White Haired Woman

My mother, Patty, was an amateur antique dealer in the late 1940s, gave it up in the early 1950’s, and replaced most of her furniture with up-to-date modern pieces such as two ‘storage units’ by Charles Eames, a set of dining chairs by the same designer and other modern pieces designed by unknowns – this was because she had gone to university to study interior design, I imagine and was introduced to modern design trends. The following year she decided that she should, in fact, study architecture as she could then design the homes that would contain her interior design ideas – she was definitely a woman before her time!

Later, after we had moved to England, she went back to antiques and opened a shop in the downstairs part of our 14th century cottage home. In the evenings, the shop became our living room.

I was the appointed driver for her excursions into the countryside, looking for little antique shops that she could buy her stock from. This turned out to be a not-very-good idea as shops needed to make a profit and her buys were possibly already too expensive for her to add to ……she wasn’t a very good business person! She would buy something, bring it home, add a bit to the price she had paid, then take off that bit of profit for friends! I doubt that she made much money with her shop.

During that time, I was studying to become a teacher, then working as a teacher and had no interest in antiques at all. The one antique that I had bought was my upright piano. It sat in the shop because it would have been extremely difficult to get it upstairs. I had bought the piano because I was taking piano lessons at college.

One day a group of tourists from Mexico (I think) came into the shop and bought my piano. I assume the price was a little above the price I had paid for it! Luckily, my piano lessons had come to an end for various reasons and the money came in handy for buying food!

Patty went on buying and selling antiques but in an antique centre in London.

When I had been teaching for several years, had met and married Julian and had decided to quit teaching – a very stressful job even in those days, I took over my sister Jennie’s jewellery making. She had learned how to make rubber moulds and use resins to create lovely little items – rainbows, Christmas trees, sets of flying ducks – and she had recently married and, pregnant with her first child, she felt she should stop breathing in the fumes caused by mixing resin with catalyst.

Sadly, though I had learned well the making of the items, the decoration of each rainbow or duck or whatever, was right outside my ability. But, I had branched out into buttons using a product called Fimo and was far more successful with them. I made them to order for customers and did quite well – though hardly made enough to pay for much more than the Fimo I was using.

That endeavour lasted for a year or so while I was doing supply teaching.* Then, Julian decided to learn upholstery and I had discovered the delights of local auctions! Maidstone had two auctioneers who each had two auctions a month at the market, always on a Thursday. Julian and I would go along, he to look for restorable furniture and I to look for ‘smalls‘, the small items that I could buy – and eventually sell, hopefully.

I looked for things that I liked – small sewing implements, buttons, linens, boxes, toys, treen*, the occasional box of odd jewellery bits, etc. My first ‘shop’ was in Mill Yard Craft Centre.* It was a nice sized room which I furnished with odd bits of furniture we had at home. That little shop was useful as I learned the kinds of things people were looking for but the rent made it difficult to sustain for long.

Then, Julian had finished his course in upholstery and we decided to sell our house and buy a shop with living accommodation. After a long search we ended up buying the premises of what had been The Rose and Crown pub – directly across the High Street from the 14th century cottage where Patty had had her shop and where we had lived!

For the next seven years Julian bought and sold pieces of furniture as well as re-upholstering customers’ sofas, chairs and chaise longues, while I went to auctions, bought stuff I really liked, cleaned the bits up, did any repairs I was capable of doing and put them on sale. Along the way I met an older gentleman called Des who I think might have been a ‘runner’ – a person who buys items which he then sells for a small profit. Des’s main interest seemed to be pottery and porcelain – not something that I had much interest in but which was definitely sellable.

He would show up with a bag full of things. He would show me them, tell me a bit of the history of the makers, and tell me how much I could ask for each bit or each set. I loved learning about something new and different (to me).

Those seven years went quickly! Sadly, Ikea was the place to buy furniture, and no one wanted to restore their grandma’s old table or reupholster an old set of chairs! We were getting on a bit and decided to retire.

We sold off a lot of the things we had left – but I still have six crates of china! The demand for single decorative plates, dessert services and 18th century tea sets hasn’t yet come back but, when it does, I’ll be ready!

AFTER WORD

I loved the buying and selling – particularly the buying – and carried on, attending auctions online or sending commission bids. I started an online business (nostalgiagames.net) which lasted another seven or eight years, where I sold old games and old wooden jigsaw puzzles. I loved that bit of my business most of all, particularly the old jigsaws. If you can scroll back there are several posts about my old jigsaws with some great pictures of some of the puzzles.

