Obituary of Bernie Baker

I am inevitably appalled and shocked at this unlooked for item of information insofar as the windfall my Mother and her sisters had been expecting had finally materialised last Christmas (roughly) and I have been the recipient of much of a not insignificant fraction which had enabled the purchase amongst a few other things of a reasonably large shiny motorcycle and a Pet Dog to replace the childhood friend that died in 1979. I hadn't spoken at all beyond the odd phone call to my Mother this year since she bought the Yamaha Cruiser and a few other things plus paying the outstanding household bills as the fact of my having had to explain the nature of my feelings about long term unhappiness with my family and personal relations had occasioned significant emotive tension as long term memories were reinterpreted and rearranged during the course of the six months prior to last Winter. I had recently become rather fussy about getting sidetracked insofar as I was hijacked with an unscrupulous suit by the Co-op Bank who must have been eavesdropping on the atttempts of the nice young Lady GP to help me get seriously get on my my feet as regards my personal medical difficultites in this respect and should have blamed their own deceitful and suspiciously inept (to say the least) staff for any unpopularity they might have incurred in the last few years; the point being that this had rather hamstrung my efforts to be helpful to others in the short term insofar as having to make sinister interpretations of dimly remembered events is a traumatic ongoing personal event and if they had some real point they ought to have made it known about three years ago instead of harrying blameless characters with distressing official looking threats which I had just about summoned the courage to deal with having tried to realise calmly that for the first time in my life also, I was relatively solvent..

Close relatives will know of course that I have been living only a couple of streets away from where she lived for the last thirty months, that I have seen her at least once also briefly greeting her outside the nearby shops within a period of some months and that if it was not her last birthday I had managed to remember it was at least the birthday before that. It being the case that she had also only just also shaken off a lifetime's comparable poverty with her windfall as her husband had been insured but not extensively at least in her regard; I suppose that all those who had her interests at heart at all in any way within the extended family such as I have had been gladdened by the payment of significant fortunes into its' affairs it being the case that their prospect had occasioned much official conjecture of one sort and another over some years and that those who had quarrelled so, over material inadequacies over many long decades might have eventually found many pleasant diversions and an easier perspective from which to consider personal sadnesses and old hostilities perhaps. I will guess that most will say that obviously they had not considered such questions as ill health, thoughts of retirement and provisions for the afterlife would be so maladroit as to intrude on the arrival of some good weather which has finally got me out and about on the Motorcycle. I think she knew that I was planning to get away for at least a week or two on the Bike for a spot of touring with the Jack Russell/Whippet cross bitch that I have taught to ride the thing and was hoping to quit smoking at the same time and get around to doing a lot more as she was also aware and I'm also quite sure that she overheard me planning to go out to a Barbecue on the local estuary the Saturday before which some friends nearby were planning and I didn't get to in the end having stayed in to watch a new Vampire film Van Helsing as the result of being quite fatigued. It was the case that I had been worried enough about my own poor cardiac tissue insofar as I hadn't done any physiotherapeutic swimming this year until the last few weeks of good weather had seen me alacritously get up to the beach near my Father's birthplace on my excellent new transport. I'd been fretting a bit over managing to eat enough to stay respectably able to handle the thing after a serious day out and was sorting various odds and ends for a better vacation having everything I need except a couple of relatively cheap odds and ends and the fact of her being likely to have had an interest in plans for some therapeutic activity had been at the back of my mind in some respects and of course in the minds of all those who knew she had been in Hospital once or twice and did have a moderate heart condition which necessitated regular medication.

She probably hadn't gotten much beyond paying a few bills and buying a few drinks for the neighbours and so on and most who knew her will also have probably considered that she wouldn't need a comparative amount of attention in the short term or at least while the fine weather lasted. It's extremely difficult for me to describe the appalling effect this news has had on me, insofar as she was an intimate part of my infancy up to the age of almost six and a background figure to my life of at least almost equal import to either parent at most points in my personal history. Most of my memories of any sort of happiness and of having 'friends' during that time and of any sort of security perhaps thereafter are closely bound up with recollections of herself, sunny days and visits to my Cousins the Williams in Hertfordshire in infancy and early childhood with their friends and my Mother's other sisters. I had put an early picture up of the elder of my Aunt Maureens' two boys only within some recent months in the personal section of the website and was still resolving old memories which had tormented and confused me since I experienced them as an Infant in the Swinging sixties, having been conceived in central London late in 1963 and insofar as I had mentioned on my website before now, odd superficial conversational disagreements which were probably about this at the root of the matter when we visited Ireland to see my other Cousins the Bakers in the early nineties, it is particularly a cruel stroke of fate that sees her Heart give out within the first summer of having been made at least temporarily quite financially secure, especially with my being on the point of resolving more or less the last of our differences of understanding if not of interpretation over some personally fascinating pieces of information about sensitive family history which had obviously been a source of immense anguish to myself particularly amongst her Nieces and Nephews. I don't suppose for all our differences that I had ever imagined myself, insofar as I have ever given the matter any thought, getting married for example without her hovering around somewhere in the forefront of festivities, busybodying about and puncturing any over inflated egos broadcasting any suspect middle class values. A lot of my motives for taking any interest in the question of family or indeed for leading any kind of social existence will disappear as this premature and cruel passing makes it's impact on my own consciousness and that of most of those who have ever been close to me in any way, as there will now in many respects be no-one to witness or meaningfully appreciate any personal triumph I could still have conceivably devised in respect of longstanding arguments and unrequited passions while she lived, and concerning which, there was as a matter of fact a half finished letter to her on my Computer.

