Funeral St Bride's Wentloog

I was at a funeral yesterday. Going back home is always a little troumatic I find. I grew up in Cwmbran and the nearest boy of my age on the street where I lived, lived three doors up. His father was older than mine (and had fought in the war) but both worked at Lucas Girling (though my father left when I was 10). Stephen and I were thrown together from babyhood. Sadly when we were 6 Stephen's mother left home and we lost touch a little not really reconnecting again until we were 9 or 10. He is the one who invited me to the church where we were both converted and baptised. I was his best man when he married Fay, still quite young, and he reciprocated some years later when i married Eleri. Unlike me, he has continued to live in the same general area. He is an accountnat.

This month his dad, Uncle Eric, died at the grand age of 95. He was buried in the graveyard of St Bridget's,.St Bride's Wentlooge near Newport, where he grew up and where my friend Stephen lived a short time. It is a distinctive low lying part of the country. It makes me think of the Kent Marshes in Dickens. We were only about 25 present at the church, where we sang Hark the herald and Abide with me with food served later at the Ashbridge in Cwmbran. I enjoyed being with my sister and talking to some old college friends and members of Stephen's family.

Uncle Eric was a distant figure for me. My main memory is of him coming to our house weekly on a Thursday night to pay my mother the rent she had paid for him. It always seemed to be during Top of the Pops. I spent a lot of time when he was out at work in his house in the summer holidays as a teenager jumping down the stairs or over the hedge (they moved immediately around the corner and we moved across the road when sisters came along but we were still only yards from each other's homes). We listened to Uncle Eric's records (Last train to San Fernando, Trains and boats and planes, Ernie, etc) adn soemtimes Stephen would try to horrify us with his dad's spare glass eye. As was said in an excellent eulogy, he was a conservative man of humour who loved to tell stories. It was right to honour him and his good deeds. Whatever age you are it is never good to lose your father.