• *Supply teachers in UK – substitute teachers in USA
• * Mill Yard Craft Centre – a group of old buildings behind shops in Swan Street and the High Street in West Malling. Julian’s dad, Ralph, had bought and restored this group of old buildings, then rented them out to interesting shop-keepers, mainly craft based. In the room that I had my little shop had originally been a man who made beautiful wooden toys. Other shops at the beginning were a jewellery dealer, a ceramicist, a woman selling fab jumpers she had knitted, and a little café with coffee, tea and cakes!
• *Treen – mainly small items made of wood as in the photo below

I’ve just had a look at a Google list of conspiracy theories to see if I can find one I think is believable – and I found one! It’s the one where Trump’s ear was shot in 2024.

I know nothing about high velocity bullets or rifles or, indeed, assassination attempts but I seriously doubt that Trump’s ear was hit by a bullet which went on to kill a man in the audience. The very way that Trump hit the side of his head and the strange way the ‘blood’ dribbled down his face as well as the way that the secret service men who immediately surrounded him, allowed Trump to stand up and salute with his fist, moments later – these actions all looked very fake to me.

For one thing, Trump is a big sissy when it comes to danger and the whole fist thing would be the action of a man who is brave and fearless. Secondly, Trump’s ear, which was so carefully bandaged with an enormous square of gauze, which was, somehow deemed to be unnecessary after a very short time and the ‘shot’ ear has no missing bit and no scar, but is amazingly whole and good-as-new!

When I saw it happen in a tv news report, I felt it was fake but I was horrified to believe that a man in the audience was deliberately killed to make the assassination attempt look real and that the young man who did the ‘shooting’ was killed just then, after – apparently – having been spotted a while earlier, when no one went to see why someone was on a roof with a rifle! But, the stuff that is happening in America nowadays has convinced me that Trump’s government has no trouble with killing innocent bystanders or pretend assassins to make the public believe that the attempt was real.

I can think of many authors I would like to have dinner with and can’t possibly narrow it down to one, so I’ll have to mention a few.

I’ll start with the mystery story author, Elizabeth George. I first read one of her books back in the 90s, I believe. The one that pops into my mind as I sit here writing is the one in which I recognised the setting as being the area I was living in.

In the book there is a milkman called Ernie and he is delivering milk to people in a house in the rural area between West and East Malling, though it doesn’t actually say that – I recognised it as I read!

If you’ve read about my aphantasia, you’ll know that I don’t have pictures in my head so while I was reading I wasn’t picturing the road Ernie was driving his milk cart on and yet it was immediately recognisable to me! And, too, Ernie was our milkman!

I would like to chat with Elizabeth about her characters, about her obviously deep research – she’s not a born and bred English woman but comes from America, so she must have come to Kent and used the same roads I used to drive on and met some of the same people I knew.

When I had my antiques shop in the High Street, in West Malling, I used to sit and read while waiting for customers – some days were v.e.r.y slow. One such day a woman I recognised came into the shop and caught me with my head in one of Elizabeth’s books. She immediately told me that she was a friend of the author and that EG visited her in East Malling often! She said that next time EG was visiting, she’d bring her into the shop. I was thrilled!

I brought several of my EG books and stood them in the book case in the shop, each marked inside with, ‘Not For Sale’, just in case someone wanted to buy them.

Elizabeth George and her friend from East Malling came into the shop – when I was away (at an auction? In London? I can’t remember.) When I was next in the shop, my EG books were autographed! I was happy about that but sad to have missed the author.*

Another author I’d like to join me for a meal is MW Craven, who writes the books about Washington Poe. Until a minute ago I didn’t know whether MW is a woman or a man. Reading some books, it’s easy to guess the sex of the author even if you haven’t Googled their name, but Mike Craven is excellent at writing both male and female characters and I hadn’t a clue.

My first Washington Poe book started out slowly and it was one of those books you think (well, I do), “I might just put this book to one side,” but I persevered and WOW! Such a good story!

After the first, I devoured several more then had to wait a little as I had no others. I’ve now caught up with the available Poe stories and am awaiting the newest.

I’d like to talk to Mike to ask him how he comes up with the plots of his novels and where his characters come from. I think the ‘person’ he writes about that I like best is Tilly. She is very unlike me! She’s exceedingly intelligent. She is very organised. She is very good at tech (computers, phones etc) She can hack the government’s most secret internet sites but never uses them for bad reasons and can even join the internet where there’s no wifi!Even getting into the ‘dark net’. (Does such a thing actually exist?)

