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Light a Candle
DOROTHY TULLETT, née Bishop, 28th July, 1919 - 15th December, 2018
After the turmoil of the 1st World War, Dorothy became her parents’ Peace Baby. Her brother Frank, born in 1915, had been nicknamed The War Baby.
Dorothy was the youngest of her family, so that eventually she was the only one left, missing the others with all her heart. The greatest blessing of Mum’s life was her happy childhood, memories of which sustained her into her 100th year. She came from a loving home, with parents she worshipped, two sisters (twins), and two brothers. Frank, five years older than she, was a particularly close friend. Mum went to his funeral when she was 89 to read out a eulogy she had prepared for him, which concluded:
It's hard to believe he isn't still in the world. But I'm sure that the world has two levels. There is the ordinary surface one of our everyday lives, which are only temporary. But some experiences, and especially love, make us aware of the deeper, more real, timeless world where those we love are always with us.
In her 80s, Dorothy wrote A Childhood Between The Wars, recollections of her home life in Darlington as it was in the 1920s and 30s, and of family holidays at a farmhouse in the Dales. At heart, she was always a country girl. Birdsong, trees, hilly landscapes and skies at night kept her sane.
As a girl, she decided not to go to university because she did not want to become a teacher like the frustrated ladies who worked at her school. She moved to London at the age of 19, although her father did not like the thought of "our little Dorothy in that Vortex of Iniquity", to do an office job. She was there at the start of the 2nd world war, shortly after an unforgettable mountaineering holiday in the Swiss Alps. The following year her office was evacuated to Harrogate, closer to home, and at the end of the war she spent a few months in Blackpool. In 1947, Dorothy seized the opportunity to apply for the Emergency Teacher-Training Scheme, so had a year of university-like experience at the training college in Worcester. It was here that she met and fell in love with a fellow teaching trainee, Robert (Bob) Tullett, a recent POW in Germany, still emaciated and traumatised by his experiences. They were two members of a quartet that sang madrigals, and she played piano duets with him.
Dorothy was a wife for 35 years and a widow for another 35 years after that. Her marriage was full of dedication and music. Living at a hillside cottage in Derbyshire, she and Bob had two daughters: Alison, b.1951 and Faith, b.1955. As well as being a full time mother and managing their home and finances, Dorothy was also Bob’s willing assistant; from 1948 to 1980, he ran music departments at three successive grammar schools, inspiring generation after generation, and his colleagues and star pupils recognised Dorothy’s contributions to this, many of them continuing to keep in touch with her after Bob’s death in 1984, well into her old age.
From the early 1960s to the 1980s, the couple created and nourished a series of liaisons between British and German school choirs, with consequent concert performances in Yorkshire, Somerset, the Rhineland and Baden-Württemberg. This resulted in lifelong friendships, not least between the teachers themselves. In the 1970s, Bob and Dorothy formed the Somerset Youth Choir, Dorothy their hard-working accompanist and administrator, which also forged lasting links with German musicians. Founder members of the SYC perform together to this day. Dorothy and Bob also went on more than one Music Cruise, chaperoning high school students on an ocean liner, to Madeira and ports of the Baltic Sea, for instance. Dorothy revelled in her experience of the high seas, with professional, live classical music played on board as they rode the waves.
Bob's retirement gave their five grandchildren, Emma, George, Bethan, Elen and Rhiannon, an increasing importance in their lives, all the more so for Dorothy after Bob's death in 1984. In the course of time, Dorothy acquired seven great-grandchildren as well, the youngest of them born not many days before her life ended. As for her daughters, Dorothy always contrived to live close to Faith, which necessitated moves from Taunton to Bracknell, to Reading, and finally to Cardiff. As well as flying unaccompanied to North Carolina in 1989, Dorothy crossed the Atlantic every year for 16 years to visit Alison, who has lived in Ottawa since 1995. Dorothy was thrilled by the colours of the Autumn leaves and by her trips to the Rockies, to the B.C. coast, to Lake Ontario and into Quebec. Furthermore, with her sister Violet, and sometimes her niece Wendy, too, Dorothy travelled by public transport to Scotland and the Scilly Isles, etc., making all the arrangements herself.
It was not until she was in her 90s that her faculties and mobility really deteriorated. Having bought her last house at the age of 86, in Whitchurch, Cardiff, Dorothy clung stubbornly to her independence until a bone fracture led to her admission to the Heol Don nursing home in 2015, which fortunately offers dementia care, because by then she was losing her mental awareness as well as becoming physically vulnerable. However, Dorothy’s long-term memories remained intact, so that, only a few months before she died, she was still able to recite from memory extracts from famous poems, including the Shakespeare sonnet that includes the lines:
Love alters not with [time’s] brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
Dorothy would comfort herself with beliefs that she expressed time and again in poems of her own, or in handwritten notes too intimate for sharing with the world at large. At the age of 97, while still able to wield a pen, she wrote this:
I am not my body. I, whatever I am, exist somewhere else –– in fact, in all the places and people I have loved, and who love me, I hope. So even when my body dies, I shall continue to live in them. We are all spirits, and spirits are much more than bodies.
Dorothy wished for a quiet, eco-friendly burial, so her body will lie in Cardiff's Natural Burial Meadow, overlooking the Vale of Glamorgan. The burial will take place on 10th January, 2019, with members of her family in attendance.
