anenglishwomanslife

Prince William, the Duchess of Cambridge, Prince Charles and Camilla

2012-03-15T07:38:00.001-07:00

There was a story in the paper this week about Prince Charles' second wife, Camilla, wearing a brooch which Princess Diana was given when she married Prince Charles.

I clearly remember Charles and Diana's wedding day. I've never been a terrific fan of royalty and I don't much care forPrince Charles, but I watched the wedding as most English people did and I remember being struck by this tiny figure, such a young girl, dressed in a huge flouncy wedding dress and almost swamped by it. She looked very apprehensive, very inexperienced and rather overwhelmed. People say that by the day of the royal wedding she had an idea what she was in for as she had begun to suspect Charles and Camilla might still be having an affair.

Diana of course was from the English upper class, from an aristocratic family, and perhaps Charles and the other royals expected her to take it in her stride when she discovered that Mrs Parker-Bowles was still sleeping with the newly-married Charles. The seceret affair was not very secret and Diana was expected to tolerate it. But at 19-years-old, Diana was perfectly entitled to be in love and be idealistic. She was too young and inexperienced to understand what was tacitly demanded of her: give birth to the royal heir and a spare and turn a blind eye as your husband beds Andrew Parker-Bowles' wife. The story was only made seedier and more incestuous by the fact that many people said Camilla's husband was sleeping with Princess Anne while Camilla was hopping in and out of bed with Charles. Whatever the truth of that, it is certain that Camilla cuckolded her husband and Prince Charles was a sexual willing partner in the deceit.

The upper class and royalty have always done as they pleased.

But it's interesting after the Diana years and the tragedy which ended her young life, to see the way that Catherine, or Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, is coping with marrying a British prince. She has the advantage of being 30, of course, and she lived with William for years before marrying him. He appears to be genuinely in love with her. And Kate certainly seems more confident than Princess Diana did in the early years and yet she's facing almost as much public scrutiny.

I have a friend who tells me that there's a fierce campaign being conducted by Clarence House - Charles and Camilla's people - to denigrate the future queen Catherine and rehabilitate Camilla's image since she is seen as a scheming adulteress and yet wants to be queen of England (or Britain I suppose.) According to my friend, Charles's supporters feel they have to disparage Kate in order to try and get British people to support the idea of Camilla as queen.

I don't know about that but I do know that, as an English woman over 80, I'd far rather see Catherine as queen in England than Camilla. Catherine, like Princess Diana before her, is a young woman in love. She will no doubt have children with William and she conveys a sort of innocence, and happiness, to be married to her prince. A lot of unpleasant things have been said about her middle-class background but it seems to me that every time she appears in public she looks smart, she behaves well and she seems to enjoy herself and enjoy meeting others. More importantly, she has done nothing as far as anyone's aware that is deceitful or openly hurtful to others. She is not an adulteress and she has not befriended a young woman while bedding her husband. The same can never be said now of Camilla. Camilla and Charles also have the ridiculous phone epsiode that they can never live down where he said in a phone conversation that he would like to be reincarnated as her tampax. The image is rather revolting but even worse is the fact that Charles and Camilla were gaily and routinely committing adultery while Diana was pregnant and then at home looking after the young princes, William and Harry. There is no excuse for Charles' behaviour and none for Camilla's either.

The next queen of England/Britain/the Commonwealth will be a head of state, of course, but more importantly (since that's a fairly formal role) she will be an international ambassador for Britain. Whether one likes royalty or not, or approves of royalty or not, Britain will continue to have a royal family for some time. Their relevance, if they have any, is as ambassadors for their country. They play a role not unlike the role of Obama and his wife or Cameron and his wife, but without the political power. That is, they present an image of their country to the outside world as well as within Britain.

So what kind of royal ambassador do the British want to have once the queen is gone? Charles and Camilla would present a pretty wretched image. Charles has a reputation for being grumpy and eccentric. He and Camilla both have their history of adultery. Camilla also has the air of a scheming mistress determined to get Diana's husband at any cost. And I believe she now has the air of a woman determined to get her hands on the queen's crown as well. Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge on the other hand are untainted. They are newly married and project a certain innocence and hopefulness. They do not divide opinion in the way Charles and Camilla do. And they don't offend people in the way that Charles and Camilla, with their history of extra-marital sex and cruelty to Diana, often do.

To see how differently the two women are viewed, think for a moment about the jewellery they wear. It was reported the other day that Camilla went to the races at Cheltenham very publicly displaying on her coat a brooch that was worn by Diana, a wedding gift. Lots of commentators said how insensitive it was of Camilla, who pinched Diana's husband, to pinch her jewellery too. Almost like she was brandishing a trophy in public: "I get whatever want. And I wanted what Diana had." There will always be a sleazy aspect to Camilla and her relationship with Charles.

Now think about the engagement ring William gave to Kate. It was the diamond and sapphire engagement ring Charles had given to Diana. And that was a lovely gesture from a young man who, as he said, wanted to find a way to include his mother in his forthcoming wedding. It was a also a gesture of hope made by a young man who clearly hopes that he can in some way make up for his mother's unhappy marriage by having a happy marriage himself. Giving Kate Diana's ring was a way of trying to make right what Charles and Camilla inflicted on his mother. As Kate showed the TV cameras the ring, the couple were smiling and at ease. There was nothing to be ashamed of, no sleazy past to be skirted round. It was a gesture which was perfectly pure, in contrast with Camilla slapping Diana's brooch on her lapel and heading off gung-ho to the races.

So although the monarchy is in essence hereditary, this English woman thinks it will stain the country's reputation if Charles becomes king and Camilla becomes queen. I don't much care about the constitutional argument which says that Charles' marriage to Camilla was illegal and bars him from being king and her from being queen. I just think that the pair of them can't have it both ways. They decided to cheat and sneak in and out of bed with each other while they were both married to other people. Well, all right - that was their choice. But they shouldn't then be accepted as King and Queen. They should keep a low profile, try to keep out of the way and let William and Catherine take the throne when the queen dies. "But they can't - it's the monarchy" their supporters cry. "It's hereditary." Yes, it is the monarchy and titles are hereditary. But monarchs can abdicate the throne. Many people say Charles should, and he certainly could. In my view, when the time comes, he ought to.

Shingles at 82 - pain and fatigue

2012-01-24T07:00:00.000-08:00

In November 2011, I started feeling more tired than usual. Extremely fatigued in fact. As I'll be 83 this year I'm quite used to having an hour's sleep in the afternoon (particularly if I've had a good lunch and a glass or two of red wine.) But this was an unheathy sort of fatigue. I felt tired and unwell. Then I became aware of pain in my right side. Or rather, not in my right side but on the skin under my ribs on the right side. I looked in the mirror on my wardrobe and saw I had developed a long sweep of what looked light reddish bruises stretching from under my ribs round to my back.

I'm luck that I have a diligent young doctor who doesn't mine making house calls to elderly patients. When he came to examine me, he diagnosed shingles very quickly. "It'll take several weeks to heal" he said "but at least we've caught it and diagnosed it quickly so you can start on antivirals straight away."

I started taking the medication within 3 days of getting the first symptoms and apparently, with shingles, the earlier you start treatment the better. What I didn't know at the time was that shingles is very common in people over 80 and that very often it leads on to another painful condition - post-shingles neuralgia.

Anyway, for six weeks I was housebound. I was so tired that I stayed in bed most of the day. If I got up in the morning and made tea and ate some breakfast, I'd need to go back to bed by about 10am. Friends and family came in to help me - to make meals for me, offer a cup of tea or just chat. But mostly I needed to be alone. Shingles makes you feel pretty awful and you just need to doze and sleep to recover.

A lot of people, including a friend who is a retired doctor, asked me if the illness was very painful. Shingles is apparently often extremely painful as it makes your nerve endings flare up with inflammation. At first, I mostly felt discomfort rather than real pain. But that changed and after six weeks I really needed painkillers. My doctor prescribed me a medication that I found out was actually an anti-depressant. Not only that, but my daughter read the instruction leaflet and saw that a side-effect of the drug was feeling suicidal. "Right" she said "you're not taking these. You might be in pain but we're not having you throw yourself off the balcony!"

So we went into town, to Guildford, to Boots to see if the pharmacist could recommend something better. One complication is that I take Warfarin for a heart arrhythmia. If you take Warfarin you can't take aspirin or any other anti-coagulant because you risk making your blood too thin. If that happens and you cut yourself, you can lose a lot of blood. And even if you don't cut yourself, thin blood can make you feel very fatigued. And fatigue was already one of the strongest symptoms of shingles that I was experiencing....

The Boots pharmacist sold me some sort of painkiller which she said wasn't contraindicated with Warfarin. But it didn't seem to make any difference. I still had the pain - a sort of inflammation - a burning pain. The marks on my side were still evident after several weeks too.

My generation went through the second world war so I suppose we learnt not to make a fuss about things unless they're really important. I knew that the pain of shingles wasn't dangerous or life-threatening so that made it easier to tolerate. After six weeks stuck in my flat, I slowly started to go out once in a while. I could still get very tired and the pain was still there but I had a little more energy and regained my interest in life. By Christmas 2011, I was feeling quite a lot better and spent the holiday with my daughter and her family in London. We ate well and drank plenty of champagne and wine so I'd have to say I was on the road to recovery.

Still, it's January 2012 now and I still have the red marks on my side and some residual pain. My doctor told me that once an older person recovers from shingles they're quite likely to suffer from post-shingles neuralgia and it appears that's what I've got. It means the nerves in my skin continue to be inflamed and cause pain. It's a flipping nuisance sometimes. At 82, I really want to enjoy the time I have left and so I hope for good health. Some days I feel like I'm falling apart. I'm partially sighted, have various aches and pains, a heart condition for which I take Warfarin and Digoxin, and arthritis which sometimes bugs me and sometimes doesn't.

On the other hand, I'm soon off to visit my daughter for a few days and then in May the family has the wedding of my oldest granddaughter to look forward to. I've stocked up on talking books as I love reading but can't see well enough these days. And I have family I love and plenty of good friends. So all in all, I'm not complaining about shingles or post-shingles neuralgia. I'll file them under those little things that are sent to try us.

English riots - a question of poverty and deprivation or crime and punishment?

2011-08-26T04:54:00.000-07:00

I'll be 82 in September (2011). So I've seen a fair bit of life. I lived through the second world war. I've been widowed twice. I had cancer twice. I've raised two kids of my own and had a hand in raising three grandchildren.

One thing you learn fairly quickly when you're parenting is that children need discipline and guidance. If they're allowed to run riot, they will. At least, for a time they will. And while they do, they'll hurt themselves or the people around them. I believe that out-of-control behaviour is scary for everyone concerned - the people who're out of control and the people who have to witness that and deal with the consequences.

When people in England turned on their TVs in August 2011 and saw kids running riot in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham and elsewhere, it sparked a big debate about what had gone wrong in English cities. Night after night, youngsters were out on the streets, breaking into shops and other businesses, burning buildings and looting stores. They weren't stealing the necessities of life. They weren't after bread and meat. They were stealing computers, phones, plasma screen TVs and other electronic gadgets along with cigarettes, beer, wine and spirits and the usual street gear preferred by kids - trainers and hooded tops. The more 'ambitious' were looting jewellers as well.

The TV showed the rioters at the outset were mainly black kids and then the white kids joined in when they saw that the police were standing back, watching, doing nothing. To me, it seemed incredible that - as many guessed - the fear of being called racist prevented the police from arresting people who were smashing their way into businesses, looting and committing arson.

But certainly things have changed in England since I was young. Of course there were criminals around in the 30s and 40s and all the decades since. But here were thousands of utterly lawless young people on the rampage across England, burning and looting and smashing like the Barbarians at the sack of Rome.

There were of course older people involved too, mainly people in their 30s, and there was part of the problem. Many in the generation which has parented today's children are themselves lawless and out of control. They've given their kids virtually no discipline and precious little guidance, apart perhaps from the advice to pinch things when they can. There's a whole section of the English population that pours scorn on society, law and order, education and the idea of working for a living. That's no secret and the English and world press have widely discussed the problem of 'feral children' and 'feral parents' in England.

The liberal elite tend to argue that the rioters are a lost generation for whom more should have been done. The core problem, for them, is not that these people are profoundly anti-social and have no concern for others. The problem is that society hasn't given them enough. They should have more benefits, more education, more understanding. That's an awfully one-sided view in my opinion. It entirely leaves out the question of individuals taking responsibility for their own behaviour. One TV report showed a woman leaving a court with her young son - a child of about ten who'd been in court for rioting. She swore and railed at the interviewer speaking to her. The whole problem she said was that the government hadn't done enough for kids: there was nothing for kids to do. The interviewer seemed entirely unable to challenge that view. And yet around the world and throughout history, kids have found plenty of things to do without governments getting involved! That mother was making excuses for her own inability to guide or discipline her child. No surprise then if the child blamed "guvment" for his own thuggish behaviour. But it's preposterous to say kids in England need the government to do more for them. They have free education and, in this case I'm willing to bet, free housing and free food and amenities. That's already a heck of a lot more than a huge percentage of the world's children receive and adults like this mother should have that pointed out to her over and over again. Her son, properly guided by parents, would have plenty to do apart from rioting and stealing. He could take an interest in his education, read, play with friends, use his computer, learn an instrument, sing, play football with friends....there are clearly a thousand activities a healthy kid can do in England. And they don't need to cost much either. It would be no good that mother telling me or my generation that her kid is deprived. We lived our childhood during the war and often didn't have enough to eat. Most of us wouldn't have dreamt of stealing from others. It wasn't a question of what we didn't have. It was a question of what we did have: some proper social values in our heads, put there by parents and teachers.

