Speculation, Fact and Fiction

I was peeling potatoes last Friday evening, listening to PM on Radio 4, as one does, when they ran a piece on Nick Clarke's funeral. Which gave me a shivery moment because it was held at St Mary Abbot, Kensington, and the music they played was the hymn, 'Dear Lord and Father of Mankind.' Because that's where Maggie Noach's funeral was, a week ago today, and we sang that very same hymn.

It's a sizeable church of 1870’s Victorian Gothic with loadsa carving everywhere and marble and gilt around the fancy high altar. It was remarkably reminiscent of St Peter's Parkstone where I was in the choir in my teens, and the service was in the same High Anglican tradition I'm most at home with, which was all unexpectedly comforting.

The vicar was in the traditional High Anglican intellectual mould – I didn’t think they made them any more – so his sermon wasn’t happy-clappy trite consolation but tackled head on the difficulty of dealing with such an untimely death, acknowledging the mystery of God, and the need for faith and looking forward. Which was well received by that particular congregation, religous and otherwise.

There was a good turnout, well into the hundreds, about evenly divided between family and authors - which made a change from the usual question of 'bride or groom?' A long-standing family friend gave a wonderful tribute and the readings and music were all looking to the positive – the ‘I will lift up mine eyes’ psalm, the 'new heaven and a new earth' bit from Revelation., etc.

Afterwards I spoke to the other authors I know best – and we were all still struggling with the unreality of it all, and the pain of not being able to share variously, a new idea, a just-completed draft, and in my case, the on-going contemporary novel project with Maggie.

This past week has seen Locus Magazine get in touch about an obituary, and I've been liaising with them on that. We, that is the authors and also Maggie's staff, are really touched that they're doing one. Thanks to bellingwoman in the comments to my initial post about this, I can point you towards the obituary in The Independent.

Though they're incorrect as regards the circumstances of Maggie's death which wasn't during any operation. It now turns out that she was suffering unbeknownst from a rare form of blood cancer.

For an appreciation of what Maggie meant to her authors, I cannot do better than direct you to Geoff Ryman's wonderful piece in Publishing News. Go and read it.