As some of you might know, Mum did not have the easiest start in life. She lost her father at the age of 2 , and then shortly after that the war came, and she and her Mother were evacuated to Lancashire. In spite of all that, she did well at school, and was all set to go to college. However, due to a misunderstanding over a holiday job she had taken to help out at home, she lost her place at college. I have only recently learnt of this, and just wonder how things might have turned out if she had managed to fulfil her ambition of further education.
However, her talents were not to be suppressed for long. Having got married very young, and with 2 kids to look after, and from a bedroom in my grandparents' house, she managed to revive single handedly a dormant family business over the course of a year. This in turn became very successful over the next 2 decades, and formed the backbone of Judy and my very comfortable upbringing.
Backbone is probably a very apt description of Mum, as Judy said the other day, she formed the backbone of our family. Another comment that has been made about her, is that she was a woman before her time. She greaty believed in the independence of women, and fully encouraged Judy and any other girl to achieve their ambitions on their own terms.
I went to visit Mum last Wednesday in the chapel of rest, and on the way back, I stopped off in a coffee shop. I picked up The Times, and as I quite often do, I turned to the obituary section. The first one I read seemed to strike a chord with me in similarity of outlook that Mum had. It was of a French lady called Anne Dufourmantelle, who was a writer and philosopher, and who saw risk as an essential part of life. Ironically, she also died of a heart attack saving the lives of 2 drowning children. She succeeded. The last paragraph of the obituary seemed to me to sum up Mum's outlook on life. Let me read it to you.
" She was a feminist who led a full life, and was happy in the company of men. Like her American contemporary, Naomi Wolf, the author of the Beauty Myth, she was generally considered to be extremely attractive to the opposite sex. Unlike Wolf, however, she was not a political activist or an ideologue, and was liked, and trusted by men as much as by women, and by the right almost as much as the left".
God bless you Mum. Your spirit lives on in your granddaughters Darina and Arianna. XXXX