Pat Mattingly, 1927-2011
Today we took Alex to his first funeral, that of his great aunt, Pat Mattingly (he had attended his great-granfather's memorial caelidh but as he'd left his body to medical science, there was no funeral service).
Pat died suddenly on the August Bank Holiday, surrounded by her family there for their annual August BH get-together. She wasn't ill, in fact she was remarkably healthy for 84 years old.
Pat was wonderful at keeping in touch with her extended family and we were, unfortunately not as good at keeping back in touch. Somehow nearly five years had passed since we'd last visited and we were planning to visit at the start of October to see her and Alec, her husband, but we never got around to telling her (we were planning to phone when we returned from holiday). We left it too late.
I didn't know Pat as well I wished. She was someone I whole-heartedly admired from afar both for her ability to run and keep in touch with her large family (she never forgot Alex's or Nick's birthdays) and also for her heart-felt political convictions. Like many of her generation, she stopped work when she became a mother and devoted herself to her five children, all of whom went on to university (the first in their family to do so). It is telling that she inculcated such a love of books and reading in her kids that three out of the four work in education. She was a life-long socialist, most of the time a member of the Labour party (she left over the Iraq War before being persuaded back again) and a great supporter of the co-op movement. A founder member of the Enfield Peace Campaign, she went on the first Aldermasteron marches, taking her eldest in his pushchair. Pat was a letter writer: she wrote to her MPs regularly, making it clear when she thought they should consider seeing things from a differet point of view but never falling out with them as people (indeed her local MP attended today and spoke eloquently of her political life): she's the sort of letter writer who would get hand-written replies from cabinet ministers. She was active in her local community beyond politics as well, a sometime school governor for her old school and looking out for elderly neighbours up to the day she died.
She was in short a wonderful woman.