Normally in Ireland you’re under the sod in two days, but it took Josephine two weeks to make the arrangements for Oliver’s funeral, simply because she wanted to give everyone a chance to come over for it. All the while Ollie was being kept in cold storage at Cork University Hospital. Only no one had thought of informing Josephine and she made several trips to the undertakers in Buttevant to talk to Ollie in his coffin not realizing he wasn’t there. It was an extraordinary time.
Oliver hadn’t really made any arrangements for his funeral. David recalls him once saying, ‘If I die I want everyone to come to my funeral and cry. And if they don’t cry they’re not allowed in.’ As for his final resting place, he’d always been rather fond of Bruhenny cemetery in Churchtown, a beautiful quiet spot just across the road from O’Brien’s, its ancient gravestones lost for centuries under weeds and brambles. Sometimes at dusk he’d wander out with a drink in his hand to watch hundreds of crows flock into the graveyard to settle on the trees for the night. It was an extraordinary sight that he once shared with Sarah. ‘We were sat in the bar and he said, “Come on, girlie, I’ve got to show you this.” And we went out and sat and watched this spectacle and I remember him saying, “Isn’t this graveyard amazing?” So it was just so ideal when they allowed us to plant him there.’
As the day of the funeral drew nearer family and friends began arriving. For people like Simon, for whom Ollie’s time in Ireland was when he knew him the least, it was to be an enormously moving experience. Seeing where he lived and who his friends were, he sensed a contentedness that must have been Oliver’s life in Churchtown. And when Josephine invited him to go through and see the garden, Simon felt a rush of powerful emotions. ‘It seemed a tranquil existence. Josephine was telling me that it was his pride and joy and that he used to sit on a seat out there for hours. And I thought, oh my God, that was so far removed from the Ollie that I knew, that I think he had fundamentally changed. I think he’d had enough of the aggression. I think he more or less had come to terms with exactly who he was and why he was like it. Josephine played a big part in all that.’
The funeral service took place at St James’s Church in Mallow and was a simple yet memorable affair. From early in the morning people had started to gather outside and by the time the family arrived there was a crowd of several hundred. When Ollie’s coffin came out of the hearse spontaneous applause began, along with a few raised voices of, ‘Go to it, Ollie’, while a lone piper played a melancholy tune as the congregation walked into the church.
Among the first to enter was Michael Winner. Walking down the aisle to where the coffin stood, he touched it gently with his hand and sobbed. ‘I didn’t cry at my mother’s funeral. I didn’t cry at my father’s funeral. I wept at Oliver’s funeral. I was in floods of tears.’
Seated down at the front with the Reed family was a gentleman dressed all in black. Muriel thought he was a priest. It turned out to be Alex Higgins. The snooker ace had insisted on sitting with the family and was his usual twitching, paranoid self, scanning the congregation and nudging David, saying, ‘He’s IRA. And so’s he. He’s IRA, too.’ Then, with penetrating eyes, he stared at the coffin and yelled, ‘Oliver, they’re all phonies, get them the fuck out, all these fucking people, they’re all fucking phonies.’ Mark grabbed hold of him. ‘Alex, don’t ruin this fucking day. You can fuck around with any other day but you’re not fucking around with this day.’
As for the service itself, the family didn’t want anything too solemn. ‘We wanted to sing “Jerusalem”,’ says Mark. ‘But the vicar thought that might be a little bit hefty in County Cork.’ They ended up with ‘Abide with Me’ and ‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’, all the verses. ‘We tried to keep it light and not too religious, tried to keep it akin with the things that had value to him rather than the godly,’ says Mark, whose own contribution was a reading of Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Road Not Taken’. Sarah also read and Simon did the eulogy, which he’d done just two years before for his father. Afterwards there was a round of applause.
The cortege of at least a hundred cars pulled away from the church to begin Ollie’s final journey towards Churchtown, a few miles away, down lanes, roads and streets, every one of them lined with people. ‘It was amazing,’ remembers Simon. ‘There must have been ten thousand people and they all doffed their caps when the cortege went past. Part of it was curiosity, of course, he’s a big star, and partly because I think he connected with everyone who lived there. It was an extraordinary day.’
