love and go on

Vicky Florence
born August 1930















Born Vera Florence,
but her school friends decided Vicky was much better, and the nickname stuck.


Offered a place at the grammar school, but the technical college would
give better job prospects for a working class East end london girl.

After london and school in the blitz, she left home at 16 to work in the city.

She was briefly evacuated but the family couldn't bear to be apart and she came home again after 2 weeks)















Met my father at a dance.
Married, September 1951

We used to wear her wedding dress for dressing up when we were kids.

It was gorgeous. A halterneck dress and jacket with lots of little fabric buttons which i always loved.

My dad turned out all our dressing up clothes - when we moved i think. :o(

but i still have a little bit of the fabric.

And her wax orange blossom, which i wore for my own wedding.







3 children within 3 years. (I'm the little one)


























When we were all very small, she went back to college to do A levels, then a teaching qualification.
This is a school photo. She taught infants and juniors for nearly 15 years and was a very much loved teacher. She also did some adult literacy work.








In the 1970's and 1980's mum and dad organised and led long distance walking holidays for young people in the lake district, yorkshire, west country....

making friends (some of whom are still good friends)

and offered hospitality at home to international students and their families ...


more friends







After "retirement" they had a guest house in Devon, where lots of guests came back - and again - and became good friends.

Mum had a gift for hospitality, welcome, caring and wonderfully good food.

In "proper" retirement in Sussex, she went to french and english literature classes, regularly did creche in their local church, got involved in hospital visiting.....

wrote lots and lots of letters, cards, began emailing.... would have loved blogging if she'd not discovered it too late.























This last picture was Christmas 2006, a wonderful family christmas which we had thought we'd have to face and get through without her.

She said on that boxing day morning that she woke up "brimful of joy".

























Wasn't she beautiful?
and so much more beautiful on the inside.


May 2007 we said goodbye to mum at a small family funeral which was carefully planned by mum and dad months earlier. Having thought she had much less time with us than the year she actually had, mum had been very interested in sorting out all the details of her funeral and thanksgiving service.








She was brought home in the morning.

We decorated her casket with flowers from all our gardens.

That wasn't in the original plan - the undertakers suggested it - and it was wonderful. She would have loved it so.

Dad asked us to take some photos so that we could share them with others who loved mum - and though it felt a bit odd, I'm so glad to have these. It was a heart-wrenching and very beautiful ritual to share.

























Roses, clematis, ivy, wisteria, dog daisies, cow parsley (from the hedgerows down the lane), london pride, philadelphus, lilacs, cornflowers, wallflowers.

The service was at home.


19 of us, intimate and comfortable around mum and dads lounge.


We listened to some favourite music they had chosen.

Listened to some readings, poems and prayers.

Then we buried mum in a little country cemetary - just a little field really, with a tumbled down shed in one corner, and with these bluebell woods just over the road.










This is one of the poems which was read, and its so very much my mum, she had such a gift for being positive and outgoing, for almost unfailing patience and kindness.

I sometimes get quite annoyed with myself, with the instinct I inherited from her, and the habit I learned from her, of being positive - seeing the good in situations, looking on the bright side, glass half full, blah blah blah. Don't you just sometimes want to be miserable?

But i do know that its one of the most precious legacies i have from her.



This poem (by David Harkins) so much expresses what she was like, and so absolutely what she'd want for us:

You can shed tears that she is gone
or you can smile because she has lived.
You can close your eyes and pray that she'll come back
or you can open your eyes and see all that she has left.
Your heart can be empty because you can't see her
or you can be full of love you shared.
You can turn your back on tomorrow and live yesterday
or you can be happy for tomorrow because of yesterday.
You can remember her and only that she's gone
or you can cherish her memory and let it live on.
You can cry and close your mind, be empty and turn your back
Or you can do what she'd want; smile, open your eyes, love and go on.





This Saturday other family and friends from over the years, and around the country - and some from overseas - will be coming to give thanks for mum's life - for her, everything she was. And to say goodbye. She carefully planned it all with dad, chose the songs and hymns and readings; invited friends from her life to share memories of her.