One interesting report on the trials of rioters gave an indication of where English society has gone wrong in recent decades. A teenager was jailed for a month or two for looting. As he was led from the dock he shouted a very coarse insult at the judge. Nevertheless, he was led away. What should have happened is that the judge should have hauled him back into the dock right there and then and added to his sentence to teach him a lesson. Instead, the child learnt that he can insult a judge without consequence. Liberals may say that's too harsh but in the long run it does the child - and society - a lot of good. It instils respect for others and that has been sadly missing. The same report described the behaviour of a grown woman on hearing her boyfriend sentenced to a few months jail for rioting. She swore, ran out of court to the custody suite where her boyfriend was being held and tried to break in. Security men escorted her out of the court and as she left she kicked over a dustbin, scattering rubbish. Again, she should have been hauled into the dock by the judge there and then and given a fine. Instead - she too learnt that her bad behaviour went unpunished.

Justice needs to be consistent if it is to work. The English courts seem to have woken up to the fact, rather late in the day, that crime needs to be punished. They should now ensure that anti-social behaviour is met with jail sentences especially where it involves any form of violence.

It is true that English society is very unequal. The rich are fabulously rich and the poor are poor. But there are many opportunities for those willing to take them and for those willing to take responsibility for their own lives. The greatest opportunity lies in education, which is free. Many children and parents in the developing world understand the importance of education and would jump at the chance of free primary and secondary education. English kids have that and take it for granted. There needs to be a new emphasis on the importance of education - after that, parents and children can take notice of the opportunity or not. But we should all be challenged - repeatedly challenged - about our behaviour if it's anti-social. Those who choose to be lawless and commit crime should be left in no doubt that their crimes will be punished. The excuse that the government should have "done more" won't wash.

2011-01-31T09:39:00.000-08:00

Someone was talking to me the other day about nuclear fall-out shelters. I can't remember who it was offhand but the point being made was that sometime during the Cold War people started thinking about nuclear shelters because politicians and journalists and other people were talking about the possibility that Soviet Russia would drop a nuclear bomb on us.

I remember the Cold War and Suez and John F. Kennedy and that whole period very well. (Elsewhere on this Blog I've written a bit about the Suez Crisis.)

But anyway, I began to think that the whole idea of nuclear shelters probably owed quite a bit to the experience of the British during the war and during the Blitz. After all, it's not very likely that a shelter would protect people from a nuclear bomb. It sounds like an idea based on the triumph of hope over common sense to me...

What I think happened in the Cold War perhaps was that people had this idea of the British taking shelter from German bombs. During the Blitz, of course, people used to scramble to get down into the London Underground when the air raid sirens sounded. I don't suppose my grandchildren would even know what I meant if I used the words "air raid siren" now but during the war we all knew what it meant when that siren went off. Londoners would hurry down to the underground station platforms and sleep there if necessary to avoid nazi bombs. It might have been reassuring to be safe underground during a bombing raid but you wouldn't necessarily know of course if your friends and family were safe and you wouldn't know till the all clear sounded and you came up above ground again if your house was still standing.

I lived in Lancashire during the war and was a child. (I was born in 1929.) We didn't have underground stations there, naturally, so people improvised. Most people just went under their dining table when we heard the bombers fly over. Fat lot of good that would do, but you felt you had to take some sort of shelter. After the war began though our next door neighbours devised a bomb shelter.

They had labradors - big dogs - and had built a huge kennel in their back yard. It wasn't tall enough to stand in but it was long and wide. Once the man of the household - Mr Stuttard - realised we were likely to be bombed by the Luftwaffe (the German air force), he reinforced the kennel's sides and roof and put sandbags all round it. He and his wife had no children so they had room to let my mother, my father and me shelter in the kennel with them and their dogs when bombers flew over. I remember crouching in that kennel during bombing when the nazis were dropping incendiary bombs and hoping to high heaven that the reinforced kennel roof would stop a bomb from killing us all.

Looking back, a bomb dropped from a plane and exploding on the Stuttards' kennel would more than likely have killed the lot of us instantly. But it felt good to feel we had some kind of shelter, a place to run when we heard the bombers. My father removed part of the fence separating our garden from the yard next door so we could nip through in a hurry when we needed to. Still, I don't suppose the kennel-air-raid-shelter would have been terribly effective. Its main function was probably just to make us feel a bit safer - it was more a psychological help than anything else I imagine. And I suspect the same applies to the idea of the nuclear fallout shelter.

Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law - Boyish Film Stars Replaced the Rugged Stars of the 40s and 50s

2011-01-26T05:24:00.000-08:00

I'm knocking on a bit - 82 in September - and I don't like much contemporary music or some work that passes for art now, but do I like to see new films. The other week I went to see The King's Speech and thought it was excellent. Helena Bonham-Carter always gives interesting performances and Colin Firth was very good.

But it did get me thinking - again - that today's male film stars are quite different from those I grew up seeing in the cinema. I was chatting to my daughters about this a while ago and they agreed. The thing I notice is that the male film stars today seem far more boyish than the stars of the 40s and 50s. I wondered if that's because I'm so much older now, but Idon't think so.

Think of the old film stars and then the new ones. Actors like Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable, Kirk Douglas, Cary Grant, Robert Mitchum, Gary Cooper, Gregory Peck, Spencer Tracy, Burt Lancaster, John Wayne.

Whether you liked their performances or not, or thought they were great actors or not, you'd have to agree that they were all men - fully grown, adult, mature men. None of them were boys or boyish when they were up there on the cinema screens. Even the less rugged stars like Fred Astaire, David Niven, Dirk Bogarde and Frank Sinatra were undeniably men.

And some of the male actors who came along a bit later on, like Marlon Brando and Richard Burton, were men rather than boys too.

I remember seeing The African Queen when it came out in 1952. I was newly married, living in Washington and was in my early 20s. Bogart's performance as Charlie Allnut seemed quite familiar to me because he was like many of the men I seemed to know, including the man I'd married - men who'd recently fought in a war and won and had somehow retained all their humanity despite being toughened up by danger and fighting.

The male stars we saw in the films in those days were pretty much all like that - whether they played dependable men or dangerous men or even suave, rather pampered men they were all men, not boys.

I suppose that reflected the world that had shaped them - specifically, the second world war.

And I guess that's why today's male stars are different. To me, they seem much more boyish. More hair oil than engine oil, if that makes sense. Think of Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Matt Damon, Jude Law, Ryan Phillippe, the two in Brokeback Mountain, Ewan McGregor, Leonardo diCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Johnny Depp. They're all boys compared to Bogart, Mitchum, Cary Grant, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster!

Can you imagine a remake of Spartacus with Orlando Bloom or Jude Law rising and saying "I'm Spartacus"? I can't. They're too delicate, too pretty.

Brad Pitt was quite manly in Fight Club but I can't really think of any other young - or youngish - current male stars who could recreate the roles played by the classic film stars. Harvey Keitel is one of the few rugged male actors we've seen in recent years. (Robert de Niro and Dustin Hoffman were wonderful in their heyday but they've become aging pussycats sending themselves up, which is amusing I suppose, but to me they don't match the legendary stars.)

Now, all this may be partly because I'm so much older - perhaps that's why the newer stars look like boys to me. But I don't think so. I think there's just a fashion for rather soft-looking, sensitive-looking male actors whereas in my day the fashion was for tougher male film stars.

The reason I think it's a real change and not just the way I see actors is that I don't see a huge difference in the female stars getting cast in films now. True, I did prefer the style and the beauty of the older stars - Grace Kelly, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Sophia Loren. I did think they were very beautiful women. But there are plenty of beautiful actresses now too and they don't seem less womanly than the screen legends. They don't seem like 'girls.' Actresses like Sigourney Weaver, Sharon Stone, Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Nicole Kidman, Rene Zellweger, Penelope Cruz, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron and Helena Bonham-Carter don't seem less mature than their counterparts in earlier decades. (They do tend to go out in public, some of them, looking less than their film-star best which is a shame. As Joan Collins once said, the public don't need actresses to look like the girl next door - the girl next door fills that role already.)

Still, that's how this elderly film fan sees the young male film stars today. Much more boy than man, most of them.

I particularly noticed this in the film Titanic. Leonardo diCaprio was famously cast opposite Kate Winslet as the leading man and love interest. I don't much like Kate Winslet as an actress. She seems very smug and there's just something about her face and expressions that I don't usually find terribly watchable. But what struck me was that, when I looked at her with DiCaprio, she seemed like she could be his mum! Here was this rather robust, mumsy looking woman cast opposite this pretty young boy who seemed far too young for her. You could never have felt that if she'd she been playing opposite an actor like a young Humphrey Bogart or Kirk Douglas! For my money you only have to glance at the male stars of the 40s and 50s and their counterparts today to sort the men from the boys...

Christmas Alone at 81? I'll Still Enjoy It.

2010-12-22T04:00:00.000-08:00

The British never used to get bothered by snowfalls in winter. We just expected it. Growing up in Lancashire in the 30s and 40s I saw quite a few cold winters and whenever it snowed we just got on with things. There weren't snow ploughs to clear the roads so if the snow was deep you just had to stay in your home. One year after the start of the war - probably January or February 1940 or it might have been 1941, we had really heavy snow. I was ten or eleven and quite excited because I couldn't get the bus to school for days. The snow was so deep it buried the hedges. The snowdrifts were higher than I was tall. If I'd gone outside it would have just about covered me from head to toe! There was no option but to wait till it all thawed. We had a coal fire in the sitting room. Apart from that there was no heating in the house. My father, mother and I wold huddle round the fire during the day and rather dread going up to bed at night. The bedrooms were so cold there was ice on the inside of the windows. Because the electricity was off we used storm lamps from the late afternoon when it got dark. These were just glass lanterns with a wick and flame inside. They didn't give too much light really and were meant for use outdoors. I remember during my childhood seeing shepherds out in the fields going to check on ewes lambing.
My mother cooked on the stove next to the fire. It was OK, but hard to control - the temperature was just given by the heat of the coal fire.
We didn't get out to the shops for some days but war rations were in force so we weren't missing much. My mother had some preserves, milk, eggs and cured meat in the pantry so that was our diet while we snowed in. And cups of hot tea of course.

Now I've lived in Surrey for decades and when my kids were growing up they enjoyed the snow each winter. My husband and I usually set and lit the coal fires in the house but the girls soon learnt to do it too. They'd spread out yesterday's newspaper on the floor, fold it over and over to make something like a flat paper tube, tie it in knots and use it underneath dry twigs - kindling wood - to light the fire. We had a coal bunker outside where you'd go and put the shovel in the coal-hole at the bottom of the bunker to draw coal out, put it in the coal bucket and lug it inside.

I was talking about snow at Christmas because this year - 2010 - there's been so much travel disruption because of snow. The TV and radio have been reporting passengers at Heathrow airport and other British airports whose flights are cancelled so queues and queues of people can't get away on holiday for Christmas. That must be very upsetting for those who work all year and planned to spend Christmas with friends or family. The snow has caused a lot of trouble on the roads too even though these days there are services supposed to be ready with snow ploughs, grit and salt.

I'm hoping to spend Christmas with my daughter in London and her family. My son-in-law should drive down from London to pick me up on the 23rd of December so I've been listening to the weather forecast trying to figure out if he'll be able to drive or not. At 81, you have to figure you haven't got too many Chirstmases left (maybe another 10 - I hope!) so I hope to get up to London to be with them.

I told my other daughter, who lives inFrance, that I've bought a pizza and a bottle of champagne so if the snow prevents me travelling to London at the last moment then I'll have Christmas on my own and enjoy it nevertheless! I'm lucky to have some very good friends though - and that's one of the most important things to do as you get older - be a good friend to others and look after your friendships - and two of my friends have said if I get 'stranded' here in Surrey by the snow they'll find a way to collect me and I can spend Christmas with them and their families. However it turns out, it'll be OK.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to make 18 mince pies to take up to London with me. I found a book on my bookshelves called Christmas Made Easy with a recipe for Unbelievably Easy Mince Pies. I started to make them. You don't use any liquid for the pastry, just butter, flour and sugar. You're meant to 'knead the pastry mixture into a ball' but it all fell apart in crumbs. I added a bit of liquid but that didn't help much. I'm going to press the pastry into the baking tin anyway, add the mincemeat and hope for the best.

While I was fiddling around with the recipe and the pastry my daughter called. I told her the recipe wasn's working. "It certainly isn't unbelievable easy" I told her. "Yes it is" she said. "You were warned it was unbelievable..."

Then my new Kurdish neighbour called round. I've met her and her husband a couple of times now. They seem very pleasant but I didn't give them a Christmas card as I didn't know if Kurds celebrate Christmas, or if some do and some don't. It's silly, but it can be awkward asking these days. It shouldn't be - these things are interesting. She has what I think is a red caste mark? on her forehead and doesn't drink so I had the idea she wouldn't celebrate Cristmas. Anyway, she presented me with a long blue tin of Belgian biscuits and a Christmas card and wished me a Happy Christmas. So either she does celebrate Christmas - or she doesn't but correctly assumed I do. I'll give her and her husband a Christmas card and small gift now and when I know them a bit better maybe I'll get the opportunity to ask them about their traditions and culture.

Macular Degeneration: Becoming Partially Sighted in Old Age

2010-12-16T12:15:00.000-08:00

I had cataract surgery early this year (2010.) I was pleased with the operations - I had both eyes done - and my sight improved. I had to pay for the surgery privately as the National Health Service told me I'd have to wait two years. At my time of life, two years is too long. When you see some of the things the NHS spends its money on it does make you wonder why people in their 80s who've paid taxes and national insurance for decades can't get two simple eye operations when they need them.

Anyway, my sight did improve for a while. I'm 81 though and there's only so much an eye surgeon can do with weary old eyes. Throughout this year my sight has got steadily worse as a result of age-related macular degeneration (the one that can't be cured.) I was referred to an eye clinic and then a pleasant women came to my home to advise me about lighting and other things that might help. I was sent two pairs of hi-tech glasses - one pair for looking at the television and objects further away and one pair for reading. All my life I've loved reading and writing so the fact that they're both getting hard to do is quite difficult to accept. Being told to stop driving was difficult but at least I could still watch films fairly easily, read books, send and receive emails and write this. At least on the computer you can switch the text to large size which is a help.

