I was on the bus when it happened: racked by an unexpected sob, as if some invisible hand had reached inside me and flicked the switch marked tears. In his new memoir, a book I was about to have to put aside for a few moments, Melvyn Bragg was describing the funeral of his publican father, Stanley, in Wigton, Cumbria, some time in the 1990s. Bragg and his mother, Ethel, were just coming out of the church, trailed by a great crowd of mourners because Wigton isn’t big and everyone in it had known Stanley. Bragg looked up. On the other side of the road stood a line of men, each one smart in his Sunday best. Who were they? He knew without having to be told that they were customers of his father’s who had always been made welcome in the Black-a-Moor in the days when – how unbelievable this seems now – Catholics were still tacitly forbidden to drink in many establishments. None of them had felt able to attend the service – wrong church – but here they all were now, an unlikely guard of honour.
This probably doesn’t sound like the sort of thing that should have a critic gently weeping on the number 38, and what’s strange is that, in the context of Back in the Day, it’s not even close to being the most sweet-sad detail; Bragg’s book, the best thing he has ever written, imbues the overused literary adjective “piercing” with real meaning. But there it is: this scene moved me. In my mind’s eye, I could see the street, where the curtains in every house would have been drawn as a mark of respect (I can remember my grandmother doing this when I was a little girl), and on it these men, their faces heavy with age, their hats in their big hands. It was easy to imagine how Bragg must have felt at the sight of them, the feeling of something close to love reaching him as he emerged into the daylight. Though he’d long since moved away from the town – first to Oxford, and then to London – he had never really left it. It was, and is, his place, and I wonder if this doesn’t seem to him now like the greatest luck of his life: a better thing by far than all the TV shows, the fame and the money and the peerage.
