Colin Hume: Home page

Barbara Shaffer died of cancer on Tuesday 7th May in Wrexham Park Hospital.

Barbara and her husband Malcolm started as International dancers, but they discovered Playford and fell in love with that too — Barbara used to complain at Eastbourne International Folk Festival that she was torn between the two.  Barbara has had serious illnesses for as long as I've known her and we all expected her to die before Malcolm, but in fact she outlived him by many years.  During lockdown she told me I should be writing dances, so I wrote “Barbara's Waltz” for her to a waltz tune by Shostakovich.  She and her partner Brian Hall danced it in her living room and really liked it, but she never got to dance it with a set of real people.

The funeral was at Braywick Cemetery, Maidenhead on Thursday 16th May, where about a hundred friends and relations stood round the graveside for the service.  I'm pleased to say that it was in English this time — as I recall, Malcolm's funeral was mainly in Hebrew.  Some of Barbara's family talked about her and what an influence she had made for good on their lives.  We read together the 23rd Psalm, which I think of as Christian, but of course it's Old Testament Jewish.  Afterwards some of us drove to the nearby synagogue for refreshments and a chance to talk to each other about Barbara and many other things.

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