Yesterday, another woman called round and she gave me a fold-up white stick. It was my fault really because I'd told her that sometimes when I cross a road I have trouble seeing if there's a car coming. Out came the white stick and she advised me to keep it in my handbag so it's always handy if I go into town. I don't like having a white stick in my possession - it makes me feel sort of pigeonholed as an invalid - but I'll just have to get used to it. I've been registered as partially sighted too so there's no getting away from the fact that my sight is not as good as it was up until a couple of years ago. Blindness is a terrible thought for anyone who takes their good eyesight for granted but it's pretty worrying when you find your sight actually progressively failing. You have no way of knowing how fast it'll deteriorate or if you'll hang on to at least a measure of sight.

The woman who came this week also told me I can apply for an Attendance Allowance. It wasn't really clear to me what that means or whether it's for partially sighted people or people with any disability but I think it's to help a bit with things like taxis because I can't drive any more. Or perhaps to have someone come and help me with my shopping because the writing's often so tiny on products that I can't always see what I'm buying. I feel a bit daft asking some young person in Sainsburys to look at a packet and tell me what's in it! Anyway, I suppose someone will explain how I apply for the allowance and what exactly it's to be used for.

One of my daughters has advised me to start getting used to radio and talking books as much as the TV, newspapers and proper books. I suppose that's not a bad idea. I like to see the news on TV and I've always liked spending Sunday reading all the Sunday papers, usually lying on the carpet with them spread out all around me. But it's probably time to make a bit of a transition and get used to hearing the news on the radio.

There's not to recommend about getting older really. I don't know about getting wiser but you certainly start to get a bit worn and creaky after 80. Some chap, I can't remember who it was offhand, said real old age starts at 80. I'll be 82 in September 2011. So far, I tend to agree with him. One of the clichés about ageing is that it's not for softies. I certainly agree with that. Another is that getting old is better than the alternative. For now, I agree with that too!

Lost photos of a dry Niagara Falls found in a shoe box

2010-12-16T10:31:00.000-08:00

In 1952 my husband and I sailed on the Niagara River, by the Falls, on the Maid of the Mist - the quite large boat that always looks like it's going to be capsized by the cascading waters but never is. I'd just found out that I was pregnant with our first child, and despite feeling a little queasy we were both in great spirits and enjoying our holiday. My husband was in the Royal Air Force and we were stationed in Washington after the Second World War. We spent a fortnight driving around Canada, stopping at little hotels and taking in the sights. We visited Montreal, Quebec, Ontario and Toronto. Naturally we wanted to see the mighty Niagara Falls, flowing on both the American and Canadian side of the border and once we got there we couldn't miss taking a trip on the famous Niagara River boat, the Maid of the Mist.

There was a sort of cable car affair over Niagara Falls in those days - I don't know if there still is - and it looked like it would give you very dizzy views, looking right down on the cascading water. We must have decided it looked too perilous for me in my newly pregnant state but we decided we just had to sail on the Maid of the Mist. Before you boarded the boat in those days, you were taken off behind the Falls and handed a heavy waterproof cape to protect you from the spray. As we were putting our capes on, one of the staff told me proudly that the future Queen of England - then Princess Elizabeth - had sailed on the Maid not long before me and my husband. "She sat right where you're sittin' now" she told me "and I helped her put her cape on."

Once on board the boat, a photographer took a picture of us against the backdrop of the Falls. It's a pretty spectacular photo and we were happy to pay how ever many dollars he asked for.

The Maid sailed very close to the falls but I don't remember feeling at all anxious. It was thrilling.

So I was interested to see the news story about a Connecticut man called Russ Glasson who found family photos taken of Niagara Falls in 1969. It was in 1969 that US Army Corps engineers diverted the river away from the American Falls and over the Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side. The entire river bed ran dry and for five months engineers worked to move rock falls that had blocked up the base of the Falls. A huge part of Niagara Falls ran dry! I looked at the photos with interest even though I had to study them with the special glasses I've got for my poor eyesight. You can see the engineers at work as well as the completely dry river bed.

I talked to my younger daughter about this. She has the photo of me and her father on the Niagara River and she told me that in the background you can clearly see huge rocks at the base of the Falls with the water cascading over them. Since the main rock falls which the engineers were moving fell in 1931 and 1954 the rocks in my photo, taken in 1952, may be from 1931. Or perhaps they're part of the river bed geology that was there for much longer and is still there today.

Anyway, I found Mr Glasson's photographs very interesting - as anyone who's been to Niagara Falls or enjoyed pictures of it probably will. My own photo has a little more personal meaning for me though - especially as I'd just found out I was expecting my first child.

Sticking chalk up your nose and tending graves with marble angels

2010-12-11T04:20:00.000-08:00

Another couple of random incidents from my childhood long ago. When I was 6, in 1935, I did a stupid thing at school one day. In those days the teacher wrote with chalk on a blackboard, a practice that continued right up until my own two daughters were at school in the 60s and 70s. But we children used to write with chalk too.

Paper would have been too expensive in those days. It wasn't something you'd dish out to kids to write all over and then throw away. Instead, we had black slates in little wooden frames and we'd write on them during lessons, sitting on our little wooden benches, and after the lesson we'd wipe the slates down ready to use again. I suppose that's where English got the expression "wipe the slate clean" for starting again or starting fresh. It was a pretty 'sustainable' or 'ecological' practice when you think about it. No paper wasted. No electricity used, as gets used for all the computers and networks that are in schools today.

On this particular day, one summer, I obviously wasn't concentrating very much on what the teacher, Mrs Roscoe, was teaching us because I started fiddling around with my short piece of chalk and after a moment decided to push it up my nose. It went up easily but almost immediately I became slightly alarmed to realise I couldn't get it down again. I signalled to a little friend what I'd done, tried to extract the thing, and gradually got more alarmed that I had my piece of chalk stuck up my nose. The other kids were all busily copying something down that Mrs Roscoe had written on the blackboard. After a while I realised I'd have to tell her what I'd done and put my hand up and confessed. "I've pushed a piece of chalk up my nose and I can't get it down."

She brought me to the front of the class and had a look and then told the other pupils they were to carry on writing on their slates while she took me to the headmaster. I thought I was going to get the cane for being naughty. In those days, the Headmaster or Headmistress of a school was like god. You automatically had respect for them and would never question their authority. If ever you were taken to see the Head it usually meant you were in trouble and you'd be fairly worried. I was only small, too, and the Headmster, Mr Turner, was a tall thin man who loomed very large in my eyes. I suppose I was a bit scared of him.

When the teacher explained what I'd done he had a look at me and then took me by the hand and led me out of his office, down the corridor and out of the school.

I had no idea what was happening and felt a bit scared. I must be in a lot of trouble because I'd never been taken anywhere by the Headmaster before. In fact, he led me to his house and called his wife to have a look at me. Mrs Turner was quite a kindly woman because she smiled and took me into their garden. She was carrying a tartan travel rug - I'd never seen a travel rug before - and she laid me down on it. Then she told me to look up at the lovely blue sky. I obediently stared at the sky - it was lovely, cloudless and clear blue - and she produced a pair of tweezers and hoicked the chalk from its place.

Still surprised not to have been told off and punished, I was even more amazed when she took me back into the house, into the kitchen, and produced an orange which she handed to me with a smile. In those days an orange was a very exotic fruit. I normally had one a year, at Christmas and not on any other occasion. Kids these days have lovely red and white Christmas stockings stuffed with presents but back then a Christmas stocking, for me, as for most kids, was one of my dad's socks, washed and dried, and with an apple, an orange and a penny in it. Then, that was all that was available to ordinary families and enough to get the children excited on Christmas morning.

Anyway, I was then escorted back to school and returned to class, clutching my orange and feeling like a little heroine. It was a wonder frankly, that the other kids, seeing me return with an orange as a prize, didn't all start pushing chalk up their noses to get oranges too.

The other random incident that occurs to me is that one day after school I was playing in the churchyard by our house in Wesham (in Lancashire.) I say churchyard but obviously it was a graveyard too as churches all had graveyards at that time. You tended to get christened in your local church, married in your local church, baptise your own kids there and then end up buried there.

I was playing around anyway and noticed two women tending a grave. I would have been, again, about 6, so it was 1935 or 1936. I didn't take much notice but after a while they called me over and asked if I lived round there. Yes, I said, just nearby. They pointed to the grave they were tending and said they lived in Blackburn and it was a long way to come to Wesham graveyard and asked, if they gave me threepence, would I tend the grave for them? I looked at the grave and up at the marble angel on top of the headstone. She probably wasn't huge but I was small and she looked huge to me. She was grey though she must originally have been white and she was half-covered in moss and a bit grubby. So was the headstone. The grave was a bit overgrown and the women were clearing it and had fresh flowers to put on it. I must have looked a bit doubtful about the task because they assured me it was just a question of keeping the weeds off the grave and tidying it up once in a while.

Eyeing the threepence, I agreed and promised to look after the grave. I can't even remember whose grave it was or what name was on it. The two women went off quite happily, obviously relieved to feel they could abandon the grave without having it on their conscience. I pocketed the money, gave the marble angel another look and then dashed home to show my mother the threepenny coin. She swiftly took it off me and put it in my money box. I was crestfallen because I never saw money come out of my money box - I only ever saw it go in. If ever I got a penny for some reason, it tended to go into the box and I think, looking back, that the money must have been used for things I needed for school or maybe helped pay for food or birthday or Christmas presents.

My mother told me quite solemnly that I had made a promise to look after the grave and had accepted payment and I would have to be as good as my word. I was slightly regretting having pocketed the threepence by this point but I understood that tending the grave was now my responsibility.

Over the next few weeks my mother would ask from time to time: "Have you tended the grave this week?"

Admitting I'd sort of forgotten about it, I'd plod over to the graveyard with a heavy heart and a little garden fork and trowel, kneel down beside the grave, and clear the weeds away. That went on for weeks but eventually I think even my honourable mother must have started to think that paying threepence to have a grave tended in perpetuity was a bit unrealistic. She eased up on reminding me about my duties and gradually I forgot about the grave and the marble angel.

In those days of course, relatives and husbands and wives were in the habit of tending graves carefully for many years. Weeds would be cleared, fresh flowers would be brought. In Scotland and the Meditteranean countries they still do that very often. In Italy - and in France, where one of my daughters lives - relatives keep photographs of their loved ones sheltered from the rain and renew flowers on elaborate tombs. On All Saints Day, the 1st of November, they buy flowers and make special trips to honour and remember the dead. English communities don't tend to do that much any more. Old-style English communities broke up largely in the post-war years and these days everyone moves a lot. You wouldn't necessarily live anywhere near a relative's grave now even if they'd been buried instead of cremation, which is much more the fashion.

Maybe those two women were some of the first in that process of moving away - leaving your village, leaving the place of your birth, going to the nearest town or city - Blackburn or Blackpool in this case - or, as people increasingly did, going 'down south'.

Thirteen years later, as a young woman who'd got through the war, survived the rationing and a few incendiary bombs, I would do the same myself. When I moved away though, it wouldn't be to Blackpool or London, it would be to Washington DC in America. Quite a move for a teenager from rural Lancashire in those days. I was to meet, marry and have my children with a man nearly twenty years older than me, a (totally lapsed catholic) man in the Royal Air Force who would take this girl who'd stuck chalk up her nose and played in the graveyard at Wesham church, and marry her in the great cathedral in Washington. He'd introduce me, for a time, to a post-war life of fun, cocktail parties, cigarettes (always cigarettes) and British airforce and embassy culture. It would be quite a change from the life I'd known.

Celebrating Christmas during the war years

2010-12-06T03:41:00.000-08:00

Christmas is such a big event these days - mostly for business and commerce, but for children too. My grandchildren, like most kids growing up over the last two decades, are used to lots of presents - electronic gadgets, mobile phones, computers, TVs...

When I was a child during the war Christmas was a whole lot simpler. At our home in rural Lancashire we had a tiny artificial Christmas tree, about 18 inches high, that we put on a little table, and we bought those highly coloured 'link' paper chains and put them up in the sitting room. That was it as far decorations went.

I got some quite good presents before the war when I was 7, 8, 9. I remember a chocolate "smoker's set" that I thought was wonderful. It came in quite a big box and had dark chocolate cigars, and white cigarettes made with some sort of fondant paste. They had pink tips as if they were alight. There was a packet of matches made from the same confection, yellowish with pink tips. I thought it was pretty sophisticated to walk around smoking my sweet cigarettes or waving one nonchalantly in the air as I chatted to a schoolfriend. It was a good present.

I also loved a sweet shop that my parents bought me one Christmas. It had small weighing scales and a little till to take money, price labels and little bottles of coloured sugar sweets. I'd set up shop in the sitting room and play shopkeeper and customer with my friend Betty at the weekends.

One year I asked my father to buy me a Hornby train. I can't remember where I got the idea for this. Maybe I saw one in a shop in Blackpool or a schoolfriend had one. I certainly didn't see it advertised on the telly because no-one had one back then. I was thrilled when I received it on Christmas morning and it was fun to play with. But I didn't get to play with it very often because we had to move furniture to clear space for its rails. We'd lug the table and chairs out of the way and lay the tracks on the carpet but it was a bit of a palaver. For a long time I kept it, in its box in a cupboard, and I suppose eventually my parents gave it away to someone else's child. Had I kept it, it would probably be worth a fortune now. In those days of course it was just another child's toy.

