Eulogy for Dinah

It is clearly impossible to speak with any objectivity about one’s own mother.  But at this moment of her burial I want to say a few things about Dinah.

Dinah was an extremely loving person, whose need to give to others less fortunate seems to me to have sprung from a religious sense that we are all equal under the sight of God and that all should share in the opportunities and treasures of the world.  A couple of examples stand out in my memory:

When Raymond’s brother Nigel’s marriage collapsed, and he was left to tend for his two young daughters, Dinah immediately took Amanda and Caroline into our home and they grew up with us for about two years.  Years later, when Dinah talked about the difficulties of education and of the need to wait until children were ready to learn something,  she would bring up the example of the day when Caroline came to her to say that she finally, really, wanted to learn to read.  Dinah then worked with her for several hours a day until in a couple of weeks she was reading on her own.  

Dinah was very sensitive to the notion that “One size doesn’t fit all,” to individual differences.  An example of this tolerance came when I abandoned my Prep school at age 9, and declared that I wouldn’t go to school any more.  Dinah stood by me and supported me until I returned to school two years later.  As a parent I can appreciate what a bold and faithful move it was to support this choice as she did.   

Dinah made many great friends and friendships that endured through decades.  

Roger and Ann Ormrod were her closest friends and mentors for forty or more years.  Their love for all of us affected our family’s life in many important ways.  When, in her teens, Francesca needed to escape the tensions of our fracturing family she went to live with Roger and Ann.   They really became Francesca’s second parents.  But the quality of Dinah's friendship with Roger and Ann saw them through this transition and they stayed close friends with each other up until Roger and Ann’s deaths.

Dinah and Raymond spent some of their early marriage in the United States and Canada and Dinah made friendships then that also lasted a lifetime.  I particularly want to remember Roger Barlow, whose friendship with our parents (he really felt more like one of the family) was a wonderful fixture in our emotional landscape.  Like the Ormrods, Barlow’s love of Dinah and Raymond extended to all three of us children and particularly to my brother, Roger.  Barlow and Dinah remained devoted friends until his death ten years ago and his wise and lightly humourous presence will always be greatly missed by Francesca, Roger and myself.  

Dinah had ambivalent feelings towards the New Country, whose politics she distrusted and which had taken her two sons from her.  But she was endlessly generous to both Roger and me about our moves to the States – Just the other day I came across a letter she wrote to Roger in which she waxed on about the beauties of the English spring, but took care to say she wasn’t trying to make him feel homesick.  And when my son Angus, for whom Dinah provided a home for several years, himself left for California, she was unambiguously supportive of his decision and sent him on his way with all her best wishes.

The family was, for Dinah, the centre of life.  This came out not only in her own family, but in her support of her children’s marriages and of her grandchildren.  For almost the last 30 years she always kept a toy box in her sitting room for visiting grandchildren and friend’s children.  Dinah was also extremely proud of her own children’s accomplishments: Francesca’s rigorous journalism at the BBC and Roger’s creative career as a film maker and director.

Dinah loved beauty and nature.  She loved to drive through Los Angeles to see the Jacaranda trees in blossom or through Richmond Park with its ancient English woodland.  She was also a very musical person – one of the last times I saw real joy in her face, this was just two or three weeks ago, was when she broke into singing “Speed bonnie boat like a bird on the wing, Onward, the sailors cry.  Carry the lad that's born to be king over the sea to Skye.”  Our childhood home was always filled with music, either Dinah’s piano playing and singing in the studio or Raymond’s travels through Classical music on the record player.   

Dinah was not always an easy person to have as a mother.  Her own high standards made her a demanding parent - But she was a person whom I always loved and respected.  She was someone with a confident inner connection to the world of the spirit - at times she seemed to speak with more authority than her own life experience could warrant.  

We once discussed a quotation that Carl Jung had chiseled into the lintel of the door to his house, “Vocatus, atque non vocatus, Deus aderit” – Called, or not called, God is present.  I think she knew exactly what he meant.  

In saying Good Bye to her now, I can only say, as she so often used to say to her outwardly atheist son, 

“God Bless.”