My granddad once told me that the only funeral he would attend would be his own. He was right.

The warning signs began to emerge on New Year’s Eve, 2019. As per tradition, my family spent the last few hours of the year playing Bingo. My grandad would bring out the rickety Bingo machine that had survived in his garage since the 1970s. He always took the lead on Bingo night, sitting at the front of the table, calling out the numbers as they appeared on his machine.

‘Staying alive!’ he shouted, as we turned to our tickets, ‘Eighty–five!’

Everyone knew him as Jack, even though it wasn’t his real name. When I was growing up, my mum, a fan of soap–operas, jokingly called him ‘Jack’ in reference to a character in Coronation Street, Jack Duckworth: an old, gloomy man who taped the sides of his glasses to keep them together. My granddad, likewise, taped the side of his glasses to avoid getting a new pair.

Attending university in an affluent city and finding myself amongst students from wealthier backgrounds than mine, I discovered, to my surprise, that many of them saw ‘being working–class’ as in–vogue, akin to a fashion movement. Young, privileged people recited Marx, wore flat–caps, and slummed it in Primark or Oxfam, as though trying to confer a badge of authenticity.

As the middle–class kid of two painfully working–class parents, each with two painfully working–class parents of their own, this romantic view of the poor seemed utterly bizarre to me. I associated being working–class with an almost religious obsession to work, work, work and save, save, save. Case in point – on the night my granddad died, after his body was removed, my grandmother immediately went to work organising his clean clothes, taking his underpants and cutting them up into little squares to use as DIY dusters so as not to waste 30p on new ones. You won’t be seeing them on the shelves at Oxfam anytime soon.

‘Man alive!’ Jack continued, as we crossed off another number, ‘Number five!’

New Year’s Eve was always his night. It was, in fact, the only night of the year in which our family could tolerate his presence. Jack’s relationship with the rest of my family had deteriorated. In his twilight years, he had turned into a temperamental, alcoholic bigot, which differed from his younger years as a temperamental, non–alcoholic bigot.

Jack was a man out of time. He was born in 1937, growing up in the destitute conditions of wartime Gloucestershire, UK. His father, my great–granddad, was one of the first people to die in the war, just outside Dunkirk. There were posthumous medals and commemorations. For Jack, though, his dad’s name written on the official list of the dead was medal enough.

You might assume that a man of such humble origins, a man whose dad died fighting Nazi Germany, would develop an appreciation for the downtrodden. Often, in the media, we are inundated with such stories: people who realise that their pain is a pain similarly felt by others, who decide to fight injustice to give others the better life they didn’t have. Unfortunately, Jack was not one of those people. Instead he was a racist, a sexist and a homophobe.

‘Two fat ladies!’ he shouted, ‘Eighty–eight!’

I kept my distance from him. He lived down the road from us but I rarely visited. When I did, he was always in the same spot, in the same room, in the same chair: always smoking, always drinking.

As a younger man, he was strong and lively. He frequently clashed with the police, coming in and out of the courthouse like a local watering hole. But old age caught up with him. I think he resented it – the room, the chair, the cigarette, the pint. It was like he was trapped. His addictions, which were so much easier to manage with youth on his side, were slowly killing him. He had nothing else left to give. He couldn’t punch, he couldn’t run, he couldn’t move. In comparison to old age, a jail cell felt freeing.

‘Boris’s den! Number ten!’

It was sad to watch Jack shout out the numbers, conducting the evening’s events on the precipice of 2020. He didn’t have quite the same unbridled passion as he did on prior New Years’ eves. He was uncharacteristically tame and, by his standards, non– offensive. There were no side–eye glances towards my uncle and his husband. At first I thought, after 83 years of life on planet Earth, he may have finally settled down. Or, perhaps, he had finally come to learn that Bingo is a fundamentally boring game. But we came to realise there was another reason.

I want to say, after the clock struck twelve, someone in my family exclaimed, ‘Don’t worry – I’m sure 2020 will be more interesting than 2019!’ It would certainly be dramatically convenient. In truth, we all thought the following year would be just as uneventful as the year that had passed.

‘Doctor’s orders, number nine!’

In January 2020, Jack was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Around the same time, there were reports of a virus emerging from Wuhan, China. I didn’t think much of it at the time. In March 2020, Jack entered palliative care, sequestered in the makeshift ward that was his bedroom, his bed replaced with a hospital gurney. I arrived back home from university to see him one last time. By April, he was dead. We threw out the Bingo machine shortly thereafter.

Because of lockdown measures at the time, funeral attendance was restricted to six people. My mother, grandmother, uncle and great–aunts attended. I gave the sixth and final spot to my sister.

At the end of it all, despite his flaws and complications, Jack taught me a valuable lesson – youth and old age are conditions inflicted upon those least capable of handling them.