planted with her mum’s ashes.

Laura died on the feast day of Julian of Norwich, the first woman whose writing survives in English. She would have laughed at the comparison, and promptly dismissed it as both absurd and historically naïve.

Back in 2004, Laura came up with the idea that we should buy a share in a narrowboat. We’ve since had so many wonderful holidays over the years, and Alys and Barnaby have grown up on the canals. We’re due to have our last holiday on board this summer, before she is sold by the syndicate of owners, against our wishes. The boat is called Willow, and we therefore chose a willow coffin for Laura. She’ll therefore get to stay in Willow forever.

The 25th of August this year would have been our silver wedding anniversary. Barnaby and I found a beautiful amethyst ring at the silversmith’s in Hexham a few weeks ago. It mirrored her amethyst engagement ring from Past Times in Eldon Square where she worked when she first moved up to the North East. I didn’t get to give it to her in time, but she’s wearing it now.