One year I got a celluloid doll the size of a real baby that I thought was wonderful. It didn't open or shut its eyes - they were just painted on - but it had nice painted hair and its arms and legs were moveable. They were held together inside the doll with elastic in some way - the limbs all moved - and I remember crying when I somehow broke the elastic and all the limbs fell off. My father, being a practical man, as most men were in those days, soon fixed it and it was as good as new.

The other Christmas presents I remember were edible. Every year once the war started I had a Christmas stocking filled with an apple, an orange and a brand new penny. An apple and orange wouldn't excite a child today but in the war years fruit was scarce, so it was quite a treat. I was also given a pink sugar pig each year and I really loved them. They were quite large, solid, very heavy and had white waxed cotton tails. They were made of hard, crunchy, bright pink sugar! The taste was simply of sugar but I've never eaten anything with the same texture since. I can only describe it as frosted.

These days I spend Christmas in London with one of my daughters, my son-in-law and their three kids. In the last 4 years I see my great-grandson too sometimes. My son-in-law is a wonderful cook and always makes a great meal on Christmas Day - always turkey, but often with some contemporary twist to the recipe. We drink a lot of champagne, beer and wine too. And really enjoy ourselves.

It's strange to think just how much has changed in 70 years in England. At Christmas, for example, I (almost) take for granted now things that I never had as a child. My daughter's lovely warm house. A huge Christmas tree with dozens of nicely wrapped and labelled presents underneath it. A fridge and freezer packed with all kinds of food, often from other countries and continents as is the way these days. Champagne and wine from France. Beer from Belgium and Thailand. Plenty of running hot water whenever you want it. Huge high-definition televisions (whatever that means.) Cars sitting outside if we need them. Digital cameras and digital photographs. Gadgets to put them on the computer.

Back in the war, and before and after, Christmas was a whole lot simpler. Usually dad would kill one of the chickens we kept for their eggs. We'd have a few vegetables with it and my mother would always make a Christmas cake. We didn't have Christmas pudding and there certainly wasn't any wine or champagne!

One Christmas during the war years I remember spending the day at my grandfather's place. I would have been 10 or 11. He lived in a cold old farmhouse with my uncle Jack, aunt Alice, spinster aunt Lizzie, and uncle Tom who lived there till he married a rather fierce local woman who kept the local sweetshop. My mother and father and I walked 5 miles to grandad's house - stopping on the way to go to the catholic Christmas mass.

There were no presents because no-one could afford to give anything, except to their children. We had sausages and a chicken in the farmhouse kitchen and I remember it was cold, with great flagstone floors. In the late afternoon uncle Jack went round and lit the oil lamps and the grown-ups had a glass of sherry. There was a small bottle of port too and that was it. We walked ten miles that day without giving it a thought, which you did in those days. The walk home that night was along freezing frosty country lanes under a full moon. I remember clearly walking along between my mother and father, looking up at the moon and thinking how beautiful it all was.

It was around that time that I had quite a bad accident at home. We had a cooker in the scullery but another cooker, sort of like an aga, in the sitting room. The one in the sitting room was right beside the fire and used heat from the fire. My mother used it as a way of economising on fuel. It had hot plates on the top and one wintry day I was sitting in a chair reading a book, close to the fire, when my mother put a pan of water on to boil. I managed to put my foot up and knock the boiling water all over my foot. It was very badly scalded and injured and I couldn't walk for weeks. At one point the doctor said I was developing gangrene (or was going to develop gangrene - I can't remember which) and I remember my mother being terribly distressed. (She lost her first child, my brother, when he was about a week old. He was born with spina bifida and I think the doctor prescribed some drug daily for a week which killed him.) Anyway, my treatment was changed - I can't remember if I was given medicine to drink or some ointment was applied topically but eventually my foot recovered (although it's still a bit scarred 70 years later.)

I had six weeks off school since I was quite ill and couldn't walk. I remember a teacher, Mr Fenton, turning up from my school one day to see what was the matter. In those days, in our area anyway, if a child was off school for any length of time a teacher would call round to see the parents and ask what was going on. Presumably Mr Fenton thought I was being allowed to swing the lead because when my mother explained - standing on the doorstep - that I was still ill, he demanded to see me. I still remember the look on his face when my mother brought him inside and showed him my foot. He looked quite ill and said he understood now why I was at home. Then he scuttled off back to the school.

Piano Lessons, 1938-style.

2010-12-03T15:47:00.000-08:00

When I was about 9, in about 1938 I suppose it was, my mother decided I should learn to play the piano.

My father had left his job with the water board for a new job as a market gardener and we'd moved from our end-of-terrrace house to a semi-detached house near Westby catholic school in Lancashire. The terraced houe had no electricity, just gas and gas lamps, and no indoor bathroom or toilet. The semi had electricity and a bathroom indoors. I think my mother felt we'd gone up a bit in the world and that may have been what prompted her to decide I should learn the piano. She told me I could become a concert pianist and "have letters" after my name. I had no idea what she meant but I didn't mind having a go at playing the piano.

Since we didn't have a piano, the first thing was to get one. My father bought one from someone locally and a women called Miss Ward agreed to come and give me lessons. Miss Ward was the ugliest woman I'd ever seen. She was short and squat and had hair on her chin and for some reason wore a little woollen cap even in summer. Now I'm older - 82 in September 2011 - I realise it was probably because her hair was very thin but as a child I thought it was very odd.

When she arrived for the first lesson she propped the sheet music up on the piano and told me to pull the seat closer. We sat on the same little bench. Then she asked if I had a ruler. Yes, I did, in my school satchel. She asked me to fetch it and I gave it to her. Then she started putting me through my paces. I didn't know what the ruler was for but at the first mistake I made she picked it up and rapped me hard on the knuckles with it. I tried pretty hard not to make many mistakes after that!

After a number of piano lessons it became obvious to everyone concerned that I was never going to be a concert pianist. I wasn't pianist material. One thing I hadn't grasped, and no-one seemed to have explained it, was that I was meant to practice in between lessons. Since I just ran outside to play after each lesson and forgot all about Miss Ward and the piano till the next lesson, I didn't make a lot of progress.

Eventually my mother decided to stop the lessons and Miss Ward took her sheet music, left the ruler and went. But my musical career didn't end that easily. My mother had decided I would do better with a harmonium and contacted a cousin who had one he wanted to get rid of. I remember the day he arrived at our house with a horse and cart and the harmonium on the cart. The thing was offloaded and brought into the house and then the piano was loaded onto the cart and the horse went off pulling the cart and piano. Before he left, my cousin told my mother he was delighted to get rid of the harmonium. No wonder. It made a horrible noise. You had to work pedals to get any sound out of it and I had to pedal away furiously to make it work.

It wasn't long before my mother and father and I all sort of agreed that keyboards weren't my forté. I never understood why my mother thought that, having failed with the piano, I might be a successful harmonium player.

Years later I won a scholarship to Layton Hill Convent in Blackpool and then worked there as school secretary. The convent had a long corridor with music rooms off to each side where girls had to go and practice piano or violin or other instruments every day. The school didn't do any drama but it had an excellent school orchestra. One of my duties when I worked there was to patrol up and down the corridor just making sure the girls were practising their scales or rehearsing their repertoires rather than sitting around chatting. It was always classical music being played and at the time I didn't find it very interesting. But it stood me in good stead because in later years I grew to appreciate classical music and much of it came back to me from those teenage years, listening to music practice and then attending school concerts.

I never learned to play an instrument despite my mother's ambition for me. But I learned to enjoy classical music and that's not a bad result.

The Royal Wedding (in 1947), Telly, Cinema and Rations

2010-11-29T10:35:00.000-08:00

One of my daughters asked me the other day if I remembered much about the queen's wedding in the 1940s. We'd been discussing the razzamatazz that's going to surround Prince William's wedding to Kate Middleton.

I had to stop and think. What did I remember about the queen marrying Prince Philip?

As it happens, not much. I know it was in 1947 and they were married at Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The reason why I don't remember much about the Queen's wedding is very simple. It has nothing to do with being over 81. The fact is that we didn't, as a family living in a rural area of Lancashire, have a television in those days. And nor did anyone else we knew.

I watched the queen's coronation in 1953 but that was on television in Washington DC where I was, by then, living with my husband, posted there by the RAF after the war. It was in Washington that I first saw a television, in 1951.

I've seen many pictures of the queen's wedding to Prince Philip but I'm pretty sure I saw them long after 1947. I don't even remember seeing photos in newspapers at the time although perhaps I did. Our main source of news back then was the Pathé news reels that we saw in the cinema. I was aware that the royal wedding was happening but it wasn't a very big deal round our way. I was a teenager and certainly had other things on my mind. Boys, for example.

One thing I do remember is that there were some local women who sent their ration cards to Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, so she would be able to have enough material for her wedding dress. We were still rationed for years after the war and even if you had money you needed ration cards to get material just as you did to get food and other things. I'm probably being very naive there. She probably had a hundred ways round rationing. Anyway, I remember local women sending off ration cards to contribute.

Talking of the cinema, my friends and I used to go to the cinemas in Blackpool once a week or so. The Clifton Palace was a small cinema where the cashier handed you a square metal token instead of a ticket to get into the film. There was a back door at the Clifton which was sometimes left open - I don't know why - maybe to clear cigarette smoke or as an emergency exit. Little boys used to wait outside till the lights went down and the B film started and then they'd creep in, giggling, and watch the films for free. In those days there were always two feature films. The B film, then the main one. Most of the films we saw back then were American. I'm talking about during the war now - 1940, 1941 - when I was 11, 12 years old. (We didn't think anything of getting the bus into Blackpool and then back home again at that age.) I remember the stars we saw were people like Abbott and Costello, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. All those "Road To..." films.

There were a lot of Westerns too - cowboys and indians, which have long since fallen out of favour. At the time they were very popular and often quite bloodthirsty. My pal Betty used to hide her face against her seat when there was violence and ask me to tell her when it was over. Strange really because she was a rather robust farmer's daughter and I'm sure even at her tender age she was used to the sight of real blood on the farm.

Later, when we got television, we watched yet more Westerns. Wagon Train is one of the ones I remember. Clint Eastwood in Rawhide was quite a lot later on I think. Then police series became popular. Dixon of Dock Green would seem totally outdated these days but, at the time, the idea of the wise local bobby wasn't so farfetched. When I was a teenager, about 18 or 19, there used to be a show on the radio called Dick Barton, Special Agent. Again, people would laugh at it now but my father listened to it faithfully. I'd always be getting ready to go out when it came on and once Dick Barton started I knew I'd have to get my make-up on and run or I'd miss the bus into town.

I know I'm rambling a bit here but thinking of those years, Pathé news reel, the royal wedding and the war reminds me of something else. Betty and I used to collect money during the war for the Penny A Week Fund. This was a Red Cross fund and the idea was to collect money to send to the Red Cross so they could send food parcels to our prisoners in the camps.

Betty and I were about eleven when we started collecting and we weren't meant to - we were too young. Everyone turned a blind eye though. Every Sunday mornings we'd cycle off on our rounds on our bikes, going from farm to farm in the countryside to collect contributions. Our local bobby was called PC Woodward and everyone thought he was really good-looking. He had a grim wife and a very pretty daughter called Arletta. All the people we collected from for Penny A Week gave more than a penny but MrsWoodward always gave exactly that - one penny!

The money went off to the Red Cross and they sent food parcels to POWs in German camps. I had a cousin in one camp and his best friend there was an Australian called Jack Hercules. My cousin and Jack knew that we collected for the food parcels and when they eventually got released at the end of the war they both came to England. My cousin came home obviously; Jack Hercules just came to visit. He then returned to Australia and, returning the solidarity we'd shown him during his years in the camp, he used to send us food parcels up until post-war rationing was stopped.

One of the other things Betty and I did to help the war effort was to hold a jumble sale. We asked people we knew - family and neighbours - to give us old stuff and then we held a jumble sale in a hen house to raise funds for Mrs Churchill's Aid To Russia Fund. We were twelve years old I guess, so it was about 1941 or 1942. The bobby's wife, Mrs Woodward again, said she wanted a preview of the sale so she could have first pick of the items for sale. We refused! We had some quite good stuff too. A milliner's shop had closed down because business was so bad and the owner gave us lots of hats to sell. Mrs Churchill's Fund was, again, for the Red Cross but this one sent medicine and surgical equipment to our Russian allies. I can't remember how much we raised - not very much I don't suppose - but we got a letter back from Mrs Churchill, signed Clementine Churchill. She thanked us for raising funds "to help our brave Russian allies."

Then we held a raffle. Heaven knows why we did all these things. I can't remember anyone prompting us. It was probably just the spirit of the times. Anyway, we begged and borrowed rationed food from relatives and neighbours - bags of sugar or a few eggs or a packet of tea - and then sold them raffle tickets so they could win them back... When we'd sold all the tickets we put them in a big ceramic bowl at Betty's house and started drawing them out. Betty drew the first ticket and looked at the name. "I don't like her" she said and promptly put the ticket back in the bowl. She didn't like the next person either. I had a go and put my ticket back in too. We kept going till we drew someone we liked. At some point Betty's mother came in and saw what we were doing. She stopped it right away! All the tickets went back in the bowl and she said firmly "I'll draw them now. We'll do it properly."

Looking back I can't see how so many of us got through those years really. Rations were so tight and food so scarce. There was a black market of course but we were in the countryside. In winter there wasn't much food about. My father kept a dozen chickens so we had eggs but he needed corn to feed them. He'd go up to the nearby farm to get corn for them on the black market. It was a bit risky and one night he ran into PC Woodward. Worried that he'd get into trouble he soon realised that the bobby, who kept chickens too, was going to the farm for exactly the same reason - black market corn for his hens.

Sometimes a local farmer would kill a pig and we'd get some meat. Or my father would kill one of the chickens if it got too old to lay eggs, or shoot a rabbit. We had a quarter of an acre of garden too, where he grew fruit and vegetables. But so many things were rationed for so long - bread, soap, sweets, eggs, butter, meat, flour. Everything you needed really.

