2005
The nearest parking place was two kilometres from the cemetery. The roads were choked, families and friends heading towards the grave like hundreds of black ants. The church had been full of family, children — her great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild — friends and neighbours.
Arjun had only really known her for a single night, though he’d invited her to his graduations, and she’d sent him an invitation to her hundredth birthday party, and each birthday party after that, but so many people had wanted to talk to her then, so he’d just smiled, and kissed her cheek, and given her yet another block of fruit and nut chocolate, the same gift he gave her every year.
He didn’t want to take the place of the important people in her life today, either. He stood on the outskirts of the crowd as the coffin was lowered, mounded with flowers.
She had died on the afternoon of her hundred-and-fourth birthday. There’d been more than a hundred people in the Town Hall function centre, her descendants, neighbours, friends. Arjun had been proud to be one of them. She’d been so happy at the lunch, laughing, opening presents, holding the latest baby on her knee.
Her son said in the eulogy for her that after the party she’d said she was a bit tired and was going to have a lie-down before dinner. Those were the final words she’d spoken, unless at the last she’d said a private farewell or greeting to the husband who had died eight years before.
No one had mentioned World War I when they talked about her at the funeral. She’d been a farmer with her husband; the woman who founded the scholarships; and the postie who carried the mail across a hundred square kilometres.
She’d been a neighbour, friend, a mum, a grandma and great-grandma, who never let you leave the house without a bar of chocolate ‘just in case’.
‘She saved my life,’ Arjun wanted to say. ‘She might have saved us all. If it wasn’t for the messages she and the other women sent, the kaiser might have won before the USA entered the war.’
I am an environmental lawyer, fighting for my country, because of Jean McLain-Galbraith, he thought. I have a block of fruit and nut chocolate in my briefcase, too.
Maybe no one else alive knew the story of her war work. Or was it just that other things from her long, full life mattered more to the people gathered here?
If she had been a man there’d have been a flag across her coffin, and a military escort, the kind to which all ex-service personnel were entitled. Arjun thought she’d have liked the flowers everyone had brought her better — mostly hand-picked posies, not florists’ bouquets, and a big wreath made from envelopes like the letters she’d delivered, and a spotted toy dog from her youngest great-grandchild, To keep Great-Gramma from being lonely.
No, she wouldn’t have wanted formality and the flag. That girl had been a world away from the woman she had become, in time as well as geography. But the story should be told. It had all happened too long ago to hurt or even influence her children now. In a few weeks he’d ask Laura, Laurence or Henry if they would permit a footstone to match the headstone on the grave, the one she was sharing with her husband. It would have a tiny sparrow on it. He had the words ready, too.
The Telegraph Girl.
She did her duty for her countries.
We will not forget.