Tribute to Rosamund May Pendergast

Martin Pendergast gave the following Funeral Address at the funeral of his mother Rosamund on 8 November 2013

The readings in today’s funeral Mass tell us how the significance of the things we do, not least for others, will follow us in the memory of others, even the eternal mind of God. Yet at the same time, there is a paradox that the grains and seeds which we plant must die before they can bear such fruit. In the midst of life we are in death, facing deaths of relationships, death of a future we held to be precious, but we are also in moments of resurrection, experiences of rising above much that would drag us down in all sorts of situations, moments of freedom from all those tangles of human experience which prevent us from growing into the full stature of all that we are called to be as human beings. Believers may well clothe this with the language of faith or spiritual reflection, but we are called to recognise that this is a common human experience and not just the preserve of those who hold religious beliefs.

Many people of various faith traditions cherish a belief that the One who is called God knows every hair on their head and calls each person by name with unique human dignity. Well, here lies a problem! I have never known anyone to be known by as many names as my mother. I presume that on arrival at the pearly gates, St. Peter, or even God, has a definitive names-list to help her entry into heaven.

She was born on Gibraltar, on the 30th of August 1924, then the Feast of St. Rose of Lima, to May Angela and Albert Edward Hudson, living there until she was three years old. In spite of its colonial history Gibraltar was very much a Spanish-speaking grass-roots community then; indeed she hardly spoke any English when she arrived back in England, but unlike her mother, her own Spanish was soon forgotten. My grandfather was stationed with the Kentish Buffs Regiment and my grandmother was Cook to the Garrison Colonel-in-Chief. Mum was named Rosamund May, but the Spanish-speaking priest who baptised her at St Joseph’s Church, overlooking the Harbour, couldn’t get his tongue round ‘Rosamund May’ for some reason, so she was christened ‘Rosaria Maria’. At school, St Patricks, Plumstead & St Peter’s, Woolwich, in South East London, she was known as Rose. In different parts of our family she is called ‘Pat’ or ‘Totsie’, and after her marriage, neighbours and colleagues called her ‘Penny’.

What was the labour from which she now rests? What were the deeds that follow her, resting in our memory, and if in ours, so also in the mind of God who sees that everything is good.

Life was far from easy, growing up in Plumstead in the 1920’s and ‘30’s. Her father was something of a ‘wanderer’, only coming home when his pockets were empty. A great sadness in her childhood was the loss of her young brother, Frank, to infantile meningitis, a real scourge at that time, in poorer parts of London. She was 15 when the 2nd World War broke out, with Woolwich and Plumstead suffering heavy bombing due to the proximity of the Woolwich Arsenal and Dockyard. As a result she spent various periods of evacuation in Sussex.

At 18 she became a volunteer nursing assistant in the St John Ambulance Brigade and helped at various reception centres for those injured or homeless as a result of bombing. She has told countless doctors and nurses who disapproved of her continuing to smoke, that they should ‘blame the doctor’. One day, she was on duty, when a whole hearing and speech impaired, extended family, living in various houses in one street, were wiped out by a scatter bomb. One young man was brought to the Centre, still just alive. Mum and another young volunteer held his head while the doctor replaced his brain back into his skull. Seeing they were both shaken by this experience, at such a tender age, he gave them their first cigarettes, and the rest is history!

It was during this time that Mum and Dad met, he being in the Fire Service before joining the Marines for the rest of the war. They were married in September 1944 and I was born, as her 21st birthday present, in August 1945. Dad joined the Metropolitan Police after the war, stationed in Woolwich. Being a policeman’s wife in those days was no easy task either. Poor pay, Masonic corruption, and the uncertainties of the job were the order of the day. We lived with a constant anxiety of whether Dad would come off duty, safe and sound. Mum got, and gave, great support in the strong police community culture of those days. In a crisis, everyone on that shift pulled together.

Mum balanced the family income by working in various clerical and retail sales positions in local department stores, particularly the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society which was a key influence on both her and my grandmother’s social and political awareness. My mother remembered being taken to Beresford Square, Woolwich, a South London equivalent of Speakers’ Corner. There, my grandmother would heckle both Oswald Mosley and his Empire Loyalists, as well as the Catholic Evidence Guild & Protestant Truth Society.

Brought up in a working class, Irish Catholic community, was something Mum was proud of, but neither she nor my grandmother were putty in priests hands! They both challenged the cultural Catholicism of the day. With an absent father, it was my grandmother who gave my mother away when my parents were married in St. Peter’s Catholic Church, Woolwich. Dad’s parents were none too thrilled that he was marrying a ‘Paddy’ ; those were the days of “No Irish, no Blacks, no dogs” signs. It has become obvious in more recent years that the Pendergast family nursed a kind of internalised Irish phobia, as they tried to bury their own distant Irish origins, coming to London, probably as post-potato-famine refugees, and becoming stalwarts of a working class Anglo-Catholic parish church, not really ‘taking the soup’; more like deciding to choose a different menu!