At the moment I am absolutely dreading it.

I think it will be overwhelming, so many people. And painfully final. Another goodbye and letting go. And recognising that she belonged to other people, that so many people loved her makes it worse as well as better.



She was very concerned that the catering would be good.

We will have to keep an eye on the sandwiches - that they are arranged just the way she would have wanted. She cared about the little things.

spring greens

ok, photos with which i promised to bore you, from wonderfully green suffolk.

























































































































































































































Reflecting on this post,
and choosing pictures,
i realised that I came back from Ipswich
with an interesting collection of pics - with two particular
types of shot preponderate: wheatfields and hedgerows (as here) and street art/graffiti (some of those are on flickr).


- bit of a contrast, eh?
nature and culture
town and country
green and .... other colours.


I've also noticed that I've called this post "Spring" greens, though it is, in fact, June. So not strictly speaking Spring.

I excuse myself for this on the basis that it was so miserably cold and wet at the beginning of my suffolk trip that - when the sun came back on Wednesday - it felt like spring after a too-long winter.


But it is now feeling rather like summer.

Updates (click to enlarge):

tadpoles






in fact, as you can see, no longer tadpoles but little tiny tiny froglets, with 4 little legs, climbing on rocks and everything!!!!!











my garden, a more recent photo

(at RW's request)





and finally, before leaving suffolk for the time being, there is this:

(Warning: the following footage contains NO images or incidents likely to cause snorting of beverages or unsightly snottage)




see?
no nuts.

no surprises.

springing about in suffolk

I had a lovely lovely 3 days (not long enough by half) with RW in Suffolk last week.

larking and drinking



larking around with the dog
drinking coffee
listening to sky larks
drinking gin
larking about in shops
drinking wine
larking around with solicitors and bankers
drinking tea
larking around at times without little girls

(or men)

(but with my camera)


... despite miserable cold cold rainy weather for the first two days...
... and soaking up warm sunshine on the last day.


At some points, larking and drinking at the same time.
Imagine that if you can.




Suffolk is wonderfully spring- green and lush and luscious after all the rain and I took endless pictures which I plan to bore you with in due course.


In the meantime, I hope you enjoy this.

Spring (late)

pond life

Some of you may remember that I am very happy with my tadpoles. They are getting unfeasibly fat - they look fully ready to pop - and have finally grown little tiny froggy legs. (pictures will enlarge if you click on them - go on. look at the little legs!)


No further newt news - Tiny Lorraine Isaac Newt has not been sighted again. But she clearly hasn't eaten all the tadders (phew) - there are still at least 10 of them lolling about (with the odd wiggle here and here) and waiting for their transmogrification.

In the meantime, a local frog has popped in and splashed about once or twice. I hope it will eat some of the little gnat larvae which are also squiggling about in there.


I'm very pleased with my frog pool. Here it is in its early stages:


Once a builders bucket-thingy which Dizzy and I lugged up the road late one night after liberating it from a skip.

Next to my fabulous shed, with which I am still just as pleased. (for the full story of my girl shed, click here)

The pool is already started to look more at home





though it has quickly developed a coiffure of blanket weed and duckweed which I think I will have to deal with if I want to go on being able to watch the pondlife (no unsightly mullets in my pond, thankyou very much).

[spot the surreptitious snail in that second pic]
{hate the little blighters}


So I' m also very happy with the transformation of this end of my garden.
This is what it looked like a year ago:
(more
"before"
pics
here)

and here
it
is
now.


thankyou to all my friends and family (agent, script-writer, producer everyone who knows me blah blah blah) without whom I couldn't - or at least wouldn't - have done it.
I just couldn't get motivated to do much in the garden last year - other than the big clear up - and I wouldn't have done anything, i think, without friends and family helping out. This year I can't spend enough time out there, it soothes my soul.

