As an adolescent I used to spend a lot of time helping my elderly grandmother with jobs – just mundane shopping, cleaning, gardening and so on. But I was also her necessary companion, accompanying her to the cinema, taking her to visit friends. And so it was natural for me to go with her whenever she went to pay her respects to the family of someone who had died. I was brought up to see death as a very ordinary part of life. The custom then was to keep the body of the deceased at home until the day of the burial. Curtains would be drawn closed as a signal of bereavement, the coffin placed in the front room and family members would take it in turns to sit with their loved one, through night as well as day. This was probably a remnant of the traditional Irish ‘wake’, transported to Leeds by immigrants fleeing the potato famine, then adopted more widely amongst working people as a kindness and courtesy. When visitors were expected, the lid of the coffin would be removed to give a last opportunity to see the loved one.

On one occasion we visited the home of one of my grandmother’s acquaintances, in Harehills. As duty required, my grandmother and I stood respectfully in silence beside the open coffin before sitting down to have a cup of tea and talk to other mourners. I had been directed to a low chair at the side of the room and one unforgettable result of this was that as I sipped my tea I was looking directly at the rather large nose of the deceased projecting above the lip of the coffin. The strangeness of this only unsettled me slightly because I didn’t know the dead person or any of his relatives. Then the man seated next to me started talking. He introduced himself as a grandson of the deceased and initially appeared politely friendly. But it didn’t take long for me to realise that his conversation was more personal in tone, leading towards him asking me out on a date. In other words he was chatting me up! The situation was totally inappropriate by any reckoning but he had also misread it badly. I was fifteen years old and had come straight from school and was still wearing my winter uniform which was a long grey mackintosh. He had thought me much older and because of the coat had mistaken me for a nurse. Error corrected, we moved, somewhat embarrassed, to separate parts of the room. Amidst death, life goes on.