White Haired Woman

I remember Hallowe’en, 1957. I dressed as a fairy, or a princess or something girly. Judy would have dressed as a cowboy or a ghost or, maybe, a spaceman and Jennie might have been a witch or a princess. I was 14 and it was the last time I went trick or treating.

In late August, 1958 we moved to London. My mother had been at the University of Cincinnati studying architecture and had recently graduated. She realised that, at that time, there would be no jobs for female architects in Ohio – or possibly even in the whole of America. I imagine that she talked it over with a friend who suggested she apply to the US armed forces as they had openings, even for women, to work as architects or interior designers in foreign lands. The US Navy hired her and moved her to England – with her 3 daughters – to work in their architecture department.

In London we found a lovely big apartment in a very interesting area of the city, which was full of interesting people from all over the world. We lived on the sixth floor. The block of flats was above an ice skating rink and, because of this, the flat had direct current. This meant that we couldn’t use our lovely refrigerator that we brought from the US, nor could we buy a tv or radio that could be plugged into the current! (Of course, this has nothing to do with Hallowe’en but I always think it’s a strange fact to pass on to my readers.)

It was with disbelief and sorrow that Judy, Jennie and I found out, just two months after we arrived in London, that Trick or Treat didn’t happen in England! I can’t remember if we had Hallowe’en parties at school or the TAC (a club for American teenagers which had been given a wonderful space for dancing and socialising in The Columbia Club, an American Air Force Officers’ club in Lancaster Gate in London). This meant, naturally, that once a year we couldn’t knock on neighbours’ doors and be given packets and bars of sweets – or candy, as we called it, (though 65 years of living in England have changed that; they are now ‘sweets’ and I hardly ever hear the old joke about my name and my sweetness, any longer, thank goodness!)

(I believe that in areas of outer London where some of our school mates lived, there were enough American families to have a good haul of candy once a year on the 31st of October, and that Jennie had some friends who lived in one of those areas. She may even have been lucky enough to be visiting them at Hallowe’en but Judy and I weren’t so lucky. 😢 )

After 1958, I was grown-up! At 16 I was no longer interested in such childish things – I was more into ‘boys’, an interest that I had for four or five years until I was 20 or so when I graduated to ‘men’. (Now I realise that 20 is still a child, really, but then I thought I was an adult.)

The years passed – the 60’s brought hippies and Beatles, Rolling Stones and Kinks, college, a year’s teaching and, for me, a baby. ‘Veronica’ was born in 1964 and, of course, was told all about Hallowe’en and Trick or Treat, but sadly, didn’t have any opportunity to join her neighbourhood friends collecting sweets. But, in around 1974, I was teaching for a short time in our local primary school and, on the 31st of October, we had a playtime of Trick or Treat!

I had to be the person behind the door (actually a tree!) and the sweets ran out far too quickly but the kids enjoyed themselves! As Veronica was at that school, though not in my class, she may have joined in but I can’t remember.

Time went by. We moved from West Malling to various other villages before going back to West Malling eventually, but Hallowe’en still hadn’t caught on in England. In fact we had been living in Broadstairs for 12 or 14 years before, out of the blue, we had small evening visitors on the 31st of Hallowe’en. I doubt if I had any sweets to dole out that year but I’ve been ready ever since.

Last year I bought two tins of sweets in preparation and most were gone by 9pm. This year I’ve only bought one tin because I have some wrapped chocolates from last Christmas which weren’t eaten. I’m sure they’re okay but I feel I have to try a couple just to be sure.

On Hallowe’en the lucky children who ring at my door will be greeted by an old hag with straggly white hair wearing a green hooked nose mask and a big black cloak. I must remember to make sure Lola doesn’t come to the door with me as, last year, she was so excited by the number of people ringing the bell that she sneaked into the porch with me and made a mad dash for freedom when I opened the door! Luckily, there was a daddy standing at the bottom of the driveway who scared her back to the safety of home, before she could run into the road!

When I was young I had headaches. They weren’t usually terrible but bothersome. Then, I reached my twenties and POW‼️ I realised that these weren’t just headaches, they were something else, entirely. They were headaches but with a ‘sick’ feeling at the same time and a feeling of fatigue. After a few of these, I realised they were migraines.