I’ll leave out all of my other fave authors of mysteries and thrillers and go to the author I’ve been reading for longest, Barbara Kingsolver.

The first books of hers I read were amusing and the characters were so recognisable – some of them could have been me. Then I read The Poisonwood Bible. It’s definitely not the kind of book I had read before but that didn’t stop me. The writing is clear, the characters lifelike, their troubles are real. After I read that, if anyone asked me, “what’s your favourite book?” I would say The Poisonwood Bible.

Since then I’ve read many more of her books. There’s one about Monarch butterflies and their annual mass migration, there’s the latest I’ve read which is an excellent story set in the 20th and 21st centuries but mirroring the Dickens’ story of David Copperfield, and my new favourite novel – The Lacuna.

The story in The Lacuna starts with a young man diving on into a lake in Mexico and from there follows his life and those of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. The book was a wonderful way of teaching me about historical figures whose names I knew but had no idea of them as whole people.

I can heartily recommend books by the three authors I’ve mentioned above. There are so many more whose books I’ve read and loved and whose newest books I immediately snap up! I’ve got so many books (real ones and ebooks) that I haven’t read yet that I’ll have to stay alive for at least another ten to twenty years! And, there are the books I haven’t read but know that I should which would probably use up most of those years just on their own.

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*One day, coming off a train at West Malling Station, I went through the ticket office and passed the acquaintance from East Malling, along with Elizabeth George! The two were rushing for the train that I had come in on and didn’t even notice me😢

I’ve mentioned, once or twice, that I’m now 83 – quite a long life, so far, really. If I, in April 2043, could send myself a sentence, it would be, “You made it!” Or rather, “I made it!”

I suppose a message from 2033 could say! “Hey, I got this far!”

A message from 2027 could say, “So far, so good!”

But, if I received any one of those messages, it might make me think, “Well, I don’t need to take care crossing the road any longer,” or “Now I can stop taking my blood pressure meds or statins!”

Then, maybe, the message I received might just disappear! Oh, no!

….. ten minutes before I opened my whitehairedwoman site this morning, I remembered an old quote – from my mother. I must thank Jennie, my sister who is five years younger than I, who answered my plea five minutes ago – I remembered the quote and was able to connect it with my family‘s teasing, but not who it teased or why.

I can’t say that it’s my favourite quote, since it has taken all this time to remember it – it must be almost fifty years and maybe more, since it was used……

Quotes are not something I think about very often. I always had difficulty remembering bits of books to use as quotes when doing exams or even to use in essays when preparing for exams.

One that I remember, sitting here in my conservatory, goes something like: “I cannot tell a lie. I chopped down the cherry tree,” which was supposedly said by a young George Washington. I suppose that was quoted to young Americans in elementary school back in the 50s in the hopes that we wouldn’t lie about naughty things we had done. I’m not sure it worked! I, personally, never lie,(!) but other people of my generation are still blatantly lying, even in public! (I’ll let you decide about whom I speak, dear reader.)

I’ve just looked at Google to see some other famous quotes and it was very helpful. You, too, can go there and type famous quotes into the search box – up will pop ten or twenty such as

1 To be or not to be

2 I think, therefore I am

3 I have a dream

4 The only thing to fear is fear itself

5 That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind

But I did not find the teasing quote which was used, mostly by my mother, when asked, “What have you got me for Christmas, mommy?” And her answer (the quote I was talking about at the beginning) –

OLD MOULDY CHEESE!

Okay – well, I have lived for slightly more than 83 years, now (though it’s not ‘forever!) so have heard a great many songs in that vast time! I’m thinking a list of songs with a note about why I remember it (if I know why) will suffice.

1. She has freckles on her BUT she is nice – it might have been BUTT though, which Judy and I preferred way back when we were VERY young.
2. How much is that Doggie in the Window – we thought maybe, if we sang it often enough, mommy would get us a dog. It didn’t work.
3. That’s Amore – the good bit was the pizza pie hitting you in the eye!
4. We are Siamese if You please, (from Lady and the Tramp). We had a family of Siamese cats so it made sense.
5. Summertime – I can’t remember who sang it when I heard it first. I just loved the idea of Daddy being rich and Momma, good looking. I have heard it many times now and have loved every different singer singing it!
6. The Big Rock Candy Mountain – I think by Burl Ives. What’s not to love and remember about a mountain of candy (but not a mountain of Candy!)
7. Blue Moon – the first version I heard of this song (as far as I remember, was in the late 50s or early 60s and a modern take on the older song. I quite like both.