And having some water in the garden is wonderful - I'd not anticipated how much of another dimension it would add, even such a little and static tub of water. I got the idea from this book - if you have a garden, think about having a go, its easy and quite exciting. (tubs like the one I'm using can be bought pretty cheap in garden centres)
[notice how I resolutely ignore the implicit suggestion that frog pools such as these are ideal for kids]

I now have plans for a larger pool, near the house, hopefully with some kind of moving water.... a project to keep my father busy in the Autumn i think.

happy/sad

happy/sad, bitter/sweet, last/first - that was my birthday.

It was almost exactly a year since the definite diagnosis and prognosis for mum's cancer and now the endless year is over and seems almost like a dream. With many aspects of nightmare. But there is not much for which I'd exchange all the precious time I've spent with them over this year and for the new depths of closeness which grew between us.

Except to have her back.

This was the first birthday without my mother - the last birthday with a card written by/from her. She and dad had organised and written all the birthday cards for May, before she died. Thats what she was like. Her writing is scarcely recognisable for hers - its evident at a glance the time and effort it took to write the words, and she knew it was the last time. How will I ever be able to take it down from the mantlepiece?

My fathers been staying, and we've been having a bittersweet time. Enjoying gardening, sitting in the sun, crying, holding hands. We've been finalising plans for a thanksgiving service for my mum, which will be in a few weeks time. I'm sure it will be good, a celebration of how wonderful she was, and another kind of closure. There are so many goodbyes when someone dies, its not just the once, it seems to go on and on.
But I'm also kind of dreading it, there will be an awful lot of people there, mum was special to so many, and I think it will be quite overwhelming.
But we've been looking through old photos, selecting the best. Bitter and sweet.

So my birthday was sad.
But happy too.
Happy to have so many messages from people who care about me.
Happy to be with family who love me so much.

And little things help.


Even in the face of the huge catastrophic life and death stuff, it cheers me up to see that my tadpoles have little legs. (will post pics soon). And that my roses are blooming beautifully. And that there are sparrows feeding their babies on my bird tree. And that I have morning glory self-seeded again in my patio.

I'm also happy with my new birthday iPod.

and with my iPod socks. (only 6 in the packet tho' - what am I meant to do the other day of the week?)

And I'm overthemoondelighted with my new armadillo.



Designed and handmade specifically and specially for me by the clever and talented little purl one, (who makes gorgeous knitted toys...) - she is named Rose after my lovely wonderful friend who commissioned her for me. Isn't she adorable?







ADDITIONAL:
Click here for a larf.

butters

Nothing to do with dairy produce.

"Butters" is (or was... could be i'm out of date already) sauwf london slang for ugly. Butt-ugly, presumably. To be pronounced, of course, without clearly enunciating the "tt"s.

as in "as butters as the back of a bus".
A london double-decker bus, of course - but sadly wouldn't be a routemaster these days.

My water butt - only about 8 years old (received on my xx birthday) - has an unrepairable split in its butt. I have tried smelly sticky supposedly waterproof repair gunky stuff, twice, and carefully, according to manufacturers instructions, but without success. Didn't do what it said on the tin.

So - I have to buy a new one. Which gives me the excuse to upgrade to a more slimline model, with also hopefully greater capacity.

After all, who doesn't like big butts?

Or - should I get one of these butters butts?










yes, these are all water butts, i kid ye not.

Which one would you choose for me?






The slim-line water butt i covet costs rather a ridiculous amount of money. But i'm going to buy it anyway, justifying the expense firstly on the grounds of environmental concern, and secondly on the grounds that its my birthday.

For anyone who's interested, there are some pictures of me on last year's birthday post - click here if you like.

seven tits

Thanks Joyce for tagging me.

Admittedly, my first reaction (after laughing so much through your post, right up to that last line) was "poo".
But once I came round to the idea I've appreciated being kick-started into this next post after the previous. So, really thanks.


This did start in my head as seven tits.
Honest.

And they are here at the end of this post. But it then evolved into a seven days post, and seven things about the seven days.