Two of them stick out in my mind. The first was an evening when I went to a gathering with my friend, Keith. He was an actor whom I had met at the Players Theatre in London where I worked as a sort of usher. (A story for another time). This party was somewhere in west London, possibly Kensington, and seemed to be in someone’s bed sit, as there was a huge four poster bed dominating the large room. At one end was a fireplace with a real fire and easy chairs. There was also a dining table with a few chairs. The lighting in the room that night was, thankfully, very dim because I had a bit of a headache. As the evening wore on I began to feel more and more ill and soooo tired! I lay down on the bed, leaving the others to sit and chat. Finally, Keith drove me home. It didn’t take long to get myself to bed where I fell into a deep sleep.

The other migraine which I remember from those early days was on a Saturday in, I believe June or July. My mother had a friend whose daughter was getting married and she and I were invited to the reception afterwards. The event was being held at the golf club which was a couple of miles or so from West Malling. I wasn’t feeling very well but I had promised to go there with Patty so got dressed up and drove to the golf club. The reception was lovely as were the surroundings. I, on the other hand, was not lovely at all – I felt like I was going to die or at least pass out. The headache was worse and worse, the sick feeling was constant and all I wanted to do was curl up in bed and sleep away the day – but, I had to stay there, not eating the gorgeous foods on offer and not even having a drink, in case it came straight back up! I wonder what all those other, joyous people thought of this silent, unsmiling, apparition, that day!

Strangely, I never had a migraine on a work day. My body obviously wouldn’t let me miss work. (It was the same in my forties when I used to get bronchitis after school was finished for the term!) The one time I did have a bad headache at school was on the day after a get-together of the staff at Jean’s house. I sat most of the evening of the staff ‘do’ near to the gas fire in Jean’s living room and, in the morning, blamed my headache on possible fumes. I drove to school and arrived feeling very poorly but determined to face my class of 3rd year juniors. I must have looked very rough. At playtime, Tony, the Deputy Head told me to go home. I wasn’t actually certain I could drive the three miles safely and Tony decided to drive me in his car. I was so thankful and, again, fell into bed when I reached home. How I got my car back for the following week, I have no memory.

The migraines of my twenties and thirties were, thankfully rare with months in between but, when I reached my forties, things took a strange turn! I would go for two or three months with not a hint of a migraine and then have two or three in a few weeks. It turned out that it was what is now familiarly called, the peri-menopause and, later, the menopause itself.

My hormones were to blame! (Not gas fumes or cheese or red wine.) When I worked all this out (being a brilliant diagnostician!), I went to my doctor and asked for HRT. He, blast him, turned around and said, no. Go home and take some evening primrose. I tried that; it had no effect.

Back I went back to Dr R——S——. “Please may I have HRT. These headaches are getting me down!” Again, he said no but this time he added, “Some women taking these hormones have strokes and if that happened to you, you would sue me, because you’re American and that’s what Americans do”‼️

All of the above took several years and I was fast approaching my fifties by the time he gave in. He prescribed an HRT patch which I changed every few days and I had them for several years and they worked very well! Minor headaches, yes, but no migraines. Then, my body said,” Ha ha, more trouble! From now on you will be allergic to plasters!” and I was and am.

I think I had changed doctors by that time. My new doctor, seeing the red marks on my hip, immediately gave me HRT tablets which I took for the next quite-a-few years. With all the warnings about HRT, I did try to stop taking them about seven years later but, straight away the hot flushes and migraines started again. Back to the tablets I went until I was in my early sixties when, at last, the migraines didn’t reappear several times a month when I stopped taking them – although the hot flushes still attack me occasionally, even at 80!

I almost never have a migraine nowadays. I do have headaches but they’re usually mild. And, what’s very strange, those migraine ‘auras’ that people talk about, which I had never had with a migraine, I have now.

I will be sitting, reading, eating, watching t.v., cuddling Lola and suddenly I see a small flashing light in one or other of my eyes. At first I’m not sure – is it? Isn’t it? Then, it starts to get bigger, is in both eyes, and gets in the way of anything I’m trying to see, then I realise it’s gone. It looks like the crenellations on a castle, sort of. When it’s small it’s just a couple of lines /\/\/\, then it gets bigger and, eventually turns into a circular but still crenellated shape and then just disappears! I wonder why?

I must say, though, that as bad as the migraines made me feel, I was lucky that they weren’t worse! I know that some people have them for days and can’t do anything but lie down in a darkened room until it’s gone. Mine usually came in the morning and lasted all day but the next day I would feel much better. The only thing that lasted was that words didn’t always come to me as quickly as they had before and I would say one word when meaning another. That still happens but now it’s old age!

