From Chris Fenton

When I think about Carol

I remember a special trip to Windsor Safari Park when Josh and Alex were very small, before Max was born. Josh sat on her knee in the front seat as we drove around the park to see the baboons who stole the comic relief red nose from the bonnet because it looked like a bum. She laughed at that as you can imagine.

Then we drove back to East Dulwich and she made chilli coconut fish for us all in the house she used to share with Zoe

I remember my first ever gig which was with her and Kim to see the Specials and AuPairs at an Anti-Nazi League Carnival in Leeds (1981).

I am/was always in awe of her social calendar, at least three meetings with friends each day seems impossible to me.

She often gave me clothes. My favourite top was from her and has lasted five years so far.

The first one she ever gave me was the subject of the poem that Alex read at the funeral service:

In the garden at Glenarm Road, this August.

Our house in Dalton

A Gothic Smock

Before I knew much about life,
Carol made for me, a coal-grey top
with some T-shirt material she got from Leeds.

It looped around my collar bones in deep,
skeletal hollows at the neck.
Places where moonlight might have gathered.

Within earshot of church bells and yew trees over the graveyard,
where a third of her ashes will go,
I watched,
in our lazy Dalton sitting room,

as she stitched and pinned a hundred seams by the fireplace.
My older sister,
with love that tastes
like slowly opening your eyes
then sweetly falling asleep again, still tired.