Alan Mitchell's Ipswich posse yesterday at Manor Park cemetary, along with nearly a couple of hundred mourners, witnessing him being laid to rest in a spectacular pan-African ceremony.
The rain sheeted down in the kind of perfect Pathetic Fallacy weather that Alan would have struck out as a cliché had anybody been sufficiently corny to have included it in a script. However, the sun also struggled through, though our hearts were breaking. The grief rolls in on you in outsized waves and I don't surf.
Thank you, Nelson Mitchell, for the anecdote earlier that morning in the church service about Alan playing Doctor Who as a kid, using the wardrobe as his Tardis (for it was he who was the Doctor, natch!) and ordering his younger brothers Nelson and Emmanuel to be Cybermen and attack him as soon as he exited. Unfortunately, this was nine at night and bedtime. The noise of Alan's vocal Tardis noises and the rocking of the wardrobe in the small Bethnal Green flat soon attracted the attention of his Mum. The only battle victor when Alan emerged was his Mum who administered "licks" while his brothers laughed themselves silly. This is the one thing that made me smile in a long, wrenching day.
Charles Shaar Murray said he once teased Alan that Nelson was a younger, handsomer version of him. Alan harrumphed and retorted, "No, not handsomer. Just prettier!"
Alan, you are beautiful in all our eyes. And will always be. RIP
In the outside world, it was the darkest period of our lives in a generation. We were about to topple into a post-truth era where politics, economics, race and ethics would all be thrown into the air. However, after years of struggle we were temporarily safe in our new home which was to be a writers’ retreat for myself, Charles Shaar Murray, Paul Anderson and Alan Mitchell.
They say the sound you hear while making plans is the gods laughing. At 6.30pm on 22nd June 2016, the eve of the catastrophic Brexit vote, the wheel of fate creaked round a new notch and the walls were breached. The powers of destruction in evidence Out There crashed in with the news that one of my best friends, my bro, the person I could talk to and share experiences with of racism, exclusion and injustice, had died that morning.
Alan Mitchell, with whom we were going to do amazing things now that the house was almost finished — including his history of black creatives and heroes in comics — had gone and left us bereft.
He had persuaded me to turn my show, Anna May Wong Must Die!, into a graphic novel. He was always brilliant when it cames to matters of race and black history in particular and he thought that this was an important project about the Chinese diaspora and my own place in it. Conversations with him had already led to me adding a new section to the end of a lengthy piece I’m writing about my experience in the far left and how their particular brand of conscious and unconscious racism works.
Alan always understood me with great kindness and insight. He was to be my editor and script consultant, basically holding my hand through the process of adapting to a new writing genre. I’m missing his love, his wisdom, his humour. I’m so sorry for his beautiful children, his family and his mother, all of whom he loved so deeply; for the writer Charles Shaar Murray who brought him into my life 18 years ago. And especially for Sarah Adams who'd found love with him in the last six months of his life.
There are many cruelties to this early death. To pass on at 55 is to feel cheated of the promised three score years and ten. All of us are feeling the Alan-shaped hole left behind, but no cosmic joke is as profoundly hurtful as this talented man working for decades to perfect his art finally reaching a point in his life where he was about to blossom with the conclusion of various projects and the birth of many more.
He was going from strength to strength, inspiring and supporting everyone, and I hope feeling the same in return.
The butterfly broke out of its chrysalis ... and was gone before his beautiful irridescent wings had even unfurled.
So now, in memory of him, we have to channel Alan, allow his spirit to take our hand, and create the most fabulous, soul-soaring body of work within our abilities and beyond.
Loving you always, Alan. Your spirit sister, Anna.