(ADDENDUM

My father had migraines, my brother Alex has migraines, my daughter has migraines – they obviously can run in families!)

I previously mentioned the ‘heavy breather’ who used to ring our London phone number. He wasn’t doing what the many, many callers are doing nowadays, of course – he wasn’t trying to scam me into sending him money or giving him my bank details. I’m not sure what he got out of talking to me, if anything, as I neither got upset nor played along.

Barely a day goes by without at least one phone call from someone trying to make me take out insurance on my boiler, replace the insulation in my loft or ‘help’ me get rid of the virus on my computer. It’s usually easy to recognise foreign call centres, with the gap between my ‘hello’ filled with chatter in the background then a foreign-sounding voice asking for me by name (often very strangely pronounced!). I usually put on a very sad voice and tell them, “She died of the covid a week ago.” Many say sorry and hang up, most ask if I am the householder. I say no and put down the receiver by that point.

Some years ago I started answering the phone with, “Good morning. Such and such police station. How may I help you?” which was great in getting them to back away quickly. But, once, I answered in that way and the voice on the other end said, ‘Oh, sorry,” and hung up and within a few minutes I got an email from my brother-in-law in America who had been ringing to say he and my sister were coming to visit! Thank goodness for emails!

Another, quite useful way to answer (if you’re sure that it is a scam call) is to become very melodramatic and say something like, “Is it you? What have you done? There’s blood, everywhere? Oh, my God, what am I going to do?” etc. But this one takes some planning and is really exhausting to keep up for long.

Scammers and phishers and crooks don’t just phone, of course. Nowadays there are so many seemingly clever attempts at cheating one out of money on-line. It would be a miracle if my Junk folder hasn’t 5 or 10 offers of prizes from shops that I have never been to in any one day or if my In-box doesn’t have one or two emails, purporting to be from my bank or Amazon or the tax people warning me that if I don’t click on the link something terrible is going to happen. So far, I’ve not been tempted to click on the links but I can understand how it happens.

But, the most amazing and weird scamming emails I’ve recently received are the ones I am most unlikely to be taken in by. They start out with a variation of:

Approximately 3 or 4 months ago I was unfortunately for you, able to hack into your emails and from there was able to see everything that you have posted and every site you have looked at. You have very naughtily been looking at very rude adult sites.

If you don’t send me 2000£ in bitcoin to my email address in the next week I will publish to all your contacts the following photos of you pleasuring yourself – yes, I have also taken over your camera and all your contacts.

Then, they attach some pixilated photos – of an unidentifiable man pleasuring himself!

Why do these creeps think I am a man?

If I didn’t think it was so funny, I would be very upset!

Here I am, a little, old, white haired woman who, except for my youngish attitude to tech, might be scared or outraged or – if I were a man, worried about what else the scammer had seen!

When I was 4 or 5, we lived in a house on Sunset Avenue in Zanesville. I only have a few memories of that house and things that happened there – we moved to Cincinnati when I was seven. One memory I do have of that house was the telephone. It was in the kitchen, on the wall just to the right of the door from the hall. I remember that if you used that phone, you had to ask the operator for the number you wanted – there wasn’t a dial. I doubt if I ever made a call from that phone, though in my mind is a memory of making ‘joke’ calls from it. That makes no sense at all, of course, because if you phone someone to tell them that if their nose is running, they should hurry up and run after it, the operator will not only know who you rang but also who you are! I think that ‘memory’ is a conflation of my knowing the phone and my remembering hearing about my father making ‘joke’ calls when he was young.

When we moved to Cincinnati (because Mommy and Bill we’re going to go to the University for Patty to study, interior design which changed to architecture fairly quickly, and for Bill to study Business), we had two telephones, but only one line. One phone was in the living room, the other in my mother’s bedroom. The phone number was something like, University 123456. I don’t have a clue what anyone else’s number started with in that big city – ours was University because we lived not too far from the University of Cincinnati. We lived there from 1950 to 1958 with a year or so in other places during Mommy’s second divorce. (Yes, in those days, Patty was Mommy.)