1. Seven days away from home, seven days which felt like seven weeks in a very strange timeless land.
My mum had returned home (where she wanted to be) after 2 weeks in the hospice but after only 2 days, she was rushed back in again, haemorrhaging; the hospice team* - with their expertise, wisdom, intuition - had kept her room ready for her. After a long bedside vigil, she died and after 7 days we buried her.
(* who were overwhelmingly wonderful)

2. Dr. Karg crispbread thingies are exceedingly noisy - both the packaging and the chomping of their extreme crunchiness. On day 2 (I think, its all a bit blurry) my BIL and I went on a snack-finding trip to the local supermarket. It was a cause of some amusement on our return that almost all the things we'd bought were exceedingly noisy and there was much rustling, crackling, crunching, attempts to muffle noise and laughter which didn't seem quite seemly.

3. Laughter was actually quite a feature of those bedside days, with sometimes all 13 of us (me + 2 siblings with spouses, 6 grandchildren, dad) camping out in mum's room, in and out of the corridors, taking over various lounges, chatting, reading newspapers, mucking about.... Hospices are so mercifully unlike hospitals. Mum's eyes didn't open again after the 2nd morning, but she knew we were all there and I know she loved that we could laugh together as well as crying together.

4. Oast houses. Mum was in the Hospice in the Weald - the Weald being South East England, Kent and Sussex. Hop-farming and hop-picking used to be key industries and activities in Kent and the countryside is full of oast houses like these, traditionally used for drying the hops. This was mum's last view.





5. Mosaic puzzles helped keep some of us occupied and distracted during the long hours. "hanjie" and other similar types. Essentially they are (japanese) pictoral logic puzzles - a bit like sudoku but much less boring (imo). My sister and I were already inclined to be a bit addicted to these, but a niece and nephew picked some up and started colluding, with a surprising amount of hilarity.

6. Snooker - the World Championship Final. I grew up with snooker - we had a table in our house so my teenage hanging-out days included larking about with balls and queues. The high ceiling in our victorian house was pockmarked with little round blue holes. And we used to watch Pot Black - Hurrican Higgins and all that. So we watched, on and off... into the night, in mums room, in the lounges ... the clickings of balls and silences and understated commentary providing punctuation and background.

7. Tits. 2 actually observed, not 7 - though we don't know how many babies they are feeding in the little nesting box on the end of dad's shed. So could be 7. Apparently they can hatch up to 14 eggs. 14! blimus, in that little box?
In the days between mum's death and her funeral, we watched the 2 flying in and out constantly, incessantly, backwards and forwards - box to tree for insects, to shed roof for look-out, into the box, back out to the bird feeders.... I got a bit addicted, too, trying to capture their tireless mothering with my little camera. So here as promised are 7 tits.


















I'm not tagging anyone but if you feel like it, take "Seven" as your theme.

(or tits, of course....)

Mum

My mum died last Monday, May 7th.

I'm fighting the urge to post just that.

what more can i say?





sharing some of the past year with some of you has been important to me, so it felt right to let you know.



We buried her on Friday in a very very small private family ceremony which was one of the most painful experiences of my life, but also one of the most beautiful.



I expect I'll blog a bit more about this later, but thats all for now.

Humps

I was just going to start wittering on about hills and bumps and walking very slowly. But I think I'll just stay away from the metaphors today if I can.

I have a free day at home (well, if I ignore the essays waiting to be marked)
(I think I can) - due to a cancelled appointment, which is a disappointment, but well-timed really - once M goes out I'll have at least a few lovely hours home alone.


Mum came home from the hospice on Weds. It should have been Tuesday but her health has deteriorated quite a bit since she's been there (2 weeks) and the hospice staff really didn't want her to come home at all, they're not convinced they/we will cope. But - she so very much wanted to come home that they agreed on condition that she was brought home in an ambulance the next day, with as much extra support as they can find and give. Mum wanted to go into the hospice, was very happy there at first, and it was a good change for everyone. But though its a wonderful place, she soon began to want to be home again.

She is so delighted to be home, we saw something of her old self in her smile.


It was a very good home-coming.


I've run out of words now, metaphorical or otherwise.