Finally the cortege arrived in the centre of Churchtown, but could barely move for the throng of people. Cheers rang out and there was spontaneous applause. Some onlookers broke out into a verse of ‘Consider Yourself at Home’ from Oliver!. ‘I remember getting out of the car and going, wow, this is extraordinary,’ says Sarah. ‘It was amazing, and lovely as well that he was that loved. He really had come home over there. They understood him.’
The coffin was carried into the cemetery, where the grass had been mowed and the weeds and brambles cut back to clear a space for Ollie. And as the coffin was lowered into the grave, people started throwing in coins.
Of course, the press were much in evidence: TV crews and reporters. Just behind Ollie’s grave was a wall and behind that a tree. David has never forgotten it, but suddenly out of the branches fell a cameraman, who landed with a heavy thud. ‘So that caused a bit of a distraction.’ Afterwards, as is the local custom, Josephine, Sarah and Mark remained at the graveside for something like forty minutes, just shaking hands with people walking past to offer their condolences: ‘Sorry for your troubles.’
Oliver had always admired the way the Irish treated their dead, that someone’s passing was a cause for celebrating a life that had been well lived. ‘I’ve had some fearsome hangovers burying the dead,’ he’d said. So Josephine was determined to throw the mother of all wakes. And it was an open house: Josephine put the word around the village that everyone was most welcome to come. ‘And it went on apparently for three days,’ reveals Muriel. ‘Ollie would have loved it.’
At Castle McCarthy a large marquee was erected in the garden and a microphone set up on a platform so that anyone could go up and tell a story about Ollie or read a poem or sing a song. The place was full of friends, four hundred at the height of the wake, and there was lots of booze and lots of curry and bacon rolls in the morning. There was music, dancing, Irish and rugby songs, a proper celebration. ‘And everybody got pretty pissed,’ says Simon. ‘It was really lovely. Of course, there was a sense of loss, but there was also a sense that we had to get at it because that’s what Ollie would have expected.’
Faces from the past mingled with those from the present, and everyone carried with them their own private thoughts and memories of Ollie. Michael Christensen, still in the police, hadn’t been able to make the funeral because he was giving evidence at the Old Bailey that day. ‘But even if I hadn’t I couldn’t have gone, to see him in a coffin, he was too larger than life, and to think that he was mortal would just shatter too many of our thoughts and dreams.’ However, other old Wimbledon friends were there, like Johnny Placett, Mick Fryer and Mick Monks. Paul and Nora Friday too. And the women in his life: Jacquie came, and so too Kate: ‘His harem,’ jokes Jacquie. It was the first time the two women had been in the same place since that episode in the pub. It was Jacquie who took the initiative. ‘I went up to Kate and told her how sorry I was about what happened with Oliver and she was absolutely gobsmacked. I don’t think she liked the fact that I had approached her, so I quietly went away again.’
As the evening wore on people began trickling away, although plenty were still arriving and going strong. For David and Muriel, it was time to leave. Their cab dropped them at their hotel, but before getting out David quietly asked the driver, ‘Today was too public for me, would you be very kind and come early tomorrow morning to drive me back out to the cemetery? I’d like to say a private bye-bye.’
Years before, when their friend Pat Clancy died in Ireland, Ollie rang David from some far-flung movie location and told him, ‘Go and give him a drink.’ David knew what he meant and bought a bottle of hard stuff and poured it over Pat’s grave. ‘And so I thought, I’ll do the same with Ollie. We drove out at the crack of dawn with a bottle of Scotch and I went out to the grave and stood there with my private thoughts, saying bye-bye, Ollie, here’s one for the road. It was a bit emotional. I got back in the car and we drove back.’
When David arrived at Cork airport, the Departures lounge was filled with Ollie’s friends and family waiting for flights. He decided to buy a paper ‘and there on the front page was a photograph taken from the fella who’d fallen out of the tree, and it showed the coffin lying there in the hole and I suddenly realized I’d poured the whisky over Ollie’s feet, because I could now see which way up he was. And I can just imagine him saying, you ******!!!’