But get through it we did. There wasn't really any choice.

Growing Older. Stay Open To New Cultures and Meet New People - Even in Your 80s

2010-11-17T09:36:00.000-08:00

I live in a flat in Guildford in Surrey, in the south of England. I've lived here for over 35 years, since marrying my second husband after I was widowed at 38. (I'll write later on about my husbands, marriages, being twice widowed, losing another boyfriend to open heart surgery and meeting my current 'boyfriend' when I was 63.)

It's a nice flat, with lawns on either side and tall pine trees where gold finches nest and breed. On the other side of the landing my next door neighbour is one of the Cadbury family. Or rather, she was, but she now lives in the Middle East with her husband and children. For years now, she's let the flat out on fairly short term leases.

I don't really know why but every tenant she's ever had has been foreign. Whether that's because of the agency she uses, or the rent she charges or just because the demand for rental properties in Guildford is from non-British people for some reason I have no idea.

For me, it's meant an ever-revolving door of neighbours from other countries, continents and races, speaking other languages. And that's meant a chance to meet people I never would have met otherwise, help them a bit if they have queries about the building or about living in Guildford, and learn a bit about their cultures. It's usually been very interesting.

Currently there's a Kurdish couple renting. The young wife was educated in Canada and has an American accent. I'm not sure what accent her husband has. When they first arrived I was a bit put out because on the first day they opened all the windows in the building, though it was cold outside, and moved the pot plants I carefully cultivate on the window sills. Then a very odd acrid smell, unlike anything I've ever smelt before, came wafting from the flat. It wasn't like something cooking. I wondered if it was part of some sort of religious ritual, 'cleansing' a new home? Anyway, after a day or so the smell went and I closed the windows and put the plants back and that was the end of that. I soon invited the new tenants round for a drink and they arrived with flowers and chocolate. The young woman refused a glass of wine but her husband shared a couple of glasses of pinot grigio with me. I don't know if she refused alcohol on religious grounds. We didn't really discuss anything about their background or where they're from. These days it's difficult to chat freely which is a shame as it's interesting to ask where people come from and to talk about their country and your own. The only thing I really learnt about them is that the husband is a paediatrician at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, probably in his late 30s. They're both very pleasant, as most of the tenants have been.

There were four Spanish guys a few years ago. Students. They looked a bit stroppy but turned out to be very kind. They'd carry my shopping up the stairs when they ran into me and after a while told me if I had heavy shopping to knock on their door and they'd come down and carry it up for me. I thought that was very considerate - students have their own lives to live without elderly ladies appearing at their door asking for help. After they left a lot of letters kept arriving for them. They gave me a forwarding address and maybe they regretted that because I got the idea some of the letters might be from people the boys owed money to...

Then there were two Lebanese guys. They were very solemn and not very friendly. The first thing they did was to put a Sky dish on their balcony, which isn't allowed under the flats' regulations. As I was Director of the Residents' Association at that time I got the job of going round to explain and tell them they had to take it down. They weren't very pleased but they did it. Like lots of young men, I guess, they didn't seem to be very domesticated - the outhouse where the rubbish goes was stuffed with empty pizza boxes all the time when they were renting!
Two French girls rented for a while. They were really pleasant, lively and full of Gallic charm. Everyone says the French health system is the best in the world and certainly the girls were not terribly impressed with the NHS (which I worked in for many years.) One of them went to a GP with a bad cold one day and was shocked to be sent home with (perfectly good) advice to take an aspirin! She gave me the impression she expected some serious treatment but I can't imagine what. We saw quite a bit of each other, my French neighbours and I, and I tried to speak some very rusty French with them. I passed French years ago when I got my School Certificate - but that was over 60 years ago. When they returned to France after their university studies ended they left me a letter saying they'd enjoyed being my neighbours. I thought that was very sweet.

Then there was a young Indian couple with two nice little girls. They were pleasant too. One Saturday not long after we introduced ourselves to each other the wife knocked on my door and presented me with a huge bowl of lamb curry. "This is for your lunch" she said. It was very kind of her - and very good. They were a quiet family, very organised I think. I remember giggling a bit to myself one day after the husband came in to my flat to borrow something or other and sitting neatly on my sofa, looking around at my flat, he said approvingly "This is a very well-maintained house". I don't really think of my home as very well maintained.

There was a sweet young Thai girl, a student from Bangkok I think. She inadvertently left the flat's central heating on at full blast when she went home to Thailand over the Christmas holidays. When she returned she knocked on my door in tears as the flat was full of condensation and there was mildew on the walls. I felt so sorry for her. She told me sorrowfully and very sweetly: "My mother told me not to upset anyone in England." She was so concerned about behaving well. She'd brought me a beautiful silk scarf from Bangkok as a present. We sorted the flat problem out together.

A young Chinese couple came to study at Surrey University. While they were renting next door and studying, the wife became pregnant. Quite soon after arriving in Guildford. They were very impressed at the pre-natal and post-natal care they and the baby received and the fact that it was all free. They came back to Guildford a couple of years later and did exactly the same thing. Had a second baby. I didn't think it was really right to come and use the NHS for free but I liked them and wished them well and now I wonder if they actually came in order to avoid China's one child policy? Perhaps they can get away with having two babies if they have them outside China?

When I think of all the tenants renting next door from other countries I realise I've met a lot of people from other cultures. It's surprising in a way though that, though we got to know each other, I didn't feel free to ask them much about their own cultures because all that has become so sensitive in Britain. It's a shame. It would be much more interesting if people could talk freely and ask each other questions. When I was young, you didn't automatically meet people from other countries. In my youth the unfortunate thing that got people crossing continents was mostly the war. (We had a Polish airman billeted with us during the war, for example, who had escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland with his wife and daughter.) I don't know if my mother and father ever even met a black person in pre- or post-wartime Lancashire. And I was 17 before I did. Now, there's so much opportunity to meet and learn from each other. We should all be free to talk, ask each other questions and enjoy finding out about other continents.

How To Be A Good Mother or Father: Here's The Secret: Just Do Your Best

2010-11-16T02:36:00.000-08:00

There's a lot of tension in Britain these days about parenting. I'm not talking about the kind of parents who never should have had children, who see them as a nusiance and maltreat them. Social workers have to deal with some of those families and who'd envy them their task?

But lots of capable, well-meaning and loving parents seem to be made neurotic about raising their children - perhaps by the media and constant reports about what's 'best' for children.

Parents' worries seem to be mostly about education, health and safety. That's understandable. If you can believe any of what you read in the papers then, in lots of areas of Britain, school discipline seems to have broken down so that learning is no longer the priority. Pupils bent on causing trouble can do it easily, safe in the knowledge that teachers don't have any real sanctions to deal with them. To someone of my age, the sight of teachers being hauled into court or losing their jobs for some minor infraction, after decades of devoted teaching and on the say-so of a child still - obviously - wet behind the ears is a travesty. Have a look at what I wrote recently about school discipline when I was at school in the 1930s. I'm not saying bring back Mrs Roscoe's leather strap or Miss Gillett's cane (my teachers in Lancashire) but there has to be a balance between rigid control and chaos in classrooms. Otherwise none of the children will learn.

Their children's health will always trouble parents. But there seem to be lots more health problems to worry about now than there were when I was a child or when I raised my kids in the 50's and 60's. Lots more allergies and lots more psychological problems. On the other hand, parents now have access to health care and medicines that I, and my parents before me, could never have imagined.

And safety. When my kids were small, living in rural Surrey, they'd vanish with their pals on spring or summer days - Just William style - and I wouldn't see them till they called in for a glass of water or at teatime. They roamed about in woods picking wild strawberries, tried to catch sticklebacks in streams, played on a wood lorry left in a sort of lumber yard - who knows what they got up to. During their whole youth there was only one time that a man molested a local child. And we had an elderly neighbour who'd grab the girls and try to kiss them in a rather revolting way. Everyone just saw him as a pest. The girls, like other village kids, used to take a shortcut through his garden and I'd say "Don't let him get hold of you." If he did, they'd wriggle away and come home saying "Ughhh, ughhh, he tried to kiss me." They instinctively didn't go past him if they were on their own.
But my kids were lucky. Growing up in rural south east England back then wasn't like growing up in a grim industrial town or 'inner city'. Children did play free, outside, unsupervised, and were generally happier for it is my bet.

Still, parents have always faced worries in bringing up their children and it would be wrong for today's parents to imagine they face more difficulty than other generations. Think of this. I remember during the war that kids were hastily billetted all over the place, out of the cities that were being bombed, separated from their mums and dads for who knew how long, shoved into households where they knew no-one and were not necessarily welcome guests. One day when I was about 11 (it must have been about 1940) I remember a woman - a total stranger - came to our door and absolutely begged my mother to take her little granddaughter in because the Germans were bombing Liverpool. I still remember the woman's tragic expression and pleading. I learnt that the family were Jews though I didn't really know what jewish meant. We did take the little girl in, for several weeks - she had beautiful black hair and pale blue eyes and was called Sylvia. (We found out very soon that the beautiful black hair was full of lice. Mum had us kids and dad - and a Catholic Polish airman billetted in our house with his wife and baby because of the war - all out in the little back garden washing our heads with a soap called Derbac. It was the sole product available for head lice in those days.)

Just like children have their fears about the monster under the bed or in the cupboard, parents have their fears that their child will get ill or run over or be snatched away. But the thing is, life isn't always under our control. In the 1930s and 1940s people had far less control of their lives, health, education and safety than we do now. Imagine packing your child off to school every day with a gas mask, as my mother did for years, fearing a bomb or gas attack would mean you'd never see each other again. The best a lot of parents in Lancashire where I grew up in the 1930s and 40s could hope for, for their children, was that they'd learn to read - and find work in a mill or a factory when they left school at 13 or so.

As we all steadily got more control since the second world war, people seem to worry about any risk. That'll just ruin your life. And will probably make your kids neurotic too!

I remember taking my second child back to Washington DC in 1956. She'd been born in England and was 7 months old. (My husband, Gerry, was stationed in Washington in the Royal Air Force after serving in the RAF throughout the war.) A bunch of us went down from Washington one day to see American friends in Philadelphia. They were middle-aged, Steve and Babs Rotay, and had already raised their family. At lunch, I was slightly horrified to see my husband and Steve gaily improvise a baby chair at the table for my chubby, blonde, little baby. They plonked her in a huge 'carver' chair and strapped her in with a couple of Steve's leather belts. And gave her a chicken leg. I didn't like to say anything - the others were all a lot older than me and not long ago they'd beaten the Nazis - but I kept a bit of an eye on her. She had a whale of a time. She was in the thick of things - chatter, laughter, beer, whisky, smoke and all. She had a huge smile on her face and chortled her way through the afternoon.

I think what I'm saying is keep an eye on your kids but don't get neurotic. Whatever you do as a parent there will be events over which you have no control. In my case, I brought my 2 girls up both in the same way. One has had - so far, touch wood - pretty excellent health, the other has had illness after illness, including Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion (in 1984 I think it was) after the birth of her son, and skin melanoma. There will always be things you cannot protect your children from. And you worry about them even when they're in their 50s!

After raising two girls, having a hand in raising three grandchildren, and now having a great-grandson, here's my advice about having and raising children if anyone's interested:

Love them to bits.
Do your best for them.
Treat them equally. (They'll see that you treat them equally even when they put on a whiney voice and say "It's not fair...".)
And don't worry if you make mistakes. They'll forgive you.

Free university education? Not in the early 21st century - and not in the early 20th century either.

2010-11-15T13:20:00.000-08:00

Last week I watched the student protests and the attack on Millbank Tower in London. Most of the students seemed to be protesting peacefully but of course there'll always be some who get out of control. I felt sorry for some of the coppers getting hit and cut, and the student who chucked a fire extinguisher off the tower certainly wasn't doing anything progressive. Experience suggests that most of the students smashing windows and breaking things will turn into ordinary middle-aged people with kids and mortgages even though they don't imagine at the moment that they will.

I haven't followed the latest ins and outs of education policy but I know the coalition government is planning to raise university fees and students are demonstrating for free higher education. My daughters both benefited from free university education and I was delighted they had an opportunity that few teenagers got in my day.

They went to university in the 70s though - in those days Britain didn't have a trillion pound budget deficit.

Back in the 30s, when I started school in Lancashire, the opportunity of free university education was still a long way off.

I started school at 5 years old, in 1934, at Joseph's infant school in Wesham. It was a Roman Catholic school, obviously. Most schools were religious and funded by the various religions. My best friend, Betty, went to the local Church of England school. At Joseph's, we sat on long benches to be taught by the only teacher, Mrs Roscoe, who was my mother's cousin. She was a middle-aged married woman with grey hair who wore shapeless cardigans and skirts. To maintain order and discipline she had a leather strap, 2 inches thick, and you got whacked if you stepped out of line. I remember little boys in the class coming back to the benches with their eyes smarting after she'd strapped their hands in punishment. Poor little things!

Unthinkable in today's schools, the strap did help the teacher keep order back then. None of us objected to it. It was just the way discipline was maintained. You didn't question the teacher or the school and parents accepted teachers' authority too.

When I was about 8 I left Joseph's and went to the Roman Catholic school in Westby. The teacher here, Miss Gillett, was another of my mother's cousins. Miss Gillett was an aging spinster who used a thin cane to keep order. No wonder, because she had about 30 of us kids aged between 8 and 14 and quite a few were farm boys who would have preferred to be anywhere but in a schoolroom.

There were no set lessons and we didn't know what we'd be studying from day to day. Miss Gillett would simply come in each day and say: "Today we'll do arithmetic" or "Today we'll do English." The farm boys regularly got caned for not paying attention or for being a bit cheeky. From time to time - I can't remember exactly why; we probably sniggered at something - all of us had to line up and Miss Gillett caned all of us. I remember getting caned, that little whip hitting my hand.

