quite quietly:
“There’s a reason I picked you. And when you’ve heard it you’ll understand why I had to ask.”
The reason.
A grave.
In 1958, Alwyn Creed bought a double plot at St Osyth’s in Harling for eleven pounds.
His wife Nancy went into it in the November of 1991.
And he had been told, in the January of 2025, by somebody at that home, that when he died he would be cremated by the local authority, because he has no next of kin and nobody to authorise anything.
No children. One nephew, who died in 2019. A sister who went in 1996.
Nobody left to sign a form.
And a man of eighty-nine had spent nine months being told, in the pleasant way these things are said, that it would all be taken care of — and had understood, correctly, that taken care of meant a cremation in a
