Glenis Hesk 1947-2025
Glenis Hesk MA, BA (Hons), Cert.Ed
Eulogy for Mum
Service of Thanksgiving
St Denys’ Church, Cold Ashby, Northants
Thursday 13th March 2025
Good afternoon everyone. For those who don’t know me, I am Jonathan Hesk and I am Glenis’s son.
Thank you all for being here today to celebrate, and to give thanks for Glenis’s life.
Thank you also for being here to share some of the stories and memories which made my Mum such a special person.
And thank you all for being here to support Glenis’s husband and my dad, John, myself, my children Daniel and Fiona, and the rest of Glenis’s family as we say farewell to a beloved and very wonderful wife, mother, grandmother and cousin. I also want to say a special ‘thankyou’ to my wonderful partner Bridget for being such a support to myself, Dad, Fiona and Daniel at this difficult time.
It is a great comfort to us that so many old friends and neighbours have come together in this beautiful, ancient church – a church which Mum cared about as a focus for the community and as an important asset within the village’s built environment.
Some of you are friends whom my Dad has known since he was at school in Bedford in the late 50s and 60s and whom my Mum got to know once she and Dad met and fell deeply in love at Bretton Hall College back in 1965.
Some of you are friends from the lovely village of Carlton in Bedfordshire where we lived between 1969 and 1987 and where Mum taught 100s of primary school children to read, to write, to ‘share nicely’ and much more besides.
Some of you are friends and neighbours from Cold Ashby, a wonderfully close community which Mum and Dad have lived in – and have loved being a part of - for the past 37 years.
And some of you are former students of Glenis, who quickly became her dear friends, when she taught you on numerous English Literature adult education courses in Northampton in the Nineties and Noughties.
Along with our family, all of you already know what a loving, warm, kind and interesting person Glenis was. Some of you know how talented she was as a teacher, Whether you learned from her as a five year-old or as a seventy-five year old - my goodness! - you found yourself transformed by her enthusiasm, passion and commitment. And there can’t be many of you here who haven’t at some point experienced my Mum’s skill as an entertaining and engaging narrator of events and experiences. I’ll talk more about some of this in a moment.
But first of all, I want to discuss and give thanks for Glenis’s capacity for love and care towards her own family.
As I’ve already mentioned, Glenis met my Dad in 1965. Like me, Mum was the only child of loving parents. She grew up in Wolverhampton and did her O- and A-levels at a local convent school. The progressive and creative atmosphere of Bretton Hall teacher-training college in the mid-sixties provided a liberating contrast to those school days. My Dad also welcomed Bretton Hall as a means of escape from one world ruled and defined by his parents’ generation, to another new, and more exciting world in which that generation’s assumptions and priorities could be challenged and displaced. And so it was that Glenis and John found each other, not just as lovers and friends, but as soulmates. For all their very different personalities, Glenis and John shared the same outlook on life and the same wicked sense of humour. That glorious sharing endured, uninterrupted, for 60 years.
The success of their relationship was due in no small part to Glenis’s openness to, and capacity for, love. She loved and deeply cared for John unconditionally and unwaveringly for all of those 60 years. When I was a child, and even into my adulthood, she would tell me, all the time, how much she loved John, my dad, and how much she loved me, her son. It may seem obvious, common and unremarkable that this woman loved her husband and her only son so much, and that she constantly demonstrated that love through words, hugs and kisses. But I maintain that my mum’s love was a very uncommon and special gift. The power of that gift lives on in me and in my Dad, and in my wonderful children. The Hesks know how important it is not just to love, but to show love and to speak its name. We owe much of that to Glenis.
Being such a loving, kind and caring person as my Mum undoubtedly was, can come at a cost. Glenis was, as one of you put it so well in a letter of condolence to my Dad, ‘fiercely proud’ of her family and all our achievements. But she also worried about us a lot. This was especially true when my wife Katherine, Daniel and Fiona’s beloved mum, was diagnosed with incurable cancer in 2019 and then died in 2021. Glenis was a great support to Katherine, myself and the children during this difficult time. But the worry affected her deeply – both physically and mentally. Far more than she ever let on, Glenis’s deep love, care and concern for others took its toll and that is why we must give thanks for, and celebrate, her life and character all the more.
Glenis’s loving and caring nature towards family and friends had its analogue in her approach to her home, her garden and the two villages in which she lived throughout her adult life. She took great pride and satisfaction in tending her hanging baskets, flower pots and border plants, ably assisted by Dad. And she and Dad did a lot of work to keep things looking nice in the public spaces of Carlton and in Cold Ashby. Many of you will know how much Glenis took a genuine interest in, and was concerned for, the individuals and families of the Cold Ashby community.
Glenis cared a lot about her own appearance too: she loved her clothes and looked immaculate wherever she went and whatever she was doing. When people told her she looked good, she felt good and I know Mum would agree that there should never be any shame in doing things that make you feel good, so long as they are legal and reasonably safe! Several of you have used the word ‘elegant’ to describe Glenis to me. She was indeed an elegant and beautiful woman. It’s hard to believe we’ll never again be able to complement her on her outfit or to hear from her about the good price she got for a skirt or about how rubbish was the Ladies’ department at a certain branch of Marks and Spencer’s.
