White Haired Woman

I think that the coolest thing I have ever found was the nerve to say no to my very controlling mother!

She wasn’t always so bad. When I was a child (between five and ten or so) we, Judy and I, were allowed to play in the neighbourhood. From my birth until I was 7 plus, we lived in Zanesville and most people knew us. We were allowed to go visiting friends down at the end of the street or across the road and I never heard her say, “Don’t go there.”

The first time she forbade us doing something was when my sister Judy was told not to ride her bike in the road because of the potential traffic – in 1950 there were few cars in the roads around us and fewer trucks (which Judy had trouble saying – the sound tr came out as f !). A friend or neighbour happened to see Judy riding her bike in a nearby road and nearly being hit by a truck. Not only did Judy have her bike removed, so did I! I was not pleased, but I understood. (We were never again to have bikes!)

We moved to Cincinnati when I was seven and life went on much as before. Judy and I walked ourselves to school and home again every day. I took myself to church on Sundays (not because I was religious but I wanted to sing in the choir). I would often go to visit my friend Carol who had a player piano with quite a few rolls of music. We used to put these rolls on and sing along. Our favourite was a song about a vagabond. After a while, Carol’s mum must have been sick of hearing us sing about vagabonds as we were forbidden to play the song again! (I wish I could remember that song but it is gone.)

Judy was a rebel. She once skipped school with her friend, Cathy. When questioned about it, Judy blamed it all on Cathy and I imagine Cathy blamed it all on Judy. After that, Judy had to stay with me during recess and before and after school so Patty knew where Judy was. (She trusted that I would not skip school – which I wouldn’t!)

Patty’s marriage wasn’t happy. We all knew that her husband, Bill, drank too much beer and was often in a bad mood, shouting and swearing and threatening. He often punished Judy, partly because she was a rebel but mainly I believe, because she didn’t like him and let him know it.

One day Patty decided she’d had enough and we went off to Reno where divorces were quicker to get. I’ve written about this before – see various other posts including ‘Where Did She Come From part one’ and ‘The Super Chief.’

After that, in 1958, something terrible happened in Patty’s life – the death of a man that Patty loved very much. That tragedy changed Patty. She began drinking a lot. She was in the last year of her degree in architecture and desperately wanted to finish it but had difficulty concentrating. This was when she started to rely on me, a 14 year old, to plan and cook meals – not entirely but enough to make me become the adult and herself the child from time to time. (Patty was 36)

She did finish her degree and got a job as a civilian architect with the US Navy, which brought us to England. We went to school at the American Air Force base in Bushy Park, west of London. We got to school and back by school bus which was usually quite fun. After two years we went to the crammers I have written about in ‘Where Does She Come From’ part three.

Patty was always happy if my friends came round to the flat but she was not always happy when I went out. I would have to tell her exactly where I was going, with whom and what time I’d be back. That’s okay for a fourteen or fifteen year old’s mother to ask but she kept demanding to know these things when I was eighteen or nineteen.

Once I went out with friends, including Shaun, a girl I had known for some years whom I had met at school. We went to a party in Crouch End, an area of North London. Why I rang Patty, I don’t know, but when I told her where I was and that I didn’t know the name of the person who was having the party, she demanded I come home straight away. She knew I was with friends whom she knew, but that made no difference.

Most young people would have refused; I went home. I was so conditioned by then, that I knew things would be worse if I didn’t. So, if I went to a party where I didn’t know the host, I just didn’t mention it any longer.

It didn’t get any easier when I was in my twenties, or my thirties! When we lived in West Malling, I hardly went out in the evening and if I did it was usually with members of my family. Patty was getting more demanding, though.

If she wanted to go around the corner to a dress shop (literally less than a hundred steps away from our front door) she would ask me to go with her. If she wanted a half bottle of whiskey or brandy or even sherry, she’d ask me to go to the off-licence* which was next door! I was her taxi driver, her personal shopper, her financial backer.

One day she asked me to go to the chemist to get her a bottle of a medicine called ‘Dr Collis Brown’. I went to the chemist, as I had before, and asked at the special chemist counter (where one handed in prescriptions) for a bottle of Dr Collis Brown. The chemist looked at me, standing in front of a few others who were waiting to see him, then said, “No. I won’t sell any more to you. You must be an addict!” and he showed me the place in his ‘Poisons Book’ where I had signed for Dr CB several times in the past.

I explained that it wasn’t for me but for my mother. He continued to refuse. Embarrassed, I turned away from the counter and went home. I didn’t set foot in that shop again until years later.

Another very embarrassing moment occurred one evening. I had a ‘date’, an almost unique experience when I lived in West Malling. He was, I seem to remember, a carpenter and I have no memory of how or where we met.

Patty had been drinking through the early part of the evening but seemed to be pleased that I was going out with a man. I was upstairs putting on the last bit of make-up when there was a knock at the door. Judy answered it, then called up the stairs for me. As I was walking down the stairs, Patty shouted out, “Remember, no f**king on a first date!”