8. Blue Suede Shoes – I had to get Elvis in here, somewhere!

9. It’s All in The Game – sung by Tommy Edwards. I was one of those teen age girls that loved the idea of LOVE! (And me being the person who was loved!)

10. Only Make Believe – sung by Conway Twitty. (As no. 9)

11. Georgia on My Mind – Ray Charles. Loved his voice!

12. Blueberry Hill – Fats Domino. I loved the sad love story.

13. Could be any one of 100 different American 50s/early 60s and then came – THE BEATLES and so many British singers/groups.

I’m stopping here. I’ve loved all sorts of ‘pop’ songs, ‘rock’ songs, ‘folk’ songs by a long list of singers which I listened to and decided, “ah, that is my favourite!” And have forgotten.

One thing that does not get better with age – at least quite old age – is hair! When I was very, very young I had pretty blond hair which had no ‘body’ at all. My mum would put a little ribbon round a small strand of hair and five minutes later the ribbon would be lost! As I grew older (eight, ten years old) my hair had turned into a strange mixture of colours – maybe you could call it hazel. It was dead straight but there was a lot of it. As I got older (fifteen, eighteen) I tried to curl it – the curls would straighten out in around ten minutes. I even permed it once or twice – with a home perm. Sadly, I was always too impatient to wait for the perm actually to work!

Later in my life, when I could afford it, I would take myself off to the hairdresser and have a “curly perm“ and then I would have – at last – curly hair! I have quite fast growing hair, even now and my curly perm would grow out fairly soon so that I would have longish hair with curly-ish bottoms. I loved it!

Perms became fairly expensive but while I was a teacher I could still afford one every so often. I had a perm when Julian first saw me. I think that was what he liked when he glimpsed me standing behind the bar of the wine bar his dad owned. He often tells me that he thought I looked like Polly in Fawlty Towers. I don’t, really – and especially I don’t when I don’t have curly hair!

I gave up full time teaching in my late 40’s and shortly thereafter my hair turned a mixture of hazel and grey. That was okay! I could grow it out and wear it up or have it cut short. I didn’t mind it at all. At some point in my 60’s I realised that I had grey hair and that I looked my age!

I was going into Ramsgate for an appointment with my acupuncturist and decided to go by bus. I waited, the bus came along, I stepped up onto the bus and asked for the price to Ramsgate: “Don’t you have a bus pass?”asked the driver.

For those of you who were born in the late ‘fifties onward, a bus pass is a ‘benefit’ given to people when we reach the age of 60. [The government has now changed the pension age to 65, and shortly to 67 and the bus pass is for pensioners]. Anyway, I was amazed that the driver thought I had reached 60! (I was 63.) People who saw me had always underestimated my age. When I was 20, I was annoyed. When I was 40, I was pleased!

Of course, it was the grey/white hair that gave it away! Nonetheless, my hair was strong and thick. Sometimes I grew it out and wore it up, sometimes I would have it cut really short.

Now I am 83. A parting in my hair, instead of being like a country lane, is like a motorway! When I comb my hair so many hairs are caught in the comb! I hate to think how many are going down the drain when I wash my hair in the shower! Each individual hair is about half as thick as it used to be, too.

Jennie gave me some shampoo and a bottle of a potion that are supposed to help my hair start growing in the follicles that have given up, for my birthday. I’m not able to use it every time I wash my hair as I have a problem with something I think is dandruff – it’s definitely little white flakes, anyway.

So, hair is one thing that doesn’t get better with age. I could go on, mentioning skin, neck, boobs, upper arms, tummy, feet and body in general which also starts down hill with age. Then there are sight and hearing – neither of which is as good as it was just a few years ago. And all those strange little growths here and there! And the fact that I can’t drink coffee after about 1 in the afternoon……….

……… I suppose there aren’t a great many things that get better with age if you’re talking about the body but at least old age is preferable to the alternative.

When I meet someone who is 70, from my standpoint I can truthfully say, “That’s not old!”

I’m not certain that I have a ‘favourite’ historical figure – there are quite a few people I would like to have met. It would have been interesting to meet the young Mary, the mother of Jesus. How would she have felt being pregnant and unmarried? Did she realise that she had been chosen to give birth to someone who would have followers for over 2000 years? Or was she just a young woman who got pregnant and a whole religion was somehow built around her fatherless baby?