But in dwelling for while on Glenis’s love of things like gardening and clothes, I’m at risk of neglecting a feature of Glenis’ life and character which has had a much more enduring and profound impact on many people’s lives in Bedfordshire and in Northants. And it’s a feature of her life of which she greatly enjoyed and of which she was justly proud. I’m talking of course about Glenis the teacher and Glenis the academic. I think we can even talk of Glenis the intellectual.
Glenis was a brilliant and very talented school teacher. She loved teaching small children and took delight in the funny things which only small ones will say and do as they learn about the world. But she was never sentimental about the business of primary education – it was too important for that. In talking to my Dad about Mum’s approach to teaching at all levels, I’ve learned that her singular skill lay in making teaching a co-operative and transactional process between herself and her learners. She wasn’t interested in preaching or lecturing to a captive audience. She always wanted to make teaching and learning a collaborative exploration of a text, a topic or a project. She also knew how to get the best out of her learners and how to make the most of what they produced. At Bretton Hall, she actually started out on the art and design course before switching to literature and drama but the truth is that she was very talented in all three areas. Dad and I won’t be the only people here to remember how meticulous and eye-catching were her displays of the children’s writing and artwork at Carlton Lower School, or how good she was at inventing creative projects and tasks for the children. She always made the kids’ Christmas play something better and more interesting than the usual spectacle of fidgety six year-olds wearing tea towels and picking their noses!
As I prepared to leave school for University, Mum and Dad both decided that I shouldn’t have all the fun of Higher Education to myself, and they had always known that their Leeds University-endorsed Certificates of Education were more than equal to the Bachelors’ degrees which had become standard-issue teaching qualifications in the 1980s. So they both enrolled in part-time BA courses. Glenis got her BA Hons in Combined Studies from what is now the University of Bedfordshire in 1990. She then studied for a taught Masters in Victorian Studies at Leicester University and received her MA in 1993.
I think that these qualifications gave Glenis the confidence to jump into designing and teaching adult education courses based around the 19th and 20th century novel from the mid-nineties onwards. She taught these in Northampton on behalf of both Leicester University and the Workers’ Educational Association. She even did some teaching on the B.Ed. at what is now the University of Northampton.
As I said at the beginning, many of Glenis’s students on these courses became her good friends. Some of them are here today. And my Dad and I have been very moved by these former students’ memories of Glenis’s teaching. One friend recalls that she took these courses while she was a mum caring for young children. She has described Glenis as a ‘beacon of light’ whose enthusiasm, amazing research and learning transported her out of her ‘mummy box’. Another writes that Glenis introduced her to many of what have become her favourite authors, both through her classes and later via her ‘avid reader’ blog. (By the way, you can still read these wonderful pieces of writing via my Dad’s ‘Cold Ashby Rambler’ website). Glenis was very strong on 19th century authors such as Austen, the Brontes and George Elliott. And she would juxtapose these earlier works with more modern, and sometimes very recently published, novels. Each course was united by a theme, such as ‘the unreliable narrator’ or ‘gender and society’. Amidst all the grief and shock at Glenis’s death, I am told that one happier outcome, which I know would have made Mum very glad, is that some of these former students and friends have just got back in touch with each other – the pandemic had of course made it hard to maintain these ties.
I have only been able to offer a brief and very rough sketch – a faint outline – of who Glenis was and of why we must give thanks for her life, why we must always remember her and why we must honour her today. To do her fuller justice, we’d be here all night. And even then, it would not be enough.
But before I finish I want to share just one more memory of Glenis – and of a life well lived and well enjoyed. When I was a youngster and we lived in Carlton, John and Glenis would often learn and play traditional folk songs and current classic tunes from the world of pop, rock and folk. Mum would sing – she had a beautiful and powerful voice, actually – and Dad would accompany her on his acoustic guitar. He still has that guitar and he still plays it. I loved to hear them do this together.
Sometimes John and Glenis would perform these songs at fund-raising events for the primary school. It was the era of cheese-and-wine parties and Scrabble nights. One of those songs was 'Leaving on a Jet Plane' by John Denver. And that is one reason why we are going to hear this song next. It reminds me of happy times as a child with my wonderful mum and dad creating lovely music together. But of course, it is also a very sad song about loss and longing, about being forced to be apart from the person you love most in the world, and of how you must console yourself with happy memories and cherished objects in their absence. But, for the record, the bit about letting the other person down and ‘playing around’ does NOT apply to my mum and dad. They were inseparably devoted to each other and barely spent any time apart in the 60 years they were together. It is very hard for my dad to now be apart from his beloved Glenis. But he knows, and I know, that everyone here will be there for him as he comes to terms with this terrible, terrible loss.
Thankyou for listening.
