Four Funerals and a Wedding 
Andrew O’Hagan
When I was young people didn’t die and they didn’t pass away. They certainly didn’t expire, or perish, though there was a woman in our street called Hazel who dabbled in spiritualism while her philandering husband went out to fix people’s Hotpoint twin-tubs, and she quite often spoke of people who had ‘crossed to the other side’. I thought that was sick. Hazel had a lot of anger in her, as people now say, and I felt that must explain her hazardous use of words. She’d met Sandy, her husband, when he drove one of the Alexander buses about the town of Elgin. She happened to be the clippy on the same bus, and she would often tell me about the beauty of those single-decker vehicles (‘the Bluebird’) and the handsomeness of Sandy behind the wheel. Now she was furious all the time, and took it out on her accordion, playing Strathspey reels until the red varnish flaked off her fingernails.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Andrew O’Hagan’s The Atlantic Ocean, a collection of essays on Britain and America, will be published in June. Be Near Me, his last novel, has been shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
Other articles by this contributor:
Still Reeling from My Loss · Lulu & Co
The God Squad · Andrew O’Hagan in Bushland
Hating Football · Andrew O’Hagan deserts the Tartan Army
The Nominee · With the Democrats
Good Fibs · Truman Capote
Seventy Years in a Filthy Trade · Andrew O’Hagan meets E.S. Turner
Iraq, 2 May 2005 · Two Soldiers
At the Design Museum · Peter Saville
print layout
tell a friend