Alison Hardwick, who died peacefully last Friday, loved reading, theatre and good films. If you talked to her about what she was planning to see at the theatre while she served coffee each Sunday, her eyes would sparkle and she always had a good recommendation. If you did not know Alison you might think she was quiet, elderly, reserved. If you did know her you would begin to realise that you were in the presence of the most delightful saint. Alison once told me that one of her favourite novels was George Eliot’s Middlemarch. At the end of that long novel the central character Dorothea is described by Eliot in this way:
Her full nature, like the river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life…
Alison was like that herself – she irrigated St Martin’s and all of us all with her kindness, her wit, her intelligent insight, her long and devoted service, her courage in the face of her own loss and suffering. She made us better people. And she died peacefully as she lived without fanfare or complaint but with a deep love and affection for all around her – the flowers in her front garden that she could see from her bed, and her husband David and daughter Ruth who had gone before her, and the grace of God at the very centre of all she was and will always be. She was truly an example to us all. At the very heart and on the edge.
Alison Hardwick’s funeral will take place at St Martin-in-the-Fields on Wednesday 14 July at 12.00 noon.
Revd Richard Carter
