i used to sleep in a small bed at the foot of my mum’s bed. one night, i remember being woken by the arrival of a lot of people in our bedroom. it was dark and my eyes were in that half asleep condition, where it takes a while for shapes to register and so it took me a while to realise what was going on.
as i was waking, i noticed that there was a lot of crying. i could tell that there were a lot of women in the room despite only being able to make out dark, slow moving, silhouettes. i remember though being able to make out that most of them were wearing fur coats. it was obvious that someone had died because it was traditional that fur coats only came out for special occasions and what better occasion was there than someone dying.
as i eventually came round, i realised that it was billy who was dead. it wasn’t really a surprise. i guess that it was because billy had suffered so many strokes and long periods in hospital that it was just expected, especially when so many others in the flats had also died around this time.
billy had only recently been discharged from hospital. i guess that they did this to let him die at home and to be the ones that he loved.
it seems creepy now but it was another tradition for the dead to be laid out on their beds so that everyone could pay their last respects before being sent to the undertakers or cemetery (the latter option being the cheaper of the two). they kept the door closed and people only went in there when someone came round to the flat. i didn’t realise it at the time but when we were eating, drinking and watching the telly downstairs, so billy was laying dead upstairs.
i can’t remember the exact date when billy either died or was buried, just that it was in january 1973. instead of going to the funeral, i stayed with my aunt lal who lived next door at 118. she wasn’t my real aunt, just another member of the extended family that lived on elim estate. billy was buried at brenchley gardens cemetery in nunhead, south london. his grave is now shared with both my nan and ernie, my granddad.
on the evening of the funeral, i was taken into billy’s room and told that his room was now mine and that i could sleep in there from that night. being just six years old, i really didn’t want to. i remember that they hadn’t really done much to the room since he had died and so the bed and room felt really cold. it stayed this way all the time that i had it. to this day i don’t know whether this was because a dead body had been sleeping there just the night before it became mine or just because there wasn’t any heating upstairs in the flat.
i remember laying in that room night after night as a child, not going to sleep but waiting for something to happen. most times i laid there waiting to hear my mum come home from being out with one of her boyfriends, whether manfred, colin, benny or someone else.
billy’s wardrobe stayed in the room and was scarily big and dark. all his clothes stayed in there until someone from the flats wanted maybe a suit or a couple of shirts and so came and took them. as more space in the wardrobe came free, so i was able to make the space my own. it didn’t do much though in making the room mine.
i never felt that the room or bed was ever mine despite sleeping there from 1973 through to 1978. it is still weird to think that i jumped into billy’s deathbed so soon after he died. maybe this is why i’m such a bad sleeper now.