It would, of course, be interesting to meet her son at some point to find out if he was as ‘good’ as the men who wrote about his life made out. Did he really bring alive a man who had been dead, walk on water and turn a flagon of water into wine?

Today I read about a young Cherokee who had lived among the settlers in America. He was fascinated by the fact that a man could make marks on a paper and the marks could tell someone else what the man wanted to tell him. He knew that the native Americans did not have a way of writing down their words so figured out a list of 85 symbols which stood for the syllables of the Cherokee language. At first the elders thought he was performing some sort of witchcraft but he was able to show them that the marks he made could be understood by others when he wrote a message to his daughter and she was able to tell them what it said. I think he would have been a very interesting man to have known.

Leonardo da Vinci, Gandhi, Amelia Earhart, Cleopatra, Helen Keller, Theodore Roosevelt, JFK, Abe Lincoln, Paul Revere, Prince, – I could carry on writing down names of favourites and finding good reasons to speak to them, but I will have left out just as many because I can’t think of all the interesting people that I have learned about. (And, if it could be just one, I’ll go for Prince!)

When I was 21, I was pregnant and unmarried. Nowadays, that is something that seems to happen in America, in England and in other countries and few, if any, people are upset by this state of affairs.

But, I was 21 in 1964 and if I had lived anywhere else, I would probably not have been able to have my baby or I would have had to get married to its father. I wanted the baby and had no desire to marry just because I was pregnant.

London and Londoners seem to have been at the forefront of a more liberal England. People were shocked and then ‘ho hum, who cares?’

My mother was horrified. As I have previously said, my mother’s answers to any problem was to get drunk and stay that way for a few days. I don’t remember what she drank or how long she stayed drunk but, when she was once again sober, her first thought was that I should have an abortion.

Abortion was illegal in the UK in 1964, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. One of my friends, Jane, had an abortion several years earlier which went ‘bad’! The abortion was carried out in an office somewhere by a man who may or may not have had medical qualifications but Jane could easily have died. She was pregnant with twins – a fact which was unknown at the time. When she arrived at the ‘office’, Jane had some sort of procedure and was told that the ‘doctor’ had finished and that after several hours, the ‘baby will come away’. Then she was taken to a friend’s flat to wait.

It was late when she arrived. She got into bed and, after a while, started having contractions and then haemorrhaging. After several more hours, her friend had become really worried about the amount of blood she was losing and rang the ‘doctor’. He and an assistant came to check. They seemed to think everything was fine – and hopped into the other bed in the room for some ‘hanky panky’ (you can use your imagination to work out what I mean!)

After another few hours, Jane was still not recovering so the ‘doctor’ said that he and his assistant would take her to their ‘clinic’. Jane’s friend refused to let them take her away fearing that they would take her somewhere and abandon her to her fate. The ‘doctor’ and his aide left in a hurry.

Jane’s friend rang Jane’s family doctor and told her what was happening. Luckily, the doctor came at once, still very early in the morning, and took Jane to a hospital where she was treated by real doctors.

Knowing all this, Patty enquired among her friends and acquaintances and found a doctor who performed abortions safely. She made an appointment to see him and then took me to his office one evening. I didn’t complain or refuse to go as going against Patty led to long lasting arguments.

The doctor was a very nice older man. He sat and listened to my mother and asked me a few questions, then asked Patty to wait in the ante-room while he examined me. As soon as she was out of the room, I told the doctor that I didn’t want an abortion and he was happy to concoct a small lie so that I left the office with my child still safely inside me. He told Patty that it was too late in the term to carry out an abortion, safely!

That evening, Patty made up her mind that she would be happy to become a grandmother in several months’ time.

Well, reader, I had my baby in the following November. By the time I got back home after her birth, Patty and my sister, Judy, had phoned every one of our friends to tell them that, “🎶🎶 We have a little baby🎶🎶.”

Do I regret having my lovely daughter? Not for one minute! Was it a risky decision to have her? I suppose it could have made a difference but I was always willing to accept those risks. I would have hated, though, if it was risky for her and I can only thank the universe that she was born at a time when few people, if any, blame a child for what her mother did before that child was born.

She has brought nothing but pride and happiness to me and to her grandmother, her aunties and to many, many people in my life and in hers.

(My beautiful girl doesn’t want to be identifiable so I haven’t given her name. But, she has asked me to point out that it was my choice to have her. If I had not envisaged having a baby at 21, before I had begun a career in teaching or whatever, I would like to have had the choice to have an abortion. Thankfully, within a few years, that choice would have been legalised in the UK.)