a funeral

from the UK Guardian:

Harold Pinter was buried yesterday afternoon before a small gathering of family and friends at Kensal Green cemetery in London. And, if the half-hour ceremony conducted around the graveside had a deeply moving, faintly Shakespearean and entirely secular quality to it, it was because Pinter himself had wished it that way.

As recently as last August, he had sat down with his wife, Antonia Fraser, and selected the readings he wanted for his funeral.

Since the chosen pieces dealt with memory, mortality, passion, politics and cricket, they not only reflected Pinter's abiding concerns: they also showed his extraordinary capacity, even in death, to make his presence manifest.

What was especially impressive was the capacity of the readers, both actors and family members, to allow the emotion to flow directly through the words.

Michael Gambon, sombre and heavy-coated, read no fewer than four pieces. One was a speech he nightly delivers on stage in No Man's Land, in which Hirst pays tribute to the emotion trapped in photo albums and asks us to "tender the dead, as you would yourself be tendered, now, in what you would describe as your life".

Gambon also ended the readings with a Pinter poem, Death, that breaks through the bureaucratic formalities associated with mortality and finally asks: "Did you kiss the dead body."

The resonance of those words lingered in the chill air, prompting Tom Stoppard to remark, after we had filed past the grave: "You could cut the grief with a knife."

But, for all the palpable sadness, the ceremony reminded us all of the breadth of Pinter's personality. His step-granddaughter, Stella Powell-Jones, read beautifully a love poem dedicated to Antonia Fraser, It Is Here, recalling the coup de foudre at Pinter's first meeting with his future wife.

Matthew Burton, actor and director, read Pinter's favourite cricket poem, Francis Thompson's At Lord's, in which the run-stealers eternally flicker to and fro.

And Penelope Wilton delivered with impeccable gravitas the lines from TS Eliot's Little Gidding ending: "So, while the light falls/On a winter's afternoon, in a secluded chapel,/History is now and England."

Apart from the fact that we were in the open air, rather than an Eliotesque chapel, the lines perfectly captured the deep Englishness of the occasion.

Afterwards, over drinks at Pinter's Holland Park home, his old friends, including Edna O'Brien, Ronald Harwood, Henry Woolf and Michael Colgan, reminisced warmly about the man himself. Everyone recalled, in graphic detail, their last encounter with Pinter.

Someone, I forget who, even suggested that when a plane flew over the ceremony temporarily drowning the words, they could well imagine Pinter wanting to rise from his grave to silence the unwanted intrusion.

But the last words should belong to Antonia Fraser who ended the simple ceremony by advancing to the grave and, gazing down at the coffin through her tears, quoted Horatio's words of Hamlet: "Now cracks a noble heart. Goodnight, sweet prince, and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest."

It seemed a fitting, Shakespearean farewell to a great playwright.


farewell, dear friend