There were only 2 classrooms in the school. Up to 8 years old, children were taught by Mrs Martin . She wore a motheaten fur coat and thought she was rather wonderful. In our classroom, with children aged 8 to 14 all mixed up, it was sometimes a bit chaotic. I can't remember really learning anything at either school but somewhere along the way, someone - Miss Gillett I suppose - taught me to read.

One term when I was about 10, Miss Gillett kept me separate from the other pupils for a couple of weeks. She took me to a cupboard where there was a set of encyclopedias and told me to sit and read them. I had no idea why, but I dipped in and out of them a bit in between looking out to see what the other children were doing. Day after day I sat and leafed through the various volumes reading snippets of information.

I had some form with encyclopedias as it happened because some time before this a salesman had come to our door at home and persuaded my father to buy 6 (or was it 10?) volumes of a series called Arthur Mees' Children's Encyclopedias. The volumes had elegant dark blue binding and looked very appealing to me. I had it in mind from the start that they were fairly precious because my father had to pay 6 pounds and 10 shillings, which he could only afford to do in installments.

Anyway, at the end of the 2 weeks in the cupboard with these volumes I was taken to the nearby town of Kirkham and told I was to sit an exam. It was a scholarship to the Catholic convent - Layton Hill - in Blackpool.

Miss Gillett told me no-one had ever got a scholarship to the convent from Westby school and I was the only pupil being entered for it. She didn't say why she'd picked me.

I vaguely remember there were questions which required Yes/No answers and some which were problem solving types. After the exam I went home and forgot about it altogether until Miss Gillett told us one day that the scholarship results had been announced in the Lancashire Daily Post, that I'd won a scholarship and would be going to Layton Hill Convent and that all the pupils were getting a one day holiday off school to celebrate.

The other pupils were delighted to get a day's holiday but I was terrified. I wouldn't know anyone at the convent and I'd have to get a bus to Blackpool and back every day.

It seems strange, looking back, that there was a war on and we lived in daily fear of the Nazi bombers - listening every time we heard a plane because even kids could tell the difference between 'our' planes and theirs - and yet we kids were worrying about normal things like going to a new school or cheering because of a day off school. Some things never change.

Through my school years it seemed perfectly normal to have air raid drills where we went into the little shelter and put our gas masks on. We carried gas masks everywhere we went, not just to school, and even the littlest kids knew how to fit them. Only if we were playing near our homes did we leave our gas masks inside. Gas wasn't used in the second world war though as far as I'm aware. The fear of gas, and distribution of gas masks, was really a hangover from the First World War when so many men were gassed in the trenches. I was only caught in one incendiary bomb attack which I'll describe some other time. We were out in the back garden and heard a plane and all looked up, listening as usual for the noise telling us it was 'one of ours.' It wasn't, the noise was a German plane and suddenly there were flames coming up all over the place, all around us.

But as I say, children - like adults - have their own mundane worries even in wartime and when that summer ended and I went off to my new school I was still in a state of terror. With hundreds of girls, Layton Hill seemed huge after my little school at Westby. I now had to wear a school uniform, which I wasn't used to. There were around 30 girls in each class. I could sense that this school was going to be different from the 'education' I'd known before.

But I not only settled in quickly, I loved it. I found I loved learning and everything we were taught seemed fascinating after the rather unstructured and informal education I'd had up till then. After the first year we were all to be streamed into A and Alpha classes. The brighter girls would do Latin; the less academic would do domestic science. I quite liked cookery and wanted to be in that stream but I was placed in the Latin stream.

Had I not won the scholarship to the convent, I would have had to go to the local state school which didn't have a good reputation. My parents could never have afforded to pay for my education. As it was, they had to pay for hockey sticks and boots, tennis racquets and other sports gear and it was all expensive. The scholarship paid my fees and travel to and from school and, I think, my uniform. But both my mother and father seemed to know education was valuable though they weren't educated themselves. My father had left school at 12, which was common in those days, and I guess my mother left around the same age. Dad earned 5 pounds a week at about this time, working for a local market gardener who had a nursery. My cousins mostly worked in the local biscuit factory and my mother had been a weaver in the cotton mill. I would have had to do the same if I'd had to leave school earlier.

At 17, I got my School Certificate. This meant I'd passed exams in Latin, English Grammar, English Literature, French, Art, Science, Religious Knowledge and Maths. If you didn't pass English Grammar you couldn't get your School Certificate, even if you passed all the other exams.

The big question for me now was What next? In those days, most people from poor or modest backgrounds had only a dim idea about universities. I know that I liked the thought of going to a university but didn't know anything about them. I knew my father could never pay for me to go and wasn't sure if there was a new scholarship I could try to get.

As it happened, the problem of finding a scholarship never arose. My parents explained to me that now I had my School Certificate I'd need to leave the convent, find a job, and bring some money into the house. They could no longer afford to feed and clothe me without me contributing something each week.

This was just a matter-of-fact reality and I accepted it without question. I knew we were stretched financially as my father was buying our terraced house in Wesham in some sort of mortgage arrangement. I don't know how it worked. He didn't even have a bank account. But once a month we went to a solicitor's house in Kirkham and handed over an envelope with the payment in it in cash.

I had no idea how I'd find a job or what sort of job I should - or even could - look for but an opportunity presented itself almost straight away. The convent secretary was one of the nuns, Mother Clara. She explained that the convent was admitting more pupils and she would need an assistant to help her. If I would stay on at the school - now as assistant secretary - she would teach me shorthand and typing and I'd get a small wage. I was happy to agree. It was a strange first job. Still a teenager, I was now working at the school where my luckier school friends were still studying in the sixth form. I wasn't allowed in the staff room until my second year in the job. And I was learning to be a school secretary. So I was halfway between staff and pupil really.

I remember showing Mother Clara a letter one day that had been sent from an African country. I forget which one all these years later. It was from the parents of a girl called Rosette Solomon. Out of the blue, they announced that they had dispatched their daughter to England and she would shortly arrive at the convent as a boarder. I can't remember how payment was made but Rosette duly arrived at Layton Hill in Blackpool. She attracted quite a bit of interest from the staff and pupils as she was the first black child many of us had ever seen!

How Colours Fade As You Get Older

2010-11-09T01:02:00.000-08:00

Now I'm in my 80s, my daughters often tell me, when I'm ready to go out, that my make-up needs a bit of attention. I put too much eyebrow pencil on and too much lipstick. The eyebrow pencil, when it's too heavy, makes me 'look like a clown.' Daughters will always be honest with you about your appearance. The lipstick may be all right, but a bit too heavy.

They'll take some of the eyebrow pencil off and maybe some of my foundation. I don't blend it well enough apparently. It feels funny when they tidy up my make-up. I used to wipe ice-cream and chocolate off their faces when they were little. Now they'll wipe make-up off mine. The roles are reversed.

What I've explained to them is that as you get older your sight often gets weaker and you see colours less vividly. They may see the make-up is too heavy but when I peer in the mirror I see faint lines where I put the eyebrow pencil. And where they see bright red or coral lipstick, I see faint colour.

I don't like the idea that my make-up looks odd though so I'm happy for them to adjust it when they're around.

On the other hand they both compliment me a lot on my skin. Even though I drink quite a bit of wine and have done for years, my skin is clear and I have relatively few wrinkles. My forehead in particular is unwrinkled - my daughters say I must use botox, which of course I don't! But I think your skin is largely determined by your genes and I must be lucky there. I don't have an awful lot of faith in skin creams. I use Oreal products quite a lot but I notice that they always have something new out. The newest thing I bought from them is an under-eye cream that comes with a little vibrating mechanism. You put the cream on and use the vibrating thing to massage it into your skin. But it seems obvious to me that if the skincare companies keep producing new creams for your eyes or face or hands then they haven't produced creams that really work. One year they say "This is the cream you need for puffy eyes" or dry skin or age spots. If it really was though, they wouldn't produce a new one the year after.

Fear of Getting Older? It's The Indignities That Are Most Worrying

2010-11-09T00:31:00.000-08:00

In September and November 2010 I lost two old friends. One was in his nineties and died unexpectedly after a stomach operation. (Or at least, as unexpectedly as possible after ninety.) The other was, like me, in her eighties. A very dear friend for many years, she fell and hit her head one day and died just a few days afterwards.

When people die suddenly, even if they're old, it's a shock. In my experience though, people start looking for ways to feel better about the loss. "He'd had a good life" they say. Or "at least she didn't get ill and suffer for years." And there's certainly something to be said for that outlook.

I have another old and dear friend who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers. She's a year older than me and started losing her faculties about two years ago. At first she would simply repeat an anecdote. The moment she recounted it, she'd say it again. It was clear she had no idea she'd just told me the same story. It was a shock when it started. What on earth was happening to her? She'd always been so bright. After that she began to lose her memory for lots of things and muddle dates and times up. If I invited her round for a drink or to dinner, she might turn up on the wrong day, or call to ask me to remind her when she should be coming round.

Then she began to talk about her mother and father, long dead, as if they were still alive. She started to mislay and lose things and she'd say: "Oh that's my mother -she's taken my make-up again." I'd gently explain that her mother had been dead for a long time and she'd seem a bit shocked but then carry on with what she was doing.

Alzheimer's is obviously a progressive disease and though I didn't know much about it before, I saw it changing her behaviour and getting worse. She had always taken great care of her appearance but started to neglect it without seeming to realise that she hadn't washed her hair or hadn't put her lipstick on. She got progressively confused, frustrated and tearful about everyday things and sometimes I'd call round and find her crying. Once, she invited me to tea and put a plate of bread and paté on the table - but it wasn't paté, it was cat food. Now, although that may sound funny it wasn't because she was unaware of what she'd done and couldn't understand what the problem was when I explained it to her.

I also worried a bit about her beloved cat as I wasn't sure she was remembering to feed it regularly.

Eventually she had 'carers' who came in twice a day. There are all sorts of common sense things, apparently, that English carers can't do these days. They told me they couldn't wash her hair or do her make-up or change her sheets. For over five months - I think they said six months in total - they didn't change her sheets. I think that's scandalous. They were paid a fortune but the excuse was that they didn't have "the right" to go into her bedroom and change the sheets unless she asked them to. Something like that anyway. Common sense should tell the authorities that if you have a woman in her 80s with Alzheimers people sent to help, and paid to help, should take charge, take responsibility, and change the bedclothes.

She began to look progressively dishevelled and no wonder. I used to drive her down to the hairdresser before I had to give up driving, so at least her hair was washed and cut.

Eventually she had a few episodes where she was found wandering in Stoke Park or in Guildford and she had a few falls and after spending time in hospital she was put in a home in Wimbledon. In her lucid moments she told me, often, that she didn't want to leave her home and go into a 'care' home. But in the end she had no choice.

For many people my age I think that's the sort of thing we least want to experience. Toppling over and dying or having a heart attack and dying, are not pleasant thoughts but most of the people I know, of my age, tend to agree the worst thing would be going into a home and declining slowly as you get towards ninety. We enjoy living independently and we don't want to give that up. We may not talk about it very often, especially not to younger people, but we do fear needing someone to spoon food into our mouths, help us to the bathroom or wash us.

Personally I do think a bit about dying - I talked to my younger daughter about this the other week - but there's no use worrying about it. At 81, I may have another 10 years for all I know. For me, the most important thing would not be the number of years I have left but the quality of them. It's not so much the end of life that would worry me, more the thought of indignities I might face as I get nearer 90.

Still, I've had a pretty good old age so far and I was watching David Attenborough the other day in his new TV series on the origins of life on earth. He was born in 1926 and is three years older than me. He was jumping around filming in Australia, Canada and Switzerland. He didn't seem to have any problems scaling rocks or clambering about pointing out fossils on the seashore. That's what I call a good and healthy old age and as he's older than me, it makes me think I've got more active years to come.

Heavy Drinking and the Over 80s

2010-11-08T12:38:00.000-08:00

I think there's a lot of panicking these days about certain habits. People aren't meant to go out in the sun for fear of skin cancer. Aren't meant to smoke for fear of lung cancer. Aren't meant to drink much for fear of high blood pressure or heart disease or liver disease.

For all I know it's all very good advice. But I have to say, particularly with regard to drinking, that I seem to know an awful lot of people my age and older who drink like fish and are still in pretty good condition.

I have a book somewhere in which Churchill wrote that he drank at every meal and on all occasions in between. He smoked cigars too, almost all the time. Obviously, he wasn't a man who believed the saying "All things in moderation". He had a couple of strokes, it's true, but he lived to be 91. I saw him (and photographed him) in Washington DC after the war and he seemed pretty hale and hearty.

I can almost say the same for my partner? boyfriend? - I never know how to refer to him - who drinks at least 4 pints of beer a day and is nearly 86. He's not hale and hearty perhaps but he's perfectly on the ball, lives entirely independently, follows the news avidly, and motor racing, has a social life and sees his daughter and grandchildren every week.

Most of my other friends, some younger, some older than me, drink regularly too. I can't see the point of worrying too much about it at my age. I like white wine and I like a drink with lunch sometimes and a few glasses with dinner, always. On my 80th birthday I had a party and around 30 of us drank champagne all evening. Friends returning to Guildford from holiday in France brought two cases and others bought champagne along too. It was a lovely evening and the champagne went very well with all the food my younger daughter prepared.

My two daughters sometimes say they're worried about drinking - we all like wine - but I tell them that I've been drinking for 60 years and so far haven't come to much harm. Back in the 1950s, we all drank cocktails and martinis all the time. The girls' father was stationed in Washington DC with the Royal Air Force so we lived there for some years and the RAF lifestyle in America after the war was all about partying and drinking! I have a lot of photos of those days and in every one of them the girls' father has a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In his case, sadly, the cigarettes did get him and he died in 1968, in his late fifties. However, he loved drinking and smoking and wouldn't have wanted to give up even if we'd had all the constant rather nagging health advice we get these days.

