The long road to Silloth

On Saturday we finished burying my Grandmother.

She died in 2005 and most of her ashes lie in an unremarkable banked field of wild grasses and young trees near those of my Uncle Chris, who died of cancer some ten years before her. But some of her remained in a small enamelled container, travelling about with my Uncle Andy on the back of his motorbike, tucked in his luggage as he packed his other belongings and moved to his new home aboard a boat in Dover.

A few weeks ago she was collected by my Mum and after a scenic tour of Essex, Wiltshire and York they made the trip North here to Peebles, where she rested until this past weekend.

My Grandmother Mary was widowed in 1943 when my Grandfather Bill piloted his warplane over the Solway Firth after a test flight and collided with a young Canadian flyer. They had been married seven years, my Mother was four, my Uncle Chris not yet born. Bill was buried in a tiny churchyard in Causewayhead, near the Victorian seaside town of Silloth, in a plot of what became thirty or so RAF graves amongst the local dead. He had been stationed at the huge RAF base which dominated the area and whose runway and aircraft hangars are still there today, overgrown and reoccupied by farms and local businesses.

Mourning would have been a perfunctory exercise during that war. My Grandmother was moved out of her RAF accommodation in Wiltshire several days later, became a mother of two six months on, filed the telegram and the few letters of condolence in a brown envelope which I found amongst papers and photos in a cake tin after she died.

So last weekend three generations of us undertook to reunite my Grandmother and my Grandfather 66 years after they were unexpectedly parted. Silloth is a little over two hours from Peebles and Carlisle was a pleasant overnight stop, including a walk through deserted streets of ornate Victorian brick houses to a downtown restaurant. The easy 30-minute drive to Silloth next morning lengthened to an hour and a half as we failed several times to achieve the critical velocity needed to escape Carlisle's gravitational pull. Finally on the right B-road west we met a 'Road Closed' notice. An elaborate sequence of detour signs took us through every village and hamlet in Northwest Cumbria before depositing us back on the same B-road half a mile and forty minutes later.

It was my Grandmother's last journey, the long road to Silloth and back to her first love, on the day before the anniversary of his death. She took the scenic route; her habit in life. It was fitting, humourous and poignant that we meandered through the same villages and byways visited by my Grandfather in the last few weeks of his life, searching with increasing exasperation for local accommodation for his wife and little daughter to join him on his extended posting in Cumbria.

In the 1980s my Grandmother finally learned what it was he was doing up there. An official secret for all those years, he was a test pilot on a programme developing a bomb that would bounce across water and explode upon impact with a dam wall. It became known as the Bouncing Bomb, delivered by the Dam Busters squadron, and Bill was one of its unsung casualties.

He is buried in Causewayhead Cemetery in the shadow of two wartime aircraft hangars. Buried next to him is a pilot from New Zealand, on the other side a Canadian. The plot is simple, well-kept, quiet. By his grave is a stand of blues irises, one of my Grandmother's favourite flowers.

We laid the last remnants of her in the bed with the irises, by the headstone. An old photograph of three smiling young people watched over this. In its battered silver frame it had stood on the mantlepiece in my Great-Aunt Elsie's house; her brother Bill, her friend Mary and herself standing in a roadway by a church, arms across each other's shoulders.

We recalled some stories, shed some tears, and I walked away with a sense of having done a good thing, somehow enriching my own soft earth, and of honouring our forebears.