The Widow Gladys

They went in silence or in uproar, tearing and screaming the place down as death that fearful enemy wandered the street, bringing indigence to some and mercy to others.

Death, a good friend, a constant companion to the Widow Gladys, dressed in a fashion no longer seen, her appearance suggesting that order was invested in her very person.

Gladys earned a crust as a type of death consultant, her duties not limited to those of an event planner, caterer, unofficial undertaker, and professional mourner. Gladys took her reserved seat toward the back of the crematoria precisely and punctually.

She supplemented the death income with tea leaf and palm readings on request.

It was rumoured that she had already experienced widowhood before the untimely death of her husband Arthur, killed by bureaucratic administration on the outskirts of Mons at 9.30 am on 11 November 1918. The armistice was signed at 5 am that morning, but troops were ordered to keep fighting until the official call for peace at 11 am.

Despite fate’s obsession to bestow the worst on her, Gladys was given to neither melancholy nor complaint.

Between the wars she married a much younger man who succumbed to tuberculosis just months after the wedding, ensuring that she’d raise their son, Fred, alone.

Such misfortunes meant she spent very little time wearing anything but crepe widow’s weeds, originally purchased by her grandmother from Jay’s Mourning Warehouse London sometime in the 1840s and handed down the generations as a kind of unwanted legacy.

A keeper of meticulous records, Gladys carried about her person a leather-bound “ready reckoner,” a kind of ledger that detailed “main and subsidiary tasks,” and the “people she had helped.” She also wore a money belt containing a wad of notes and Arthur’s cap badge.

A woman of infrequent words, preferring to communicate between wakes via a series of barely decipherable micro scripts scribbled hurriedly on scraps of paper.

Her kettle boiled as bone china clinked from morning to night, spilling whirling and eddying tea on life, “solving problems in this world and out of it.”

Gladys suffered regular bouts of somnambulism and was often retrieved from the unlikeliest of places. After retiring to bed one evening, she inadvertently caused a motor accident that led to the death of a cyclist outside the town of N, some four miles from her place of abode. A cattle truck swerving to avoid her decapitated the unfortunate rider. The driver of the truck, who never fully recovered from the incident, told the inquest that when he approached the scene of devastation, he found a woman wearing a black Victorian nightdress bent over the corpse, "whispering to the departed."

“She appeared to be snoring."

How Gladys had walked that distance whilst seemingly completely asleep, remains a mystery.

During waking hours she often entered a kind of trance-like state, to hold conversations with people only she could see, in tongues defying all linguistic boundaries. Explanations proffered by her neighbours for these phenomena that she referred to as “little deaths,” ranged from “the time she talks to the dead,” to her having received professional theatrical training as a young woman.

An Irishman whose dangerous knowledge of Mediterranean countries led to the liberal use of words such as riposo, pennichella and pisolino, making him a foreigner in the locale, conjectured that her episodes were nothing more sinister than a peculiar siesta.

Uncle Alb had a different theory, “ihr wurde die Macht des Hellsehens Gieschen.”

“She was given the power of clairvoyance."

Death was a matter of efficiency for Gladys who as a young girl, worked as a machinist in a sewing factory where the principles of scientific management as outlined by Frederick Winslow Taylor were religiously adhered to.

A copy of Jules Henri Fayol’s Administration Industrielle et générale; prévoyance, organisation, commandement, coordination, controle, was one of only three books in her house, the others a King James Bible and the Tanakh.

In the second week of March 1966, my grief-stricken mother commissioned Gladys to handle arrangements for the burial of her baby boy Noel Andrew Allen who succumbed to pneumonia aged five months. A commission that included organising a wake, “a chance to sit with the dead,” in the Widow’s front room which resembled a Victorian parlour.

Gladys attached black crape with white ribbon to her door and settled into her mourning chair. She rose on the hour to touch the luminous yellow hollowing cheek of the lifeless infant that lay in an open casket at her feet, and to ring a bell to summon Fred, conveying more tea.

“The knowledge of death is part of life’s education.”

Gladys told the gathered mourners how on her eighth birthday, her widowed mother gifted her a type of ‘death kit,’ that included a doll, mourning clothes, and a miniature coffin.

She was shown how to dress and lay out the doll, correctly positioning it in the miniature coffin. Another lesson involved a role play, whereby Gladys was instructed how to console the grief-stricken.

Her mother also taught her how to make money out of the dead and their loved ones, by entering into reciprocal arrangements with a series of “death associates,” house clearers, pawnbrokers, rag traders, and the like, who dealt with “death’s ancillary matters,” such as the disposal of the deceased’s belongings. A good commission could be earned for facilitating these transactions.

Gladys lamented how death had changed.

“In a godless society death isn’t what it once was. In the old days, those with money had the option of having a wax effigy of their dead child made. This ‘mourning doll’ was dressed in the deceased’s clothes, and sometimes locks of the dead child’s hair were attached to it.

The doll was placed next to the body of the child for mourners to admire. The effigy would either be left at the child’s grave or (as Gladys had witnessed, on more than one occasion,) kept in the home and cared for by the mourning parents, who would regularly change its clothes."

The Widow finished her macabre story by saying that to succeed in business her mother had also taught her to “be kind to those who paid on time, and to wash the floor with those who did not."

The following morning for reasons that may later become apparent, four immaculately dressed dignified men of West Indian origin carried my mother’s son to his grave.

Two days after the funeral the Widow’s dried up spiky fingers poured tea and kindness before presenting my mother with a detailed bill for ‘soul services’ calculated in pounds, shillings and pence. Her invoice included a charge of ‘one-pound sterling and three shillings, for sitting with the departed for nine hours and thirty-five minutes.’ A further charge of one-pound sterling was levied for ‘associated mourning and grief management services.’

A few weeks later, and after my mother had scraped together enough money to settle the debt, the Widow took to her bed, never to rise from it again.