There are few in the family and neighbourhood who will not miss her booming presence and personable qualities of empathy and understanding insofar as her down to earth, stoic and courageous personality evolved from wartime asperity as it was, remained a link not just between family members whose differences have left them largely incommunicado for the last decade or so at least, but also between the wartime and post war world of street corner politics, family oriented society and the cold, implacable and friendless digital age in which I now find myself feeling awfully and strangely alone: death has not touched me so closely since the 1970's and her passing leaves me feeling somehow vulnerable and very much less human than I was. Whatever else may come to pass I am going to have an extreme amount of difficulty in coming to terms with life without her in a number of ways. She was a forceful, forthright and fearless personality of whom it will probably be said most outstandingly that she broke down barriers, at least made people talk and to a certain extent understand one another, was very much a bridge between many individuals and decaying family alignments that have existed since at least the mid sixties as well as a long standing advocate of Anglo-Irish amity amongst other things. Her greatest moment was undoubtedly the manner in which she blackmailed Elizabeth Windsor otherwise known as the Queen in the matter of the Trial of the Kray twins over the fact of her sister Margaret having been buying cocaine from the Gangsters she came here to sell her younger Sister to which had among a number of unhealthy repercussions the result of elicitig the only true Life sentence handed down since the abolition of Capital punishment which was ostensibly for Murder and thus obtained excusal of my Mother and herself from various crimes for which most have concurred they should have received at least a brief spell of imprisonment given their public and social conduct since then as well as obviously, the fact that they since been emboldened to various instances of dishonesty and criminal behaviour to which dozens of deaths and billions of pounds worth of lost revenue can easily be attributed.

I probably would have been out of district touring on the Motorcycle if the DSS had paid up a forfeiture for illegal manipulation of my claim at around the time of my having fractured my knee when I asked them too. Since they agreed to pay an indeterminate sum as per their brochure advertisements they have three times ignored and within a few days of this occurence claimed they know nothing about this event so I could have been in a better humour as well. It's another instance of rank corruption in the government and I don't know exactly what they are trying to pull but it's hardly likely to elicit confidence in our adminstration and I really resent being told to go nosing after bequests instead as is clearly being implied by persons who'd perhaps be better served by sinmply behaving as civil service legislation requires: the stunt they have pulled on me was simply malicious misdirection of a very distressingly handicapped person and is hardly likely to improve the chances of reducing the local accident rate insofar as there was a spate of traffic accidents after the first week of June when there was last some blarney with the Law outside and a nasty death of a WPC who ran into the back of a parked Van in the Town centre later in the month. My whole world and the onrushing course of history had been likely to have been very different perhaps if I had managed to get away for a reasonable break without worries (perhaps the first ever). For example I had only just dropped my own GP three separate letters which touched on the fact of Bernie's existence insofar as in many respects as I say our destinies had been significantly intertwined and it was unfortunate that I'd had to point out that they (the DSS) were again behaving more like Gangsters than helpful officials in these various matters.

Insofar as the 'discovered memories' referred to obviously relate to serious criminal activity the ongoing consequences of which could easily be viewed as having led to the deaths of dozens of individuals over several decades I'm rather taken aback to see so little conscience or contrition on the part of those now drooling over an estate which lacks a written will; especially those relatives who have not been greatly inconvenienced by the fact of her existence particularly in view of the fact that it's difficult to interpret recent relevant neighbourhood gossip involving the boys (and girls) in blue and numerous medical officials, as part of the completion of an interrogation that should have been effected to such a depth about forty years ago as I say. The observation is further compounded by the reasonable seeming deduction that she had relieved my Father of much (including all his Mothers' trinkets) under threat of violence or exposure as a Sodomite in cahoots with London's Pimps and Gangsters in the late sixties and who may or may not have financed various other careers since then. This would seem to explain perhaps the resemblance of Zoe Kray to my natural Mother's brother also the apparent mystifying willingness of the local establishment to tolerate and encourage my Father's recent mystifyingly destructive and thievish behaviour as well the motive for a contrary interpretation of the decision to default the estate to the unrepentant criminal siblings who now stand to benefit from having arguably thus mismanaged her medical affairs with various intents uppermost in mind other than Bernadette's immediate medical and social requirements. This on the part perhaps of Officials such as the General Practitioner who has been puzzling over the extent of this criminal activity for decades (as well as making ill advised political decisions with regard to the availability of medical resources) and is faced with various other incidental expensive situations that could more easily be resolved in the short term by sharing out the remaining treasure amongst those who had been inconvenienced by the activity described. Insofar as the incident of her dying without spending much of the cash she recently acquired should be regarded as unfortunate and that as far as possible her wishes should be observed it might eg prove possible to ascertain as to what extent her near neighbours and those whom she saw on a weekly basis as well as other interested officials conceivably might paint a different picture to the idea of handing over her money to her siblings insofar as amongst other things, two of three had also just collected a significant windfall and that I had often been spoken of as her putative heir and my location near her had been at least partly ( and illegally though this seems increasingly irrelevant) contrived on that basis. Insofar as few would dispute that my Father is visibly dying (I had expected to hear of his demise before hers) and insofar as he was arguably inconvenienced by the fact of her existence and allegedly criminal behaviour to a greater extent than anyone else she knew, I am annoyed to say the least to have to sit through the barrage of treacherous lies that I just have from mourners with a history of criminal blackmail, drug dealing, organised prostitution and various other instances of corrupt and criminal behaviour and I can only say that it is to be hoped that soon these characters will be wishing they had thought a little more conscionably on their obsequies than they just have.