Eulogy for Ros
But how do you sum up almost 35 years of friendship with someone like Ros? Its difficult to tell funny stories about her because just being with Ros meant almost constant laughter, and much of this was about shared memories and sayings which were carried on and added to over the years. So this is about where some of those memories and sayings come from, and is a very personal reflection on Ros’s life and qualities.
I got to know Ros a bit better during that year when we had a long w/e in Switzerland as part of the programme, and Ros and I began singing on the train down. We discovered a mutual love of good Wesleyan hymns and, in fact, of singing in general. One of the things we sang that day was "All in the April Evening". We sang this in many strange, and frequently inappropriate, places over the years. Perhaps one of the strangest, though with the best acoustics, was the Booking Hall of Antwerp Railway Station.
When we came back from Germany Ros and I, along with a handful of other people from the volunteers group, lived for a year in a hostel in Kings Cross. The transformation which had begun in Germany continued during that year, as Ros grew her hair, lost weight, and quite a bit of the aforementioned innocence with it! In exchange for her board and lodging Ros became chief cook and bottle-washer. This gave her the opportunity to declaim great chunks of Shakespeare, usually "Anthony & Cleopatra", over the cornflakes each morning. She would also recite whole scenes of "Murder in the Cathedral" and entire poems by T.S. Elliot. I was lost in admiration, and inspired to give Shakespeare another chance. Never before had I seen such a passion for literature and language, and her facility with words was very much part of her humour. When I visited Ros and her family in Horsforth, and met Fred and Barbara for the first time, I realised where much of the other part came from!
Also during that year Ros and I auditioned for the Dramateurs, a breakaway drama group from the N10s of Muswell Hill. Ros landed the female lead in "An Inspector Calls" – a play which, although not intended to be a comedy, provided us all with a great many laughs during rehearsals. It also provided Ros with a taste of fame as, several months after the performance, she was accosted in a West End café by a young man who said "Aren’t you an actress?" Ros denied this vehemently, but eventually it transpired that he had been in the audience and was so impressed by Ros’s performance he thought she must be a professional.
After Kings X Ros had a fairly peripatetic year when she worked in hotels in the Lake District and Scotland, and at the famous Harry Ramsdens. She finally settled down for a few years at Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry where again, as always before, she collected a growing number of friends who were to remain an important part of her life. This was one of Ros's greatest qualities – her gift for friendship – and the number of people here today is a testimony to this. Ros reached out to people and attracted them, and her friendships were wide-ranging. She was incredibly generous with her time and with herself, and made a real effort to keep in touch with people and maintain her friendships.
One of the friends Ros met at Coventry was Pete, who became her first serious, long-term partner and with whom she eventually moved to Oxford. But before that there was a sojourn in Middlesborough, getting a taste of Probation, and another in Swansea, getting qualified as a Probation Officer. Her choice of Probation was, I think, a natural extension of the "good Methodist girl" with her strong sense of duty combined with a sense of outrage at injustice and inequality. Throughout these years Ros and I met irregularly – some years 3 or 4 times, others only once or not at all. But friendship with Ros was such that, even if you hadn’t seen her for a while, you could just pick up where you left off as if you’d met only last week.
The upside of these irregular meeting for me was the ‘Ros Gill Letters’. Ros wrote wonderful letters – pages and pages of them full of stories, anecdotes and observations on life, all of it imbued with Ros’s inimitable sense of humour. The sight of her handwriting on an envelope would, quite literally, make my day. A letter from Ros was a real treat, to be saved for the evening so I could read it at leisure. A letter from Ros could leave you chuckling for days, and you’d reply as soon as possible in order to get another one. I missed them when we both got phones, but even after that Ros would occasionally decide to write instead or, at the very least, would send cards crammed with writing on every conceivable occasion.
And so to Oxford. I think for many of us Ros is Oxford and Oxford is Ros, and its impossible to imagine being here without her. Ros in Oxford meant her wholehearted involvement in her work, through which she met many of her closest friends. Ros in Oxford meant many good times both intimate and grand. I have such happy memories of May Day mornings, punting expeditions with wind-up gramophones, Ros’s famous carol-singing parties, birthdays, picnics and so on. Who could ever forget Ros’s dramatic renderings of Rule Britannia in a very passable imitation of the great Constance Shacklock?
Ros loved events and was frequently the centre of them – though was usually unaware of this. She loved games and tennis and windsurfing and her garden, where she would sometimes make people eat in sub-zero temperatures! She loved Tony Hancock, Kenneth Horne, Victoria Wood, Eddie Izzard, and all those comedians whose comedy is based on acute observations of everyday life, as was her own. She loved good food and wine, travelling and walking the Pennine Way in slingbacks with Jane! And for the last 17 years she loved Paul, even to the extent of actually marrying him in Sri Lanka! Through Paul Ros also became part of Em's life, which was a challenge for both of them but one to which they both rose.
At the start of Ros & Paul’s relationship he was known to some of us as "that Paul" and regarded with deep suspicion I have to admit. But as we saw how much Ros meant to him, and he to her, we grew to love him too. The feminist in Ros would not allow her to be too much defined by the men in her life, and she had a horror of being too "couply". One of the many things I valued about her was the continued importance her women friends had in her life.
Of all of us, the person who coped best with Ros’s illness was Ros herself. She was completely lacking in self-pity and, in the same way she had thrown herself into other interests and activities in her life, she threw herself into healthy eating, exercise, visualisation, and all the other things she, and we, hoped might help to beat it. Throughout all this she still managed to make a joke of it, and made it possible for us to talk to her about what was happening without awkwardness or embarrassment. She was absolutely amazing. The diffident, anxious Ros was still there, but alongside this was an incredibly tough, strong Ros who was determined to carry on as normal.
The overwhelming memory of Ros, I suspect for everyone here, is of her humour and how much fun it was being with her. She had such joy of life and grasped it, and the opportunities which came to her, with both hands.
So thank you, Ros, for your friendship, for being such an important part of my life for so long, and letting me be part of yours. I hope you know how much you meant to me.
I’ll miss you more than I can say, or probably even imagine at the moment.
But I feel so lucky to have known you – we’re all so lucky to have known you and to have shared so many happy times with you. Right now it feels unbearable. But I know that, in time, we’ll be able to enjoy all our wonderful memories of you and you’ll be part of us whenever we meet.
We are all so much richer for having known you.
Goodbye Ros - God Bless