Happily, I met Julian not many months after that. Still, I was asked to do shopping, accompany Patty to the doctor, etc until Julian and I bought a house in East Malling (a mile or so away from Patty’s house). She was not happy with my moving out. She had come to depend on a large share of my teacher’s salary to pay the bills and buy things. So, she decided to sell her cottage on the High Street and move to a small house in a terrace on a country road nearby.

In the time we were living apart, Patty would ring me three or four times a day! I had a few months’ relief when she went to America to visit her mother, then she and Judy came back and the telephone calls started again. Often, she would ring about five o’clock in the evening and ask me to pop into West Malling to get her a bottle of whiskey or whatever. One evening I said no. Patty argued but I was firm.

After that, Patty would ring the taxi company and ask them to pick up whatever she wanted and bring it to her. They didn’t mind; they made money. And I breathed a sigh of relief!

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

(I loved my mother when I was young. I was always proud of how young and ‘with it’ she was. I know that my having a baby without being married was a terrible worry for her, but we survived that. I came to the conclusion some years ago, that Patty really shouldn’t have had children. Her life could have been so rich if she had become an artist or if she had been born 50 years later when women were not always expected to get married and have children. Her upbringing in a wealthy family did not enable her to be a mother of three living on only a little money.

As we both grew older, I found it more and more impossible to ‘forgive’ Patty. Underneath, I hope I still loved her but it wasn’t like when I was a kid. As I get older, I still don’t understand some of the things she did. I’m just glad that I am not an alcoholic like I’m certain she was. We are not, definitely, our parents and that’s something that pleases ‘Veronica’!)

*Off licence – a place to buy alcoholic drinks to take away

Sitting here in 2025 and thinking about famous or infamous people I’ve known, I’ve previously written about the few ‘famous’ people I’ve met, but my memory tells me there’s no one in the infamous line – except for one fleeting introduction to a young man who turned up for the evening in the flat that I was visiting with my boyfriend at the time.

The word ‘Infamy’ would suggest that all the readers, at least the ones in England, would know of this gentleman, but I should imagine that very few will recognise the name of Aloysious ‘Lucky’ Gordon.

Mr Gordon was a friend of the much more infamous young woman called Christine Keeler. Put her name into Google and you may find an article or two about how she was at the heart of ‘The Profumo Affair’ in 1963 which caused embarrassment to the Conservative government.

If you are at all interested in these characters, do have a look online to find out more about them and the whole scandal that had London aghast in 1962/1963!

*(Thanks to Frank Muir and Dennis Norden; also Kenneth Williams. You can look this up too!)

I’m 82 and a half years old. If I live for those three years, I will be 85 and a half.

I can’t really imagine that life will be much different apart from the fact that I might not be alive.

Of course, if Mr Putin should happen to decide to bomb the UK, I might be under that bomb or another one. Not a lot to look forward to.

If the present Russian ‘Tsar’ doesn’t bomb the UK, maybe I will carry on living at the seaside and eating out once a week, ordering food, cooking food, walking Lola (who will be 12 years old – not so old for a small dog like she is) and enjoying the fact that I am still alive!

It’s really difficult to predict what one’s life will be like in three years when one is as old as I am.

Well, I could try sky-diving – but I’m not going to.

I could try skate-boarding – but I’m not going to do that either.

Pastry making?

Milking cows?

Learning to use AI?

Learning to speak Welsh (or Finnish or Greek?)

Training for a job in banking?

Become a cobbler or a milliner?

Reading James Joyce?

Become a watch-maker?

Ski? Shoot? Play poker for big money?

Nope!

I haven’t got to my age doing any of those and I don’t know why I should do them now!

(Though I would like to have a go on a skate-board but value my unbroken bones too much.

CRY!

Then I’d work out how to replace at least some of it.

At my age, I couldn’t go back to work.

On the other hand, my needs would be simple – something to eat, a few clothes to wear, a bed, several sheets, a pillow and pillow cases, a duvet and cover, something to read, glasses to see with, fingernail clippers to clip my nails, shoes, face cream, tooth brush, toothpaste, a water flosser, a comb and a brush, underwear and socks, a nightie or some pyjamas, a bag of some sort, a phone, some Gaviscon for when I get indigestion, my tablets, (amitriptyline, statins, blood pressure), paracetamol for headaches, an iPad, some paints, brushes and canvases, a palette, some painting knives, a kitchen scale so I don’t eat too much of the things that make me grow where I shouldn’t, a bathroom scale to make sure I haven’t been eating too much of the stuff I mustn’t, and, oh, crap, I forgot, I’d need a home to store it all and act as shelter……… I guess my needs wouldn’t be simple at all!

I must make sure I don’t lose all my possessions!

I spend a lot of time using my iPad (a smaller and more personal computer.) I really cannot imagine my life without it! I look up recipes, search for the reason behind new aches and pains, keep in touch with relatives abroad and those friends of mine who have email. I also search for information about films and tv programmes I’ve watched – who played which part? (Ah, yes, I thought it was him! Wasn’t he handsome back then!) or for ‘Whatever happened to so and so?’