She divorced her second husband, Bill, in 1955/6, the ‘quick’ way, by taking herself and her 3 daughters to Reno, (known as The Biggest Little City in the World!). For the Reno part of that time, we lived at a ‘dude ranch’ called The Whitney Guest Ranch, along with other women who were seeking to get away from their husbands and the occasional man (but we never knew why he was there). We didn’t have a phone in our ‘unit’ (two rooms with a galley kitchen and a bathroom), though there was a phone in the main house if we needed one. It didn’t play any part in my life and I don’t even know or remember where it was situated.

From Reno we went to Palm Springs for about a month to visit Mommy’s dad and his second wife (divorce runs in the family!) After that we lived in a sort of ghost town called La Quinta, which is now quite a large inhabited town, but, at that time, housed very few people. I think we might have had a phone there but we didn’t seem to have much reason to use it so, no memories. From there we went back to civilisation!

Back in Zanesville for a few months, our phone was our grandmother Ethel’s phone. I seem to remember the prefix word to the numbers in that neighbourhood, was Gladstone, but I could be wrong. Anyway, in that house we hadn’t much need (as kids) for a phone as all our friends lived within a few minutes’ walk. Then, for a short time, we lived in a small satellite area of Columbus, while Patty tried out the University of Ohio’s architecture school. We may have had a phone, probably did, but I knew no one to ring so that one isn’t in my memory at all.

We returned to Cincinnati in December of 1956. UC’s architectural school was better than Ohio U’s, obviously, and we had the same phone number for the rest of the time we lived in America. I used that phone, a lot!

I turned fourteen in April, 1957. Not only was I a teenager – I’d been a teenager for a whole year! There were suddenly masses of people I needed to ring – girl friends, of course, but mainly BOYS! And I hardly remember any of them! I remember Joe, who rang me once (I think) and a guy who had a car! called Dave, or maybe Dale. There was Bob, (who fell down his cellar stairs into a sheet of glass and needed surgery on his wrist), there was Todd who fancied me but whom I disliked, and Bill, who was a good friend.

In August, 1958 we came to England, where I have lived ever since. For 6 weeks we lived in a boarding house (I think I have written about that, before), then we lived for a whole 7 or 8 years in a ‘luxury flat’ in Bayswater. (My American readers mostly won’t understand what a luxury flat was in 1958. The ‘luxury’ was that we were furnished with hot and cold running water, had heat coming from the radiators in the cold weather, had an indoor toilet and bathroom and a gas fridge big enough to hold a pint or two of milk, a block of butter, a bit of cheese, a tray of ice cubes in the exceedingly small freezer inside the fridge and maybe, some bacon wrapped in paper. Also, there was a lift (elevator) which was necessary as our flat was on the sixth floor. These luxuries were, indeed, luxuries in the year 1958 as few people in England had any of them! Few people had central heating or hot water at the turn of a tap (faucet). In fact, we didn’t realise how luxurious having these items was until we moved again. Since this is about telephones, I won’t carry on with this particular thread but I’m sure I’ve already written about these things, or I will at a later date.

We had to wait a few months to have a line installed for our phone. The number, eventually, was BAYswater 2544, but in the interim we had to use the pay phone in the lobby of the block of flats. I had a new ‘love’ interest called Ashley who lived in outer North London somewhere. On many evenings I would take my 3 pennies down in the lift to the pay phone, put them in the slot, dial his number and, if he answered, push button A. We would talk for 10 minutes or so then say good night. (It was a very innocent love!) (If no one answered you pressed button B and got your 3d* back.)

Soon enough, Ashley disappeared into the wilds of north London and I met my next boyfriend – a school mate – who was called Mike Katz. I didn’t have to ring him as he lived around the corner in a flat in the Bayswater Road, but if I had had to ring him I could have because we finally had our phone installed!

I have mentioned this phone in a previous post when Shaun rang Lance Percival. I imagine I used the phone fairly often. My most vivid memory of that phone, though, was the phone calls which came from an anonymous ‘heavy breather’! He not only breathed heavily from time to time but talked, asking some very personal questions. I would chat away about what we had for dinner, how school was progressing etc and, after several calls, he gave up on our number.

Next was the phone we had in our flat in Chiswick, west London. I don’t remember the number but it started with 995-. My main memory of that particular phone can be found somewhere in my archives but I’ll give you the gist – it was Christmas morning, Patty and Judy had spent the night before Christmas getting plastered and Patty decided, in the morning to go upstairs to sleep, leaving me to cook (as usual).