In the 60s, back in England, in Surrey, we drank sherry and gin (and babycham? - can hardly remember babycham but I think my elder daughter sometimes drank it as a teenager). And later on, in the 70s I suppose, once people really started going on holiday to France and Italy, Malta and Spain, we all started drinking wine.

Two male friends of mine died during 2010. They were both over 90 and both liked a drink. I'm sure health advisers would tut tut and say it's best to avoid drinking more than whatever is the medically preferred weekly limit. Perhaps they're right. But presumably there are lots of factors dictating what will and won't harm us because otherwise probably none of us would live to be 80 or 90. I had two brushes with cancer in my 60s (bladder cancer) and I haven't smoked since. The surgeon told me he's never had a patient with bladder cancer who hadn't smoked. But since I like a glass of wine, or several, and I've already lived to be 81 and a bit, I'll take my chances with alcohol and keep on drinking. I won't go as far as Churchill did and drink on every possible occasion but I'll stick to my glass of wine with lunch and a couple of glasses with dinner.

Disabled Children Born in the 1920s - My Baby Brother's Fate

2010-11-08T12:02:00.000-08:00

I was born in 1929 and was brought up as an only child. But I wasn't the only child my parents had. A few years before I was born, my mother gave birth to a little boy.

My brother was born at home in Kirkham in Lancashire, just as I would be. But whereas I was healthy, he was not. He was a very sick baby. My father told me years later that he had a hole in his back - a sort of wound that was unhealed. Although I can't be sure, I think he must have had spina bifida.

I don't know what the treatment is these days for a baby with spina bifida. It's not a condition I know much about. But in those days, it was often thought best that a very sick or disabled baby was left to die. Or - who knows - even "helped" to die. I think that is what happened with my brother. My father told me many years later that our doctor said just after the birth that the baby would only live for about a week. Obviously it was terribly upsetting for my parents. Their first child...

My father arranged straight away to have his son christened. We were catholics and in those days we believed without even really thinking about it that an unchristened baby who died would go to limbo and spend eternity there. (What a terrible thing for a religion to tell parents facing the death of a child.) Anyway, my brother was christened. The priest came to the house for the baptism and the sick baby was given the name William.

Each day that week William lay in his cradle and each evening my father administered a medicine to him. He was told by the doctor to fetch the medicine from the chemist each evening. When my father eventually talked about the death of my brother, when I was an adult, he told me that the doctor had never explained what the medicine was or what it was for but my dad noticed that each evening after he had the medicine, William was worse. At the end of the week, he died.

My father told me that it hadn't even occurred to him to question the doctor's orders - in those days the doctor, like the priest, was a bit like God - you didn't question them and you certainly didn't challenge them. It didn't even cross your mind. However, looking back, my father said he'd often - naturally - thought about his sick baby boy and had concluded that, whatever the doctor had ordered, it had probably killed William.

He could never know for sure and I will never know. My mother had died by the time my father talked to me about this. I don't know if he had ever shared his opinion with her. Probably not. She was ill most of her adult life with pernicious anaemia and he probably would have thought she wasn't strong enough to talk about losing the baby.

My dad was of course a man of his time and when he talked about William and his death he talked about it simply and objectively. He just said that he thought the doctor had probably told him to administer a 'medicine' that had killed the baby. He didn't say he thought that was terrible, or for the best, or anything else - just that he thought that was what had happened. I'll never know if he was inwardly angry at the doctor or calmly accepting that a medical judgement had been made or even reassured by the belief that William had been spared a long life of pain and disability.

I suspect, because it was back in the 1920s, that he may simply have thought that's how life was and that was the professional decision taken by the doctor. It makes me shiver though to think that my kind dad may have spent that week trustingly giving 'medicine' to his sick baby son in the hope it would improve his condition, if in fact it was killing him.

Computers for the Over 80s - Internet, Google, Adsense, Facebook

2010-11-08T08:11:00.000-08:00

Because I'm elderly - 81 and nearly 2 months as I write - I'm not brilliant with computers. I saw an article in a paper the other day that made me laugh. It was an article titled something like "Silver Surfers" and it was about people over 50 using the internet. For heaven's sake. My daughters are both over 50 and I wouldn't call them silver surfers. I don't think either of them has a grey hair. They're young!

Even I'm not a silver surfer - what a patronising phrase. I colour my hair. (Only a bit, with washout colour, not with peroxide or anything. I left that behind in the '50s.)

Anyway. I use the internet and I have a PC in my home study and I use the internet at both my daughters' houses too, when I'm visiting. At the start, before I'd ever used a computer, my daughters bought me a PC and I went on a short course in Guildford to learn how to use Word and email and look around the internet. I didn't do anything very adventurous; the idea was just to use email mostly to stay in contact with family members. At first I had no idea that if you had a query or question or wanted information on any topic under the sun you could just key it ito Google and get hundreds of results. My two daughters, son-in-law and grandson gradually showed me all the different things I could do.

I'm still fairly basic in what I do with the PC and the internet though. There's a lot I don't understand and a limit to what I want to learn. Facebook, for example, holds no interest for me whatsoever. All the Word commands frustrate me a bit too. Sometimes the text becomes small all of a sudden and I have no idea which key I pressed or how to make the text larger. And the other day I got something up on the screen that I couldn't understand and a message appeared beside it saying "What's this?" I was baffled. How would I know what it was? How would I answer the question even if I knew the answer? One of my granddaughters explained later that it wasn't asking me what the thing was - rather I should have clicked on the icon to get more information. A lot of computer "thinking" is lost on me. There are lots of websites that I can't find my way around too. I fly several times a year as one of my daughters lives in France, but she always books my flights. I haven't used the Flybe website myself to buy a ticket. I'm worried about giving bank details online.

My daughters helped me start this blog after one of them asked me lots of questions about my childhood. "Why don't you write a blog?" she said. I knew perfectly well what blogs were because they're referred to everywhere now - on the BBC, in the papers - but I had no idea I could just write one. They helped me start this and helped me register me for Adsense, explaining that you get paid for blogs if people read them. I'll believe it when I see it.

All this is in order to say that although I'm not very good with computers I had a pretty good IT idea the other day. I was in a pub in Shere, in Surrey, the White Horse - and got talking to two elderly men who it turned out were from Lancashire, like me. When they were young, they had friends who went to school in Kirkham. We didn't talk for very long but I guess if we'd gone through a list of names we would have known some people in common.

So I wonder if Google or some internet company couldn't make a sort of IT Contact Board or Message Board in a mobile phone where you'd note lots of people you know, and so would other people, and you'd get signals when someone was nearby who knew people in common. It could be quite interesting. Imagine if you're young and you get a signal that someone in the same cafe or train as you knows your boss. The Message Board would indicate the people around you and which person you had the "match" with. You'd chat and perhaps find out information on your boss from someone who used to work for him. Or from his daughter. Or ex-wife! Or imagine you get a signal and find that someone knows your daughter or friend or neighbour. It could be a god way of extending social and work networks. It could also be dangerous of course. Imagine your daughter finds out that a brassy blonde in the bar where she's sitting has listed her husband as one of her contacts...

It could also be used as a proper Message Board. Say a train is cancelled you could put out a message saying you could give three people a lift to the West End of London, for example. Their phones would tell them where you were, so they could approach you. Or if you were outside a concert with a spare ticket, you could signal that to everyone too.

This is the only computing idea I've ever had and I expect someone will tell me that all that is already possible with some mobile phone or other, or iPod or Google phone. Never mind. I think it's not a bad idea and it just goes to show that even at my age, if you learn something new, like internet use, it'll get you thinking and give you new ideas. Even if someone else has had them first.

Growing Up In Lancashire in the 1930s

2010-11-08T00:54:00.000-08:00

I was born in a Lancashire town called Kirkham, a few miles from the Fylde coast.

I thought of Kirkham the other day because I was having lunch in the White Horse pub in Shere (in Surrey where I now live) and got chatting to two old chaps, two brothers. I noticed they had Lancashire twangs to their voices even though, like me, they'd lost most of their accent from decades of living in the south of England. They turned out to have had childhood friends in Kirkham and we reminisced a bit about what the town and surrounding area were like before and during the war.

Kirkham had one main street with a few shops, a cinema, a municipal swimming pool and an ancient Grammar School for boys. My family moved to the neighbouring town of Wesham (pronounced Wessom) before I was old enough to remember the house where I was born. In those days women tended to have their babies at home. My mother also gave birth to a boy some years earlier, my brother, but he had spina bifida and died not long after he was born. It was seen as perfectly normal to give birth at home in the same bed where your babies were conceived. It was years later that it became normal for women to give birth in hospitals. Certainly it was pretty normal by the time I had my first child in 1953. That was in America. My second was born in 1956, in England, also in hospital. I wonder if the old house where I was born is still standing, like me, 81 years later.

Wesham was a much smaller town, with just a handful of shops and a railway station and at the bottom of the town a weaving mill where most people from Wesham worked. The cotton mill, to me as a small child, was a really fearsome place full of noise and the clanking of the weaving looms. No-one could be heard in the din of the mill machinery and the only way the workers could communicate was by sign language - which was called me-mo-ing - or by lip reading. My mother was a weaver in the Wesham mill.

I only ever got to go right inside the mill once. It was probably in 1934, when I was about five. My mother had recently gone back to work there and I don't know who was supposed to be looking after me but I was found crying for my mother outside the mill. I was taken in and reunited with her and that was the end of her return to work! From then on she stayed at home.

My father was a labourer with the Water Board and earnt a bit of extra money helping with tasks like haymaking on local farms.

I had 3 aunties and 1 uncle. Auntie Polly was the eldest, then Auntie Nellie - who was deaf and dumb following an attack of scarlet fever when she was two - my mother Isabella was next and then Auntie Lizzie, who suffered from epilepsy.

Auntie Lizzie worked in a café in St Annes and on Saturday nights would bring round to our house a bag of cakes that were left over, unsold. This was one of the highlights of my week. Sometimes if I was lucky there would be vanilla slices or cream crisps; other times there were only bath buns.

Auntie Lizzie had no children and her husband, my Uncle Jim, worked as a signalman on the railyway. This was a lonely occupation, sitting alone waiting to work the signals for the trains, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown, having first tried to commit suicide by gassing himself. Fortunately, my cousin Joe Lambert, Auntie Polly's son, called round, found him and rescued him and poor Uncle Jim was carted off to the local mental hospital where he remained for many years.

As well as my aunties and uncle and a lot of cousins I also had both my granddads. My mother's father, Granddad Gillett, was pretty fearsome to me. He seemed about ten feet tall and had a grim face with a large hooked nose. He had apparently ruled his children, including my mother, with a rod of iron. None of them got married till they were thirty - he wouldn't let them. They all lived at home and I gather he took a good proportion of their wages off them as he retired early and even went on holiday to Spain with Monsigneur Rockliffe, our parish priest - a thing unheard of at that time in Lancashire society. The Monsigneur obviously squirelled money away somehow - when he died he left enough money to buy everyone in the parish a prayer book. All the books had a dedication to him inside them. I've still got my copy. He disapproved of books that weren't religious. He came round one day and saw that my Aunt Polly had bought a romance. He threw it on the fire!

Granddad Gillett allowed his children out on Saturdays once they were grown up, but they had to be in by 9pm. Granddad would be standing by the door with a cup of cold water from which they all had a drink before going up to bed.

Auntie Lizzie finally broke ranks and got engaged and then Auntie Polly and my mother followed suit. My father and mother courted for seven years before marrying, partly because Granddad was so strict and partly because my father - who used to come into Wesham on Saturday nights to seee my mum - suffered from an inability to get past the Swan Hotel where he used to put up his bike. After seven years my mother issued an ultimatum: we either get married or it's all off! They got married and I never knew my father to go into a pub or take a drink, except perhaps at Christmas or just a glass beer after helping with the haymaking.

Granddad Gillett died when I was 8. We had a sort of lying in state where Granddad was propped up in bed with 6 big candles burning, 3 on either side of him, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins gathered round saying prayers for the dead, with our parish priest in attendance. I was positioned at the bottom of the bed, peering up at my dead granddad. I have never forgotten the experience. I was bought a new grey coat to go to the funeral. In those days everyone went into deepest mourning when a close relative died and mother and the aunts all went to Preston, the nearest town, to buy their black. My mother apparently tried on a dress which looked a bit peculiar round the collar but the sales assistant assured her "it's the latest cowl collar, madam." It wasn't. Mother had put the dress on back to front. In spite of granddad's recent death apparently all my aunts fell about laughing.

It was a nice day for the funeral, sunny but cold, and everyone cried by the graveside. Afterwards the whole family went to the Swan Hotel - I think it was the only pub in Wesham - and had a funeral breakfast. Salad and boiled ham at that time was a great luxury.

Another memory, apart from seeing my grandfather dead in bed, is the way my aunts and their husbands, having been weeping at the graveside, were now all laughing and joking and making merry. I was shocked by this. I've been to enough funerals now, at my age, to know this is often the way, but then, with the logic of an 8 year old, I felt it was not right!

The tradition of wearing black when you were in mourning for a close relative persisted up until the late 1940s. When my mother died in 1949 I was 19 years old. We were told she died of pernicious anaemia. Young people then, unlike today, didn't wear black clothes. My father wanted me in black from head to foot and I was appalled. One of my aunts prevailed upon him at least to let me wear a white blouse with a black suit, which I did.

I was by myself with my mother when she died. It was a beautiful June morning and my father had gone to fetch the doctor. We had a little car by that time but no telephone. My mother, who had not had good health for years, became ill in the night and father wakened me at about 5.30am to sit with her while he drove to fetch the doctor from Wesham. She died whilst he was gone. I had read about people having a 'death rattle' and it was true with my mother.

Like granddad, my mother stayed at home in her coffin until the funeral.

