Eulogy for Nina Mitchell
Nina’s approach to acting was perhaps the exact opposite of the advice Bette Davis gave to the actress Celeste Holm, ‘Pray to God and say the lines.’ Nina would have said, I think, that unless you knew the lines inside out, unless you had tried every kind of emphasis and pace and volume, until you had got it as right as you could – then you could pray – but no amount of prayer would make up for the hard and disciplined work on words. Words mattered to Nina, whether they were the words of poetry or drama – good words in the best order which demanded to be spoken in a certain way, and which could not be said properly unless you meant them. In Nina’s case I’m not sure which came first, a love of words or a love of acting, but I suspect it was the words because after she stopped acting she went on teaching people to speak and to read out loud, and she recorded over a hundred books for the blind so they too could enjoy what they could not read. And of course it was that famous first production of Murder in the Cathedral which enabled her to combine her two loves in a poetic drama, which also became part of the work of the Pilgrim Players to which she and her great friend Sylvia belonged – Sylvia whose funeral Nina was preparing to attend on the day on which she fell and had to go into hospital for the last time.
And then Nina’s second great love was her family; meal times for 8 seemed to focus the character of her family life. Dressed in jumpers she had knitted, some of them in bright yellow and unconventional in shape, eating food that may have implied she paid a little less attention to recipes than she did to poetry, engaged in keen debate about all sorts of issues and occasionally having to duck a flying orange, her family received a special kind of care – a concern that like poetry, relationships matter and you have to mean them and work hard at them to get them right. And meaning them also meant cards and presents and notes, and drawings of cats and slabs of chocolate before exams. Cats of course were another of her loves, perhaps appropriately, for cats can be very affectionate but are also rather private creatures whose ‘ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable singular names’, (TS Eliot, ‘On the addressing of cats’) no-one ever gets to know. Nina herself worked hard at getting to know other people where ever she went or more recently when they came to care for her. And her last words for us, as to her family, might well have been “ Look after one another and love each other.”
Donald Wolfit was one of the actors Nina worked with – a voice that some of us who heard him only on the radio will never forget – and one of the quotes for which Wolfit is famous is the line, ‘Dying is easy – comedy is hard.’ But for Nina that wasn’t quite true either. Because she felt she had outlived her usefulness she wanted her death to come sooner than it did. And it didn’t and she found that very hard. And that was painful for her and for all who loved her. Somehow she could not see that her usefulness – though that isn’t the right word – her purpose in life was to be loved as well as to love. We are I expect all familiar with that prayer attributed to St Francis which inspired the hymn, ‘Make me a channel of your peace’. It contains the words, ‘Grant that we may not seek so much to be loved as to love.’ Of course we cannot demand to be loved, but it can be, for so many of us, hard to accept and hold on to the fact that we are loved for who we are and not for how useful we are. The church played an important part in Nina’s life both in Nottingham and here in Hampstead, she was a faithful communicant in church and at home when she couldn’t get to church. In ways which it would be hard to discern, her faith played its part in making her the remarkable, calm yet forceful, clear sighted person she was. And yet it remained hard for her to hear that it was who she was and not what she could do that still gave her life meaning and made her a loved presence in people’s lives. And perhaps it was also hard for her as it may be for us to hear that we are loved and relished by God for who we are and not for our usefulness to God.
And now beyond death Nina comes in to the presence of the God who gave her life and all that people loved and admired in her. She goes home to God the Word, the origin of all meaning, who gives us the words to nourish our common dream of truth and beauty. And in God’s presence she will hear her own ineffable name welcomed into the joy of her master, and she will know finally and for certain that love which pours itself out, and wills for us that there will be joy and peace and that we have nothing left to do but to receive. Amen.
Stephen Tucker
Personal Reflections of Nina Mitchell’s Life read at her funeral
It’ll be a good year for field mushrooms.
On the Scar, the heather glows pink
Bracken browns at the fringes
And the swifts ready to head south.
On the terrace, children shout and play
School starts tomorrow
Soccer replacing cricket
But it’s too early for bonfires.
Her father died before she was born
A taciturn barrister – I doubt she saw the joke-
Kiwi, oarsman and a sea faring adventurer
‘ Talkative, he was, once in his cups’.
Joy, her twin, shared a secret language,
The two crouched, cats supping from a puddle,
Companions in a Pooh sticks world
Of aunts, pageants, poetry and disapproving uncles.
Then the stage – greasepaint, late night trains,
Lyons Corner House, landladies and digs,
Costumes and sets, lines to be learnt,
Juvenile leads and stage door Johnnies.
The Old Vic, Blackburn rep and Broadway
Oldham and Amersham too.
Thorndykes, Careys and Wolfit.
Priestly, Speaight and E Martin Browne.
Names now lost or drifting away
Flotsam in the wash of an ocean liner or
Steam hissing from waiting Sunday trains at Crewe.
(‘Novello’s company went 1st class, you know’)
Young men lost to war. Firewatches and sirens,
Bedsit in Hampstead, flat in Camberwell
Doodlebug, then silence then dread
Family and motherhood took over.
I’m sure my parents tried their best
Perhaps their main stage was elsewhere.
The orange hurled at his head a direct hit:
Dramatic, accurate: silencing the house.
A time to gather stones together
Her rock cakes were legendary hard core.
Chocolate slab comfort for exam candidates.
The kitchen is where I remember her best,
Tea, toast and midnight marmalade.
This is the world service from the BBC.
Nina, her name a baton handed through the family,
Gifting sly humour and encouraging care.
The last years by turns fear and hope,
Distant memory and chin up, don’t make a fuss.
Living and partly living.
Too often she said thanks in later years,
I never thanked her enough.
Instead, we talked of places and friends, parks and flowers,
Brothers and sisters, comparisons still.
Clean the air, clean the sky.
The evening has come, and the sail is sewn.
But she would have said it’s early yet
The thread’s any colour but blue,
And whose are the voices off stage?
Ta ta Goonight. Goonight
A work in progress
Peter Mitchell September 2011
Nina Mitchell