There was a phone jack in the bedroom and our one phone was plugged in up there so, when it rang around noon on Christmas Day, I ran up the stairs to answer it. When I entered the bedroom, I found my mother on fire! Or at least, the bedclothes lying on her chest were smouldering! She had fallen asleep with a cigarette in her hand and it had fallen out of her fingers as she slept.

I started shouting at her, trying to wake her up and, at the same time, pulled the smouldering blankets off her and answered the phone. it was Walter Roberts, a family friend, wishing us a Happy Christmas! I quickly told him what was going on, hung up and kept on shouting to the dead-to-the-world Patty, who did NOT LEARN HER LESSON! (Even when she lived on her own in the early 2000’s, she fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand but, luckily, she had bedclothes that didn’t burn much, which had been given to her by the local fire department!)

We moved, after 8 or so years, to Ravenscourt Park and stayed there a year. I know we had a phone, there, because one night I tried to ring it and no one answered. This was scary as I knew that my mother, my two sisters and Veronica were there as I had left them there only an hour or so earlier, to take a friend to her home in south London. On my way back, I had a flat tire just on the edge of Clapham Common and tried to ring home to let them know I would be some time. I rang from a garage who, luckily, were able to help me change the flat tire. I was really worried, though, as I resumed my drive home. What would I find when I got there? A blazing inferno? My family disappeared? A note to say they had all rushed to hospital with my little girl?

Nope, none of those things. All of them were fine, asleep in their beds, not at all concerned that it had taken me so long to get back!

Next it was West Malling where we lived from 1972 to 1982, (the longest we lived anywhere til then!)

We had a landline with the prefix 0732, until prefixes were changed all around England, in our case by adding a one between the zero and the seven – I’m not sure why. We also had huge phone books listing private and business numbers. Nowadays I don’t think there are phone books in the UK – we can look up numbers on the internet!

When Julian and I met, we bought a house in East Malling and still had an 01732 number. We lived there for about 12 years – staying put for an even longer time! Patty wasn’t happy that I wasn’t living with her any longer as she didn’t drive and was living in a rural area but she had a phone – and she got good use out of it, ringing me sometimes three times a day!

When mobile phones came in, what a boon that was! I didn’t have one for a while as we had more important things to spend our money on but, eventually, I had Veronica’s cast off Nokia when she changed to a BlackBerry. I particularly liked having a mobile after Chloe was born and I was travelling between West Malling (yep, we’d moved back there!) and London to do grandma duty once a week or so. I loved the ability to be in touch in case of emergencies. (Once, when I was much younger and a new mum, I had left my baby at nursery and was worried (anxious mum!). I was walking down a London street on my way to work when I heard a phone ringing inside a house that I passed and was convinced that it was the nursery ringing me to report an emergency! I knew it couldn’t be real, I knew it was silly to believe that, even for a second, but I did! I’m not quite such an anxious mum, now, thank goodness!)

Now, of course, I have my very own, second-hand iPhone. I keep it charged (normally), and use it mainly for WhatsApp and texts but I forget to add money to my account! Two days ago I had to go to a dentist some miles away to have a root removed. It wasn’t bothering me but my dentist near home thought it could cause me some trouble in the short term, which would then become a long-term problem. Julian drove me there and said he would probably park near the sea and do some sketching and to ring him when I was finished.

The dentist was lovely and funny – and gave me an injection in the roof of my mouth which was neither lovely nor funny but it did dull the pain of the very quick root removal. I thanked the dentist and went and sat in the waiting room, took out my phone, and tried to ring Julian. But, I couldn’t, because there was no money on my phone. (I should have realised several days earlier when I tried to send a reply text to someone and it wouldn’t go…..and wouldn’t go…..and wouldn’t go. Being old and silly, I hadn’t even suspected the cause!)

So, I decided to add £20 to my phone. But…..the bank decided that that was the moment to check that it was really me adding money to my phone and sent me a text to make sure it was me. I had to send back a text with YES or NO. But I couldn’t send a text because I had no money on my phone😩

In the end, I left the dentist’s office, found the nearest bus stop, got on the Loop (the bus that goes around Thanet in both directions and has a stop near my house) and went home.

Except – just when I was turning the corner into Seafield Rd I realised that I didn’t have my key! As we had planned to come back together we didn’t need to take two keys.😲 Luckily, my next door neighbour has a key to my front door; unluckily, she wasn’t home. So I went to Mick&Lin’s house, borrowed a phone to ring Julian and waited with them ‘til Julian got home. It was only when I went to the loo that I looked in a mirror and saw………a woman whose mouth was drooping on the right hand side just like she was having a stroke!

