Mighty Like A Rose

Mighty Like A Rose is a song that appears only briefly in the narrative, yet it carries an outsized emotional weight. It is first heard in a memory that surfaces while Harold Fry stands in a café near Exeter St David's railway station, twenty years after the fact. Queenie Hennessy, his former colleague, had once been in the car with him when the song came on the radio. The male voice, steady and deep, filled the air, and Queenie wept. Between gulps, she explained that it reminded her of her father, who had died only recently. She whispered, 'I'm sorry, I'm sorry,' and Harold replied, 'It's all right.' The moment is small, almost incidental, but it is the only glimpse the novel offers of Queenie's private grief, and it becomes a touchstone for Harold's own buried pain.

The Song as a Trigger for Buried Memory

The song's second appearance is far more fraught. As Harold walks through the outskirts of Taunton, the rain lashing down, a memory surges into his mind, one of those that he most feared. He was normally so good at repressing them. He tried to think about Queenie, but even that wouldn't work. The memory that overtakes him is of the afternoon twenty years ago when it had all come to an end: his hand reaching for a wooden door, the warmth of the sun on his shoulders, the smell of mouldering, heated-up air, and the stillness of a silence that was not what it should be. This is the moment he discovered David's body. The song itself is not playing in this memory, but its earlier association with Queenie's weeping primes the connection: both are instances of grief that cannot be spoken, only felt. Harold shouts 'No' and bats out at the rain, but the memory will not be denied, and moments later his calf explodes as if the skin-side of the muscle had been sliced open, and he collapses to the ground.

The Song and the Unspoken Story of David's Death

The song's resonance deepens when Harold later writes his confession letter to the garage girl. In that letter, he reveals the full story he had kept hidden for two decades: that he buried his son, that David hanged himself in the garden shed with rope tied to one of the hooks used for garden tools, that the coroner said it must have taken a long time to tie the noose because David was so full of alcohol and pills. Harold describes discovering the body, praying despite not being a religious man, and lifting David down, but there was no life. He was too late. The song does not appear in the letter, but the letter is the narrative culmination of the same grief that the song first made visible in Queenie. Both Queenie and Harold lost someone they loved and could not speak of it; both found the grief surfacing at unexpected, unbidden moments. The song, with its steady, deep male voice, is the sound of a father's presence, and its absence in Harold's life is the wound he carries.

The Song's Place in the Rituals of Mourning

The novel returns to the imagery of mourning in a scene that echoes the song's emotional register without naming it. When Harold drives Maureen to the funeral director's to see David one last time in the coffin, she has packed a few things: a red rose, a teddy bear, and a pillow to go beneath his head. In the car, she asks Harold what he is going to give, knowing he has nothing. The sun shines very low, torching his eye as he drives, and they both wear sunglasses; even at home, she doesn't take them off. At the funeral director's, Maureen says she wants to say goodbye to David alone, and Harold sits outside with his head in his hands, waiting his turn. A passer-by stops to offer a cigarette, and Harold takes it, although he has not smoked since the days on the buses. His fingers shake so hard that the passer-by uses three matches to light it. The thick nicotine catches in his throat, and as he stands and bends over a rubbish bin, he is met with the bitter stench of decay. Then, from behind him, the air is pierced with a harsh, deep sobbing cry, so animal in its intensity that he is struck still. This is the sound of grief that the song once held at a distance, now raw and unmediated.

The Song as a Measure of Harold's Journey

The song's significance is also measured by what Harold carries and what he gives away. Early in his journey, he inspects his feet in a hotel room, slipping on his reading glasses to examine the toes, soft and pale, with a possible blister on the way at the top of his heel. He is quietly proud, and says, 'Not bad.' He imagines the nurse telling Queenie that he is walking, and that all she has to do is keep living. The song is not mentioned here, but the act of tending to his own body is a form of keeping faith with the living, a counterpoint to the death the song mourns. Later, Martina gives him walking socks, blue duct tape, an empty rucksack, and a brass compass that had been her partner's things, and kisses his cheek, saying, 'Go well, Harold.' He accepts these gifts, and in Cheltenham he begins to give away his own possessions: washing powder to a student, a wind-up torch to a woman from Prestbury, plasters and antiseptic cream to the mother of a distressed child, a comb by way of distraction, a guide to Britain to a bewildered German couple, and the plant dictionary he knows by heart. He rewraps the gifts for Queenie, and parcels up the recent souvenirs for Maureen to send to the post office. The compass and the rucksack he keeps, because they are not his to give away. The song, like these gifts, is a thing that passes between people, carrying meaning that cannot be spoken directly. It is the sound of a father's love, and of a daughter's loss, and of a man who could not save his own son, all folded into a few bars of music that Harold cannot forget.