It seems amazing to me that I spent the first 55 or 60 years of my life with no internet, no email, and no way of looking up some information that wasn’t in the 1950’s version of the Encyclopedia Britannica Jr. which I still had. Yes, I could go down the road to the library, if it was during open hours but I might forget to bother by the time I got there!

Nowadays, many of my evenings at home are spent watching things on my iPad that I missed seeing when they were originally on tv or at the cinema. Just at the moment I am re-watching the 7 Up series. If you are not in Great Britain, you won’t have seen it. It started in 1964 when a tv company decided to see whether one could look at children at the age of 7 and ‘see’ what they would be like later on in life.

The programme followed 14 children and interviewed them at the age of 7, 14, 21, 28, 35, 42, 56 and 63. I had missed the most recent programmes and was quite keen to see what had happened to those people. I’ve watched the first 2 of the 3 in the series and will likely watch the third later this evening.

Without a computer, my life would be very different and I’m glad to say that I don’t know what it would look like!

I like music. I like almost every kind of music. After 82 years of listening to music, I have gone from Elvis Presley to Elgar and Ricky Nelson to Rachmaninov – and lots of in-between music.

The first record I bought, a 45 for those who know their vinyl, was Jailhouse Rock. How was I to know that leaving it in the back of the car on that shelf next to the rear window, wasn’t a good idea?

I also bought Why do Fools Fall in Love by Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers. By the time I left America I had around 40 or 50 45s and I added a few more in the next few years. One of my favourites was Conway Twitty’s It’s Only Make Believe and another was Jackie Wilson.

In my 20s I was quite busy being a mum but I took the time to listen to music on the radio and watch Top of the Pops. I was quite fond of The Beatles, loved The Rolling Stones and enjoyed many of the pop songs of the 60’s and 70’s.

Then, I heard some Mozart! At every chance I got, I listened to Mozart concertos and symphonies and also some Vivaldi, and other, lesser known Baroque composers. At some point during the 90s, a new station on the radio brought me loads more classical music: – Classic fm. I listened to it all day and heard so much more classical music. It became difficult to say who my favourite composer was. Sometimes it was Hummel, occasionally Buxtehude!

At the same time as this new (old) music was educating me in new (to me) sounds, I had, first a teen-age daughter who watched the 80s version of Top of the Pops, introducing me to Boy George, Soft Cell, The Police, Phil Collins and more, then in the mid 90s a new grandchild who, within a few years was introducing me to Eminem, Avril Lavigne and Nelly.

I’ve forgotten most of those songs and their singers now and hardly ever listen to whatever followed the term ‘pop‘. Occasionally I hear something new on the radio which I add to my ‘must listen out for’ list which, over the last 20 or so years, has included Paloma Faith, Duffy, Adele, Alicia Keys also Gnarls Barclay, Pink, Passenger, and loads more. I’ve bought CDs and now I stream music from Amazon, but often I sit in complete silence – which I enjoy.

I would hate not to have music of all kinds in my life (with a few exceptions!) but I would also hate to have to listen to it 24 hours a day! I like quiet, I like solitude, but I also like to dance! and, when I hear some music I think I can dance to, I go into the kitchen, where nobody can see me and pretend that I am young and dance – until I have to sit down, which sadly isn’t too long, nowadays.

When I was a sixteen year old girl, living in London and going to school at the USAF base in Bushey Park, I had three month long summer holidays. Between my sophomore and junior years I joined a few other American students and worked for several weeks at the International Food Fair which took place in the Olympia Exhibition Halls.

There were, I think, different areas for different nationalities but the only one I can remember is the American stands so, maybe it was only the American Food Fair – it’s so long ago I just can’t remember for sure. I was lucky enough (I thought) to be working on the Betty Crocker stand.

It was our job to stand behind the counter on a stage and mix a cake or other dessert from a packet of a Betty Crocker cake mix, showing how easy it is to make these fantastic items.

One morning, I decided to make a packet of Date Bars. This was an item that I had made before at home several times – and I always enjoyed trying the finished article! So, I introduced the mix, showing the two bags inside the box. One of the bags, the largest, contained the base mix which was oatie and delicious.

To the contents of the bag, I imagine I had to add some melted butter or margerine, then to press half the mixture into the cake tin. When that was done, I had to add, perhaps warm water – I just don’t remember – to the smaller bag of the pair, which was an amount of dates, probably cut up into tiny pieces.

The trouble was that, at the time, on that particular day, I didn’t remember, either! I remember adding something to the date mix but it wasn’t the right thing or it wasn’t enough of the right thing! There I stood, in front of quite a large audience, supposedly showing them how easy this mix was to make and it was anything but easy. The date mix was supposed to be spread over the base but it wouldn’t spread and it wouldn’t come off the spoon I was using to pick it up and it wouldn’t come off my fingers and I just kept trying and trying and……. finally had to admit to all the people standing there, that I had done something wrong somewhere along the way.

I think I must have been very close to tears! I have forgotten how I got off that stage into the area where the audience couldn’t see me. I’m not certain that I went back on that stage again, though I probably did, as the job paid quite well and, anyway, the same people wouldn’t pay to come and see me do it again. Would they?