Rented Eternal
Published: In Jest (November 2025)
My grandmotherʼs will was written out in biro, on crumpled unlined paper, then photocopied and distributed to the now less than a dozen members that made up my dadʼs half of the family. Doreen Maud Broome, nee Puddephatt, had stated that she wished to be buried in Luton, the town of her birth, but it was decided that it would be more economical to cremate her the half-an-hour drive down the M1, at West Herts Crematorium, the same place as George, who was to me Grandad.
Puddephatt, a name that originates in the Beds-Bucks area, derives from the Middle English pudi meaning “swollen, obese” and fat “vessel, tub, vat”. The name was wholly unfitting because they were all so bony and hard, even going back further, looking at the handful of sepia-toned photos that remained of them. I have the same deep recesses under my cheek bones. Broome is a surname for a person who lives near a place where broom grows, a shrub with golden yellow flowers. My dadʼs side knew all the names of the plants and animals, it was how they were brought up. My grandparents lived in the Bushmead suburb of Luton, just below Galley and Warden Hills where Bronze Age burials were found and broom used to flower in the spring. I remember walking up there as a boy, my dad noting the species of the birds. ʻSee how that red kite hovers on the thermal, marvelous. Look at its wings! Barely moving.ʼ
When it came to her death, there was no liquid cash left in her estate and any money for the grandkids would have to wait until after the sale of the house, which was now worth next to nothing. My grandad, a serial philanderer – something I discovered years after his death – was sold the dream of living at the foot of the Chilterns. He bought the house on a short hundred-year lease, which by the time my grandmother succumbed to the cancer and the dementia, only had a handful years left on. The material traces of my grandparents’ lives seemed almost entirely consumed by their dying. My grandad was a lot of fun, always easy with money. On family holidays in the South of France, with my granny sitting next to him, heʼd give beautiful young waitresses hundred-euro tips. I think my dad was aware of his fatherʼs betrayals from a young age and he would often cruelly humiliate him. “You think sheʼs interested in a brylcreemed OAP? Sit down, George”, my dad would say, snatching the money from his hand, everyone at the table erupting in laughter. Then my father apologised to the waitress charmingly, gently taking her by the wrist and placing some smaller notes in her hand.
His name was George Henry Broome and my name is the inverse of his: Henry George Broome. My grannyʼs side of the family was more middle-class than my grandadʼs, and she’d poke fun at him because his kingly names didnʼt match his humble origins. Sheʼd sing to him this pre-war music hall song called “Iʼm Henery the Eighth, I Am”:
Iʼm Henry the eighth, I am
Henry the eighth, I am, I am
I got married to the widow next door
Sheʼs been married seven times before
And every one was a Henry (Henry)
She wouldnʼt have a Willy or a Sam (no Sam)
Iʼm her eighth old man, Iʼm Henry
Henry the eighth, I am
“Henry” should be pronounced “ʼEnery”.
A year or so before my grannyʼs death, when she was confined to a wheelchair, my uncle flew her to Bergen War Cemetery to see the grave of Ronald Thomas Fage – the man she was engaged to before the war. They met at a dance. He was an RAF wireless operator. He was shot down over the Dutch province of Friesland, aged 20. She still remembered him when she no longer recognised my face. He was her only true love. When my uncle told me this, I was just starting university. I felt strangely threatened. The ancestry I’d assumed was always mine, suddenly felt borrowed. If Ron Fage hadnʼt crash landed, if love had won out, then Iʼd have never existed.
When my grandad died, my granny took down all the photos of him. This was the subject of much family gossip. Perhaps she didnʼt want to be confronted with the grief daily. Not engaging with difficult emotions was a trait passed down the generations. Perhaps she felt sheʼd fulfilled her obligation to him.