At first, I was nevous about this and was necessarily in the house alone with her whilst my father went about making arrangements for the funeral . But then I got used to it and would go in and see her and give her a kiss and talk to her a bit.

I'm jumping ahead of myself here though and will go back to our life in Wesham when I was a small child.

Our house was an end-of-terrace but on the 'top road', not down near the cotton mill, which was reckoned to be a bit more elite! The front door opened right onto the pavement, with a little hall called a vestibule before you opened the door into the living room. We had just one living room, a fairly big kitchen with a walk-in pantry, and 3 bedrooms. There was no fridge back then. The pantry was just cold. There were shelves where my mother kept butter, milk, cream and meat. They were all covered to protect them from flies. She made cakes and plum and damson preserves for the winter. We had no bathroom or indoor toilet. The toilet was up at the end of our small garden but was at least a water closet and not one of the old type privies which were all they had on my aunties' and uncles' farms out in the countryside.

We had chamber pots under the beds for night time use. My mother and father had a splendid one, black with pink roses all over it, which had been a wedding present.

For baths, every Saturday night a tin bath with a high back, which hung on a nail outside the back door, was brought in and set before the fire. I was then bathed by my mother and put into a clean nightie, with my clean clothes laid out ready for Sunday. I wore a vest which always had a St Christopher's medal pinned to it with a little gold safety pin. Why my mother thought this was necessary, as St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers and I never went anywhere, I don't know. After the vest I wore a garment called a liberty bodice, a sort of sleeveless jacket with buttons up the front. I wore navy blue fleecey knickers and long brown woollen stockings, kept up with garters made by my mother from pieces of elastic.

I suppose all these garments were necessary because we had no heating except for the coal fire in the living room. The coal man used to come round with his horse and cart, and coal on the back and my father would buy sacks of coal. Also, we had no electric light, just gas light. The lights had mantles made of gauze and you pulled a small cord to get the gas to flow. Then we lit the mantles with lighted tapers. Outside our house was a street light and that was also gas. A little man used to come along in winter with a long pole and a taper on the end to light it.

Once You're Over 80, Your Friends Are Sadly Prone to Pop Their Clogs

2010-11-05T11:39:00.000-07:00

Early this afternoon I was getting ready to go to the White Horse pub in Shere in Surrey with one of my daughters. I'd booked the local Dial a Ride service and we were going for lunch.

The phone rang and a friend announced that one of our friends, John Berry, had died. John was 92 - almost 93, I'm not sure. We'd been friends, a group of us, for a good 16 years I suppose, though in recent years we hadn't seen much of him. A few months ago we all went out to dinner and he was on good form - completely on the ball and in good humour.

Recently, we heard he'd gone into hospital for a stomach operation, suspected stomach cancer. But no, the surgeon found no cancer and John was going to spend a few more days in hospital and would then come home, even though an army of carers was apparently going to help him at home.

However, it wasn't to be and he didn't, obviously, recover from the op.

When you get to be 80 you have to accept that, increasingly, your friends will die. Somewhere around 55, I suppose, or maybe later, you become aware that you're going to more funerals than weddings. At 81, the funerals become all too common.

A few weeks ago a very close friend of mine died after a simple fall in her home. She was a bit unsteady on her feet and just toppled backwards. Unfortunately, the fall was enough to fracture her skull and she died that same weekend. When I looked at her obituary in the Surrey Advertiser I was shocked to see the obituary of another friend of mine too. I hadn't heard yet that he had died but there was the announcement, already in black and white.

Quite a few of my friends are younger than I am but I'm very aware that my friends around and over the age of 80 are vulnerable, just as I am. Perhaps it makes us appreciate each other more. It should do. When you're young, by and large, it doesn't occur to you that each time you see a friend may be the last. For those of us over 80, there's always that possibility. I treasure all my friends but I know that the very old are the least likely to be around next year or the year after. That's not being pessimistic, just realistic. And being realistic is useful since it means we can appreciate each other's friendship that bit more while we have the chance.

German Terrorists, Irish Terrorists, Muslim Terrorists

2010-11-05T03:22:00.000-07:00

Some deluded young girl, with her head full of militant islamic faith, was jailed for life the other day for trying to kill her British MP. She stabbed him in the stomach because he voted for the Iraq war.

Only 21, she'll have lots of time to figure out what a foolish thing she did in the name of 'religion'.

At 81, I've seen a few terrorist movements come and go. I've concluded that every society is going to have some disgruntled minority or other which decides its principles give it the right to go round killing other people.

In the second world war the nazis decided they had the right to terrorise German jews. They started out going round kicking jewish citizens and smashing their shop windows. They got so much support for their thuggery from the German population as a whole that they grew from what might have stayed a relatively powerless and German national terrorist movement into an all-out effort at world domination. My generation, along with the Americans and other allies, had no option but to fight them.

Then we had the IRA. That was different from a terrorist movement that wants to dominate in that the Irish nationalists didn't want to take over Britain or dominate the British. They wanted to get Britain and British soldiers out of northern Ireland. Once the leaders Martin McGuiness and Jerry Adams became elected politicians speaking out against violence, it was predictable that a new bunch would start up, feeling they have the right to blow up people going about their daily lives.

And then we got the islamic terrorists. They do want to dominate. Like Hitler and the nazis, they want world domination. And like Hitler and the nazis, they think they're superior to everyone else.

I suppose I've become philosophical about these things since I think they'll always be with us. The human brain gets deluded very easily it seems. Human judgement and objectivity are terribly delicate things. Some causes are of course worth fighting for. Others are entirely unjustified attempts to force intolerance on others. There'll always be tussles over values and behaviour. Islamic terrorism is just the latest attempt to replace tolerance with intolerance and freedom with coercion.

Children, Grandchildren, Music and Pop Music

2010-11-05T02:35:00.000-07:00

My youngest granddaughter always seems to pick musicians as boyfriends. I don't think it's deliberate; it just turns out that way. She went out with one in a band called The Metros. Then another one. Now it's a young man called Johnny in a band whose name I can't recall.

I had a meal with her and her older sister in Wetherspoons in Guildford last night. The girls came down from London just for a few hours to chat over a meal. (Six pounds for a meal and a drink in the Guildford Wetherspoons seems like a good deal to me.)

One arrived from her job on a magazine called Stylist, which I've never seen, and the younger one arrived from her Anthropology course at UCL.

So who are you going out with now? I inquired.(Her elder sister is getting married in 2010 so I know who she's going out with.)

Oh, she raved, it was still Johnny. Really liked him. Some complications.

She told me the name of his band but I've forgotten it. She showed me a photo on her mobile of a dark-haired young man wearing a sort of jacket open to show his chest.

Very nice, I said neutrally. To be honest, since my sight is failing I didn't really get a good look at him.

'He's Suggs' godson' she said. 'You know, nana, that band Madness?'

(The girls and their brother, my grandson, call me nana because it's not quite so awful as Granny or Gran or Granma. As soon as they could speak I encouraged them not to go the 'Gran' route.)

Anyway - Suggs in Madness doesn't mean anything to me and both my granddaughters laughed when I said the last pop group I could really picture was the Rolling Stones.

Their mother and their aunt, my two daughters in other words, used to sit rapt, gawping at the television screen when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards came on in the late sixties I suppose it was, and early seventies.

The drummer sat completely impassively as far as I could see, apart from whirling his arms around - and Bill Wyman was equally unmoving. I suppose they had to keep still though to contrast with Mick Jagger, leaping about and flailing his arms around. My generation thought they were pretty revolting at the time. We were mystified at our teenage daughters being so enthralled by this ugly, vulgar, loudmouthed louts. Then there was the whole black cloud cast by the death or murder of Brian Jones.

I remember telling my girls that this lot were nothing like real musicians and singers - Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald.

'They'll be here today, gone tomorrow', I said. 'The Rolling Stones won't last two minutes.'

I have a feeling I said the same about David Bowie.

Of course, over the years I got used to the Rolling Stones, and Bowie too, and I had to admit they were talented and made some good music even if it's not my sort of music. Strange how many of these rebels and youth icons move from the very edge of society right into the middle eventually. Isn't Mick Jagger a Sir? That would have been unthinkable in the early days when my teenaged daughters were so entranced by him.

Funnily enough, when I went to meet my granddauthers at Guildford Station last night, I had a quick look in the WH Smiths there and noticed an autobigraphy by Keith Richards, which I think he'd called "Life." A sign next to the books said Buy One Get One Half Price.

I can't really say why but it seemed odd to me somehow that such an old rock music rebel as Keith Richards would have his life story on a shelf in WH Smiths next to a sign saying Buy One Get One Half Price. I suppose it's because he burst on the music scene in Britain as a sort of uncontrollabe rebel and here he was in the shops, all these years later, appearing as a special offer.

Giving Up Driving - When Your Sight Starts to go Your Car Has To Go

2010-11-05T01:54:00.000-07:00

For 80 years I had really good eyesight. My children were very pleased for me that it was so good but would occasionally say it wasn't fair that they had contact lenses and reading glasses at their ages while I could still see signs way off in the distance when driving, recognise a friend walking up Guildford High Street from way off and only needed weak reading glasses in poor light.

But things change. If you stick around long enough, your sight starts to fail.

I started having a few odd visual effects around the time I turned 80 - little blue dots everywhere in the morning - and began to have trouble seeing detail in the distance. Like a car coming if I was cossing the road. I saw the optician a couple of times and my doctor referred me to en eye clinic and the people there hummed and ha-ed a bit and eventually told my doctor, after a few months, to tell me to stop driving.

When he told me he looked very apologetic. He knows I have a very active life, go out with friends a lot, visit my daughters and grandchildren, and he knew how important the car was to me.

I had to accept that he said I simply wasn't able to drive legally any more, and I don't think he was suggesting I drive illegally. When you've been driving for sixty odd years, being told you're becoming a danger to yourself and others and have to stop is upsetting. I won't say I cried a bit when I got home, but I won't say I didn't either.

After I got over the emotional side of it, the practical hassles of giving up driving started to hit me. How would I get around? I live outside Guildford and go into town to shop. I go out to see friends a lot. I needed to drive to see my kids and grandchildren. How would I get to the airport for holidays? How would I get to the pub for a pub lunch with friends?

I called one of my daughters and told her the terrible news. "The doctor says I have to give up my car. I have to stop driving."

I think she was shocked to. Both my daughters are used to mum being fairly independent. I listed all the things I wouldn't be able to do until she stopped me and said we should look at it differently.

Firstly, she told me to accept it. It was better to give up driving than to hit a car or pedestrian or be hit because I couldn't see as well as I used to. I had to agree with that. Then she reminded me I have plenty of friends who still drive and will help me get about. Next, she said I should think about the money I'd save on petrol, road tax and car insurance - and the money I'd get for the car - and I could put all that this year to taxis.

'You hate parking and you like a drink with lunch or dinner' she said. 'That means you're absolutely made for taxis. Once you get used to callings cabs you'll really like going out without bothering about the car.'

It was just a matter of getting organised, she said. Also, she said, 'You're over 80, mum - you should get some free transport - travel on the buses, and maybe there are council-run services too?'

I told her I'd work on all that. Which I did. The next day I rang her back with quite a lot of news. 'I'm not sure I've accepted giving up the car' I said 'but I've done some sums and research and here's what I've found.'

I'd calculated how much I could put towards taxis. If I sold the car, and since I'd save the road tax and insurance and payments for servicing, I'd be able to afford quite a lot of taxis. I'd rung the local council and they told me about a cheap service for oldies, 'Dial a Ride', which I could book to go substantial distances. If I wanted to go to Wisley Gardens with a friend then I could book Dial a Ride and travel there and back for a few pounds (which I have done since.) I don't know if Dial a Ride is a service local to Guildford funded by the council or if all councils provide the same sort of service as a national thing.

I'd also looked at ordering groceries and household stuff online from supermarkets for free deliveries. I live in a second floor flat so, for some time, it's been a bit of a nuisance carrying bags of shopping up the stairs. I stop on each landing to get my breath back a bit and then carry on. Maybe it was time to order online and get free home deliveries. I haven't done this yet but I know what's involved and may do it at some point

And lastly but most importantly I told my boyfriend/partner, Bryan, and all my friends. 'I have to stop driving - what will I do?' They all rallied round, as we all always do all rally round when any one of us has a problem. One would take me into Guildford shopping once a week. One would pick me up for the weekly pub quiz. Another would collect me for our dinner out every week.

I began to feel it would all work out.

It's been the best part of a year now since I gave up driving. I can't say I miss it. Sometimes it's a nuisance when you just want to hop in the car and go to the library or visit a friend. But mostly it just takes a bit of organisation. With good friends who help and with free buses, (expensive) taxis and Dial a Ride, life without the car is not nearly as awkward as I feared. I love not having to find a parking place and reverse wonkily into it. I love being able to have a glass of wine without wondering if I'm over the drink-drive limit. One friend, Rosemary, has made it a weekly outing for us both to go to Sainsburys and shop. We take our time and have a coffee and it's lovely to see her and chat as well as get the shopping done.

Today I'm going with one of my daughters to a lovely old pub in Shere, the White Horse, for lunch. I've booked a dial-a-ride vehicle and the driver will drop us off at midday and collect us after 2pm. I'll be able to share a bottle of wine with my daughter over lunch and neither of us will have to worry about drinking and driving. Since dial a ride fares are so cheap, getting to Shere and back will only cost a few pounds.

I suppose we all fear change as we get older. Sometimes you just have to accept it. I had a cataract operation which helped my sight for a while but I can't seem to find any treatment for the macular degeneration which put an end to my driving. Once I'd accepted I wouldn't drive again, I could get on with looking for alternatives that work.

Still I did laugh when I read that Tony Curtis's wife said at his funeral that he objected strongly to being made to stop driving. Right up to his death, she said, he was looking for ways to get his driving licence back!