Back at St John's today to conduct Hilda's funeral. Yesterday evening I spent an hour chatting with her two sisters - she was the eldest of four girls. I learned that the three eldest and their mother had been bombed out of their house in Hackney during the blitz, and had come to Cardiff, where the youngest, Iris, was already an evacuee, still in primary school, was staying with relatives. All three had worked in a factory down the Bay making 'inflatables', as we'd call them today, including barrage balloons and replicas of tanks and guns, used as decoys, positioned to fool air attackers. It was hard physical work, typical of what the 'war effort' meant in a labour intensive era. They stayed on in the company after the war and saw the development of the first inflatable boats and aircraft emergency exit chutes.
Hilda concluded her working life at 69 in Howell's department store, after a spell working in her uncle's plant nursery. One way or another, it was a long, hard working life for one who had been a sickly child whose prospects of longevity were doubted. She proved more resilient than her parents ever imagined, and was blessed by a long retirement with her sisters before Parkinson's disease struck her. Here's a photo of her taken in Abbey Dore on the Parish Pilgrimage five years ago.
I admired her physical courage and determination in the face of frailty, coming with her sister to the Eucharist in Tredegarville school after Saint James' had closed, even when that meant using a walking aid to cover the quarter mile journey and two main road crossings to get there from home. She was a quiet, reserved soul, with remarkable inner strength. She received the sacrament with devotion right to the last time I saw her, on the day of my farewell at St John's, finally bedridden and poorly. The rank and file of God's church on earth has many unassuming stalwarts like Hilda. It's a great honour to have been able to minister to some of them in my years as a pastor.
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