My granny and her father, Frank Stanley Puddephatt (my great-grandfather)
A few hundred pounds and a bottle of whiskey was given to the carer. She apparently liked a drink. She always worked more than the hours the NHS paid her for. Sue, that was her name, she was the only one my granny would crack a smile for at the end. My dad hated “welfarism”, mainly because of the tax implications, but even he felt she deserved more. “£300, it’s really not very much”. More would be found for her later – it was a nice thought, it relieved the immediate sense of guilt.
My father lived at his motherʼs house in Luton for the remaining 2 years of her life. He would say he was only living there so he could keep all of his properties let and maximise rental yield, never admitting that he wanted to care for her. He built an elaborate self-watering plant system in the conservatory for her. Looking at the flowers and eating were about the only two things she enjoyed at the end. She had become highly ill-tempered. She no longer laughed in her sweet way. “Is there such a thing as a biscuit?” sheʼd demand from the chair sheʼd sit in all day. While the carer babied my grandmother, my father would deliver her food to her, with her ergonomic-arthritis spoon, then go back to his computer in the room next door, not helping her to eat because she could apparently do it herself if hunger prevailed. “Old people are like children” heʼd say to me, “except children have the capacity to learn, that’s the depressing thing.” He was obsessed by mortality, his own particularly. He used to be a doctor. “The cells just stop regenerating”, that’s what heʼd say. “You can see it happening. The skin loses its elasticity”, pulling the skin on the back of my hand, which sprung back immediately, then pulling his, watching it return slowly. I guess he was hoping, against the facts of science, that his motherʼs condition might stop declining.
At the front of the chapel stood the master of ceremonies, the same member of staff who had a week earlier tried to sell us the fleet of Mercedes hearses weʼd used for Grandad. My dad was never more angry than if he thought he was being extorted. When a summary of costs was presented, he became incensed with rage and said we wanted the cheapest possible option for everything. “She wouldnʼt have wanted us to waste her money”, sensing my unease. “This place is a total racket!” he snarled, turning to the woman from the funeral office as she rapidly made off down the corridor.
Licking her forefinger, she began leafing through the laminated pages in her black leatherette organiser. “Youʼve opted for the secular service, correct?” Someone nodded. She started reading with breathy solemnity. “In accordance with Doreen’s enduring wishes, here in the Chapel of Remembrance, we commit her body to the elemental energy of the flames, so that the light of her life will burn forever brightly.” She delivered these words with a wide-eyed conviction, grinning idiotically.
My grannyʼs cardboard coffin burnt quickly. As the outside began to blacken and the corrugated sheets started to separate, my uncle sprung from the chapel pew to take one last picture of his mum. “Make him stop”, my cousin let out, grasping at her motherʼs arm – my aunt. She was the only one who could cry. My uncle uploaded the pictures to Facebook, along with the photos of family Christmases, his ex-wife, the aunt I never saw after the age of 10, blacked out with permanent marker.
Another family were waiting to come in behind us and we were respectfully asked to start moving towards the garden. The sound of the motorway roared on the wind. Probably put in at the same time as the red brick chapel was built in the ’50s, Scandinavian spruces had been planted throughout. They had provided fast-return growth, and though thin and bare in part, gave the place a sense of accumulated history and convention.
We planned to scatter my grannyʼs ashes at the base of a rose bush that we planted when my grandad died, but when we searched the map for the plot, a different name appeared. We had apparently only paid for 5 yearʼs occupancy. We hadnʼt bought the bush outright as we had thought, and the plot had been re-let to a new tenant.
The plot numbers were not ordered in a logical way and finding the rose bush became something like the Easter egg hunts I remember from my childhood. We decided not to pay for the plot again so we tried to search undetected. Fred, my brother, started waving frantically, full of giddy excitement. The whole family ran over, trying to crouch below the view from the office window. No one could come up with anything to say so we unceremoniously tipped my granny out onto the ground, my grandad still lurking somewhere in the substrate, along with whoever else, sharing, in non-exclusivity, the same rented eternal.