The funeral bus.

Reflections after my aunt's death.

As I came round the corner, walking to meet the cortege, a bus appeared, one of the old London buses you do not see anymore, with an undertaker’s livery. It stopped one street early. I gestured to the next corner. But the driver rolled the window down, looking like he had driven there, if such a thing were possible, out of the past, and told me this was the meeting spot for all the funeral vehicles. I carried on. When the cars arrived, the funeral bus would drive round too, to collect us all.

My aunt was a kind and busy woman. She always took every trouble to provide the birthdays, weddings, christenings, Christmases, Easters, anniversaries, and other occasions like the gathering after her funeral, with the fun and easy pleasures of hospitality. Whenever I was there, it was a house of chatter. The faces come and the faces go, a little older, a little more mature. Old ladies who used to appear round corners, to proclaim my hair a marvel they would have to pay good money for (I have to get it permed to look like that) are long gone now. No ghosts visit.

The bus was from the sixties. There was a cord, red, running above the seats, which I pulled, twice, gently, while everyone was getting on. I enjoy old transport. And how often do you see such a thing, and not in a museum? The bell still worked, ringing clear and bright.

As is usual at such events, many people knew me who hadn’t seen me since I was just this high! And I, in my turn, forgot some of the names of my all-too-rapidly growing first-cousins-once-removed. (These children grow like trees.) Some of them are reading Jane Austen now, or making AI emojis on their phones, which they never, ever, put down. The friendly conversationalists who I see twice a year were there, always a great pleasure to meet again. So was the wife of the man who checked my childhood teeth. He has cancer now. And so it goes, and so it goes.