Standing there admiring all the dead, I had quite forgotten Tummis and Ormily and only remembered them because of the rumbling in rooms above me, people were moving upstairs, they were coming this way. The gong, the gong should sound any moment. I ran back to the lumbering timepiece, tapped on the door.

‘Hilary Ward-Jackson.’

‘Perdita Braithwaite.’

‘It’s time,’ I said, ‘it’s time already!’

And indeed the stairs were hammering with the stirring of my relatives, jostling and crowding and swarming towards the great family chapel. They must come out, they must come out now, or they should be caught. Upstairs, just one flight above, I heard the clarion cry of Albert Powling.

‘Little Uncle.’ I knocked in warning. ‘Little Uncle!’

And just in time, for the stairs were yelling then, the door of Grand Grandfather opened and out fled Ormily and Perdita Braithwaite and they were down the stairs in a moment, and then followed Tummis and his Hilary, banging themselves against the door as they exited and only just in time. Yes, there was Tummis transported to a dreamland, all huge smile and a redness about his mouth and the declaration, none too quiet, ‘Oh, I love her!’

‘Oh, shut up,’ I said, ‘and act unloved, for God’s sake, here comes Moorcus.’

Moorcus tripped Tummis down the stairs, but he did not fall far, it was nothing very much, there was not far to fall, and all the little cousins laughed as they always did in Moorcus’s presence. Tummis picked himself up. He still had a smile upon his face, love his anaesthetic. All of us gathered to our pews, all aunts of us and uncles of us, all cousins by the tens and twenties, trousered ones and bedressed ones, and the shorts people towards the front, myself amongst them, boys on the west nave and on the east the girl cousins, Ormily somewhere about them. A great gathering of crows and jackdaws and ravens. Being in the swollen chapel was like having my head in a great dinning bell, it was upsetting and I always had a terrible head fever afterwards and would go and lie down, thankful that evensong is only once a week. In such a noise I could not hear a thing.

The old Iremonger dirge, Old Broken, was sung out, and I mouthed the words along with the others,

In the spring’s early blue morning

At the beginning of my days

A perfect gold was adorning

My skin was alight, ablaze,

I was hopeful then and youthful,

On the shelf I was atop,

I was happy then and useful,

When you bought me from the shop.

In the summer’s lovely bright light,

I was for ever at your call

I was polished, I stood upright,

On the shelf in the front hall.

Ent’ring visitors would gasp then

At this piece you did call ‘mine’,

You would very quietly ask them,

Had they anything so fine?