This is the eulogy I wrote.
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Sean and I were of the last generation of children to be allowed out alone at a young age, sometimes with instructions not to return home until dinnertime. Many of my earliest memories are of times spent with him, probably in the summer holidays, going to the park or swimming, or to the cinema, or just out on our bikes. Although a better swimmer than me, and later on good at athletics, he was never one for kicking a football about, but we both liked board games and spent countless hours playing them. He used to enjoy assembling and then painting model aeroplanes, which I wasn’t allowed anywhere near.
He had several friends of his age, and sometimes allowed me to tag along with them. It was a time of social change, with less emphasis on health and safety, and we may on occasion have dared each other to go in derelict houses, besides having harmless and good-natured fun with air guns, slingshots, and home-made bows and arrows.
We made several trips alone into London, to St. Paul’s, the Tower, Madame Tussaud’s, and the Science and Imperial War museums. I think he was supposed to be responsible for me, which possibly wasn’t always easy. It was good to have an older brother.
Not quite so good, perhaps, having later to share a bedroom with him in our teenage years. He had a mixture of music and WW1 recruitment posters on the walls, and music blaring out of the hand-painted record player. Sean loved music, his taste in which developed throughout his life. He liked countercultural comics, art, and books, and was interested in drawing. His tastes were individual to him, and not mainstream or led by fashion.
He was away much of the time at Mill Hill boarding school, to which he won a scholarship and was keen to go. I had long assumed that there must have been some culture shock involved, but we were able to spend his final afternoon together and, although he was unable to speak, it was clear when I asked him that his school days were happy ones.
I might have been more cautious in identifying causes of his turning to drink after leaving school. In my memory, there is no period in-between, but the memory is full of holes. He had a job drawing price charts in the City, an option to attend Art College, and looks genuinely happy in photos of this time. One might try to unravel hereditary and environmental influences, look for trauma or turning points, or wonder what could have happened differently. One might analyse, judge, blame, second-guess, or resent the roles that dealing with alcoholism constrains others to play, all of which runs the risk of distorting his life and his choices with one’s own narratives and assumptions.
Subjectivity aside, there were times, later on, when the detrimental effects on his health were not only evident, but overwhelming and damaging to his career with Virgin Rail. He several times resolved openly to quit, and appeared to do so for short periods, although drinking can be a secretive and deceptive affair. In a rare moment of candour, he once described it to me as “a terrible thirst”. He was incorrigible, which increasingly had a dispiriting and alienating effect on many of those close to him.
Nevertheless, he worked full-time and often overtime for almost his entire adult life, was widely read, enjoyed photography and difficult, cryptic crosswords, had an acute memory, and travelled extensively throughout Eastern Europe and the Baltic states with friends from work. Sean enjoyed travel very much, and I saw more of him visiting me when I lived in Paris than I often did in London. Perhaps his favourite destination was Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, which he mentioned often, and which he once visited solo, by rail, not long after the fall of the Iron Curtain; a no mean feat of enterprise in those pre-internet days of division.
I found a rare letter he wrote me twenty-two years ago. He began by describing that period of his life as “fraught”, which was an adjective I had not forgotten, and which might well apply to what was to follow. A fraught feedback of drinking in order to cope with its increasingly debilitating effects. How difficult it is to escape a downward spiral, or to understand what it like to be on one. Our different roles and ways of coping drove a wedge between us, and I regret that, Sean. Your life seems to me a dark journey taken by a gentle and unassuming soul, and I am left with memories of impromptu but welcome visits on birthdays, contradictory thoughts of what might have been, and an image of you sitting in a pub, drinking a pint and doing The Times crossword, after another long and tiring shift at work.
Sean speaks fondly in the letter of our primary school, at which he had recently attended a reunion. That was a Church of England school, at which we sang hymns and said prayers each morning in assembly, which I have no doubt he enjoyed. Indeed, one of the photographs that Salem was kind enough to pass on to us is of him at a carol service in the beautiful garden here, last Christmas. The Christian charity and support he received here is a comfort to us all, and for that, Cameron, we thank you and all of the staff and residents here, from the bottom of our hearts.
