We knew the church would be packed as Shelley had died so young. We knew the church would be freezing, as her funeral fell during the Arctic spell that whitened the bracken and iced over puddles the colour of Dairy Milk. When we drove into Simonsbath just after lunchtime, the sun was only grazing the hilltops, leaving valleys in deep shadows. We’d allowed plenty of time, but the lanes were already crammed with vehicles.
My husband and I had intended to stand at the back of St Luke’s so as not to take up precious places, but thanks to Ivo’s near-village-elder status we were ordered into the emergency seating in the chancel. This gave me the opportunity to study the fine stained-glass window, added in remembrance of local men who died in the Great War – many of the fallen, of course, decades younger even than Shelley.
‘It is finished,’ confirmed an inscription below the crucifixion. A single bell tolled in the bell-cote.
On the front of the order of service was a photograph of a joyous Shelley, aged just 36, on her wedding day only 550 days earlier, here at St Luke’s. The organist was playing ‘The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba’ and it was then I noticed there were three dogs held on pink leads by two men in black suits – surely from the hunt – in the row opposite. The little beagle was crying.
Shelley’s dogs had come to see their mistress laid to rest. I’m afraid this was the detail that set most of us off – well, me anyway. It is now standard for people to post tributes on social media when their dogs die to ‘share’ their grief. The singer Stormzy, for instance, recently made a ‘RIP no. 1 boy’ post on Insta-gram in memory of his late rottweiler Enzo. But all I could think as I studied Scamp the spaniel, Max, a golden retriever and working dog, and the little beagle Wanda, who was rejected as being too small by the North Devon Beagles, was that there is no similar outlet or bereavement counselling for them. We don’t attend to the grief of pets when their owners die, but their steadfastness is almost unbearably moving. Remember Greyfriars Bobby. Or Emma, the late Queen’s pony, who, with her owner’s headscarf spread over her saddle, appeared to dip her fetlock as the cortege and hearse passed on the way to St George’s Chapel. That sight – far more than the vision of the then Prince Andrew at Windsor with her corgi relicts Sandy and Muick – reduced even the most hardened republicans to blubbering wrecks.
We don’t attend to the grief of pets when their owners die, but their steadfastness is unbearably moving
A nice man called Jake gave the eulogy. They’d met on Shelley’s first day at the Royal Agricultural College when she’d come from Norfolk to Cirencester to study equine business management. ‘Quite by chance we ended up being tied together in a three-legged race across the rugby fields,’ Jake explained, as if that was quite normal. The guts of his eulogy were given to Shelley’s boundless determination, her glowing positivity and drive, and her devotion to all creatures great and small that first began age four with a black and white rabbit called Charlie, then enveloped dogs Ruby and Lilly, a rescue tortoise originally named Geronimo but rechristened Susie after a visit to the vet, and her first ponies, Pirole and Bonnie. She was also a keen Brownie.
Shelley met Ed (he noted to an amused ripple how when the pair bonded they became known as ‘Shed’) ‘after the social lubricant of snakebites and dry white wine at the RAC Beagles end of season supper’. Ed is still only in his twenties. He radiated steady cheerfulness in the face of appalling loss, especially when the recessional music came over the not-very-loudspeakers at the end: ‘Say You’ll Be There’ by the Spice Girls. On the back of the order of service was a photo of Shelley laughing, sitting on the floor, with all three dogs who’d attended the church on her lap.
For the wake, hundreds repaired to Shed’s house and business, Emmetts Grange, the highest and most spectacular farm on the moor, with a threshing barn for events and stable and tennis court, and the piece de resistance, an indoor equestrian arena. There was a marquee outside the threshing barn where pints of local ale were being poured from casks supplied by the Exmoor Forest Inn down the road. Hearty roast beef and Yorkshire pudding ‘bites’ and egg sandwiches were scoffed off china platters.
It was a proper, poignant and perfect send-off for a woman who told ‘all her friends to move to the moor, as she quite simply couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live anywhere else’; a funeral held, as it had to be, during the season of short days and long shadows, on a day when the sun rose late, only contouring the tops of the hills with gold, and fell too fast.
The fee for this column has been donated to the Stroke Association.
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