All the people I passed in the road, all the people on the bus, they all saw me at my very worst! and will never know why I looked like that!

*3d – 3 pence in old money!

I just found that I’ve already written a blog bout my allotment, using some of the same phrases, some years ago! I must be getting old to have forgotten.😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫😵‍💫🥴🥴🥴🥴🥴

If you’ve read about Market Cross Cottage, you know there was no ‘garden’, just a small paved yard with a small area of soil in which was growing a wonderful passion flower up the stone wall on the left – and the little area in an outhouse which housed our only toilet during the first year or so. I bought plants and planted up pots and they were pretty for a time but, what I really wanted to do was grow vegetables.

I was walking down Swan Street one day and looked in the window of the sweet shop where there were various hand written cards offering items for sale etc. One card caught my attention. It said something like ‘Allotment. We have a large piece of land which is now unused and would suit someone eager to tidy it up and grow fruit and vegetables. Phone xxxxxxx‘

I wrote down the number, ran home and phoned. The nice woman who answered said she thought it had already been agreed for someone else to use the land but I should come and look anyway. She told me where it was – on the A20 (the main road that runs from London right the way to Folkestone and Dover, at the time) and gave me the number of the house.

So, I walked down to the A20 through Banky Meadow, turned right and after another very short walk, there was the house. It was the end house of a small terrace, next to a driveway which separated the houses from the land which was going to be ‘mine’ to work on for the next few years. It turned out that the person who was given first dibs saw it and decided there was too much work to do so, as I was next in line, it was mine to clear and to cultivate.

There was a stream between the driveway and the allotment, which was crossed by a little bridge. On the other side of the bridge was a piece of land big enough to build a couple of houses on(!) covered mainly in brambles and stinging nettle. I asked myself, “What have I done? Where do I start? What do I need?” and other basic questions.

The land had belonged to a woman who kept chickens. There was a shed, where she kept the chickens at night, maybe, but which I could use for my tools (of which I had none, yet.) One thing all chickens do is poop. Chicken poop is, apparently, quite acidic but perhaps old chicken poop loses its strength. The land seemed to be very fertile and there were weeds a-plenty! All I had to do was get rid of the weeds and replace them with veges!

Remember, I knew NOTHING about growing vegetables so the first thing I did was find someone who did know the ins and outs of growing edible plants and that person turned out to be my next door neighbour, Iris, the wife of the owner of the restaurant next door. It seems she had lived in a house with a garden earlier in her life and she had grown all sorts of lovely things. Now she lived above the restaurant and harked back to her garden days fondly. She was, I believe, in her 60’s but strong and energetic – and she had tools!

That first time we walked down to the allotment carrying spades and forks over our shoulders along with a load of black plastic bags. Iris showed me how to mark out a (potential) row, removing the top growth and then digging with the fork, removing all the roots. There was a lot of top growth and even more roots! Luckily there was A LOT of land which I would never be able to cultivate so the roots and stems and excess soil was taken, via black bag, to a spare area.

It took some weeks for us to dig the area set out for growing veges but as one row had been dug and fertilised, I sowed the first lot of seeds. (I seem to remember they were broad bean seeds). I don’t know where Iris got the energy to carry on digging – she seemed to be far more energetic and far stronger in her 60’s than I was in my 30’s! I can’t remember when she stopped coming down but I think it was after it had been dug and I was ‘just’ tending the rows by weeding and watering.

I spent all my spare time at the allotment during that first spring and summer, just waiting for all the beans, Swiss chard, tomatoes and courgettes. Some things grew well and others hardly at all. Peas were one thing that didn’t like the soil, there so I didn’t try those the second year but the Swiss chard grew and grew as did the courgettes, the runner beans and French beans – and the tomatoes!

I couldn’t grow tomatoes in a green house as I didn’t have one, but I found a type of tomato that grew on bushes. They were French Marmande tomatoes and we ended up with loads! I had to carry boxes and boxes of ripe and unripe tomatoes home and they were the best tomatoes!

Next time, I’ll tell you about the potatoes and why I didn’t grow many!

OH CRUMBS! I must be getting old!! I’ve just found that I wrote the tale about my allotment a few years ago! I even used some of the same phrases! How embarrassing!

I guess I won’t have to write about the potatoes I didn’t grow, after all, because it’s all there in black and white in a post called Thank You, Iris