The early years of married life were spent in my grandmother’s house and not exactly free of tensions. We moved to our own house in around 1950 and my brother, David, was born in 1953. Mum continued to work throughout our school years.

A fall-out with the Church over Catholic schooling led to our absence from Catholic practice until 1958. Mum ‘s Catholic faith was never paraded - she was well ahead of her time in recognising the Church’s flaws, its post-war authoritarianism, and what she saw as interference in people’s lives. Her faith was always there, even if she wasn’t sitting in a church pew, and her favourite saint was Therese of Lisieux, the Little Flower, whose ‘Little Way’ was something which rang bells for Mum’s own faith and practice, a spirituality rooted in getting on with the small tasks of life.

Mum was exhilarated by ‘Good Pope John ‘ calling the 2nd Vatican Council to renew and reform the Church, even if she could never bring herself to say, ‘For the kingdom, the power and the glory are yours …’, so ingrained in her had it been that this was Protestant. It was also probably due to the fact that she had been constantly punished by the formidable Miss Fennell at school, for sitting on the wall of the nearby Anglican parish church, waiting for a friend to come out from Sunday Morning Service, and where my Dad was in the Boys’ Brigade. The fact that the later redundant St. Paul’s Anglcan Church, in 1968, became the new home for St Patrick’s Catholic Church, my First Mass was celebrated there, and my grandmother was buried from there, was, to her, an even greater turn up for the books!

She found a new place in the Church of the 1960’s, becoming Secretary and President of the Union of Catholic Mothers in Plumstead and Canterbury. She was a founder-member of Life, providing practical support for young women facing unwanted pregnancies. She was as supportive of me when I entered the Carmelite Order, and throughout my studies and ordination, as she was in understanding my reasons for leaving the Order in 1973.

My parents’ move in 1971 to Old Wives Lees, not too far from Faversham, gave them new challenges, not least the restoration of the old village stores and bakery, as a home. Mum, already a skilled cake-maker and decorator, found increased catering requests coming her way. This led to her forming Cashel Catering, becoming one of the leading catering firms in Kent, as well as developing their home as a popular bed & breakfast location, in its position on the Pilgrims Way.

Dad’s sudden death in 1984, just a week after the wonderful celebration of their Ruby Wedding anniversary, was a terrible shock. With the characteristic grit which marked her recent periods of ill-health, she got back on her feet, enrolled in a programme of bereavement counselling, going on to a diploma in counselling, and helped found Careaid, a Thanet & East Kent network of people from local churches supporting people living with HIV, as well as their parents. This also provided a listening ear to many isolated LGBT people and their parents struggling with the ‘coming out’ process when no similar listening service existed. Her support for myself and Julian was unwavering, but that did not stop us, in the past year, taking different positions about same-sex marriage: she was pro, we, less so! Oh, the radicalism of the really elderly!

Her move, in 1985, to a smaller house in Greenhill did not mean she was giving up, and she continued to deliver wheels-on-meals in Herne Bay into her 70’s. Her garden was her pride and joy and woe betide any gardener who presumed to know better than she how the roses were to be pruned. A roller-coaster relationship with David was borne with fortitude and common sense, even if, at times, the pain was hard to bear. She was proud of the good friendships she enjoyed with her three daughters-in-law, and was challenged, delighted, and proud as she became a grandmother and great-grandmother. To the end, she enjoyed good food, a glass of good wine, or a Disaronno pick-me-up. The daunting challenge for the rest of us is now to make the 23 + ingredients’ Christmas puddings to anything like her standard.

Not having ‘done doctors’ for something like 28 years, she found her increasing mobility difficulties a real trial, having to stop driving, and hating the dependency upon others which this involved. As she got older, she found that her body ‘s reluctance to do what her brain wanted it to, sorely frustrating. At the same time, she stubbornly clung on to control of her life. As much to her surprise as anyone’s, she established good relationships with a variety of doctors and community nurses. She was soon able to sort out the chaff from the wheat in that context, even when they caught her smoking on a hospital ward!

So, a long life, enjoyed to the full through travel, shopping trips to Calais, engaging with people, particularly children, cooking, tapestry-making, watercolour painting, writing her unique Norwegian-based wartime novel. Her last years at home would not have been possible without the informal network of care given by friends and neighbours. A few weeks before she died she told me that she had made some decisions; that she was not going to be able to do all that she used to, and that she probably was not going to go back home. She was laying down, then, some of the grains, the deeds she had done, for them to die, so as to bear fruit in plenty. We pray that all that she has planted will indeed bring her to eternal life, that God will surely honour her, just as he has promised to all who serve God and their neighbour.

Martin Pendergast

Rosamund May Pendergast
30 August 1924 – 30 October 2013