32. Shadows from the Past

THE POETESS Part 32

Cheeky young Stephen Shockleworth and his leathers moved into my spare room in Millers Cottage the very next weekend, and he stayed for three years, until he announced he was going to get married to the sweetest creature this side of Heaven ... his description, not mine, and move into her house the other side of town with her. But he brought her round to see me once, told her that he didn’t have a proper mother (his parents had arranged for him to be adopted soon after he was born) and that I made a good substitute. And she was a sweet young thing, and I could see very much what he found attractive about her because, in all honesty, there didn’t seem to be anything that wasn’t as lovely as I imagine angels are.

Her name was Pandora and like everyone else whose life touched hers, I loved her ... to start with. But I must move on if I’m going to reach the end of my memories and bring my faltering mind up to the present day. Which means I’ll skip over the way Pandora emptied my purse when I wasn’t looking, and stole my grandmother’s wedding ring which I kept in a box on my dressing table.

Stephen retrieved it for me and I told him the modest amount of money didn’t matter, but it was an object lesson in support of the old proverb that all that glitters isn’t necessarily gold.

Once he had gone and taken the memory of the exceedingly beautiful but dubiously moralled Pandora out of Millers Cottage and my own rather simple world, I was left on my own.

My sixtieth birthday came round, and at the same time I would have been made redundant by Woolworth’s had I not retired. It seemed a long time since I’d been that teenage girl in her tiny kilt and with long legs kissing Roy in the shadow of what was then little more than a tumbledown ruin.

As a mark of growing older I decided to have my hair cut off. Or rather, the greater part of it. I’d regularly had it cared for by Sylvia (I never knew her surname) at the salon in town. It had always been long, very long for a lady of sixty, I thought, and it easily reached down to my bottom!

“I did wonder,” Sylvia told Rosie, “it’s the most gorgeous hair I have to deal with! You have always looked after it, I can tell that as a fact.”

“I’ve been proud of it. But I’m not as young as I was and maybe the time’s right for me to look my age,” Her voice sounded as reluctant as she felt about losing her trade-mark golden locks.

“When I’ve cut it off, why not donate it? There are charities that use real human hair to make wigs for cancer patients whose own hair has been lost. I can do that for you if you like. It’s better than throwing it away.”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” murmured Rosie, “but it does seem like a good idea. After all, I donate my useable old clothes to charity shops, so why not my hair to a really useful charity.”

And that’s what happened. On my sixtieth birthday I lost most of the long tresses that in an other life, at another time, Roy had said he so admired. Anyway, that evening a handful of the girls from the shop took me out to celebrate, seeing as I had no partner of my own We went to the Sans Chappelle, which was still supposed to be the best pub in Brumpton.

“Well,” smiled an attractive woman she knew as Donna, a smiling brunette of from the children’s clothing department, “what’s it like to be an old bird?”

“I feel the same as I did when I was a young chick,” smiled Rosie.

“But you lost your mane,” sighed Donna, “I always envied you that. I’ll bet you hadn’t had it cut since the day you were born.”

“I just had it trimmed every so often, to keep it tidy,” she explained, “I left it to a charity that makes wigs and hair pieces for cancer sufferers. I thought it better than shoving it into a landfill site.”

“Good idea,” murmured Donna, “my dad had cancer and the medication made him bald as coot! He did recover, though, which was good.”

“There was a time when the word cancer was a death knell,” put in one of the women, a red-head known as Curls on account of her own head of tightly curled hair.

“A lot of people in the past would have lived a lot longer had they been given a dose of modern medicine,” sighed Donna, “take my great granddad for instance. He came back from the first world war, the 1914 one, and it affected what went on inside his head. He ended up hanging himself not long after when his poor wife granny Edna was at the shops. She told me about it before she died. She even had him buried privately, but she wouldn’t tell anyone where in case some know-all from the council decided to shift him to a proper graveyard.”

“Do you know where she lived?” asked Rosie quickly.

“Before the second war she lived in an old cottage,” replied Donna, “I don’t know exactly where it was only that she moved out when they build the new council estate out Swanspottle way. She was gaga towards the end and in a care home, and she died in 1968. But the man who did himself in because his memories tormented him was my great granddad Harry.”

“I know where he is,” said Rosie quietly, “I know his story. It’s terrible. But he’s in peace in the garden of his own home, the one that he and Edna lived in back then, the house I live in now. In fact, I came upon his bones myself when I was doing some gardening, and I reburied him in a box I made.”

“Is that true?” asked Donna.

“I wouldn’t lie about anything, and certainly not anything as sad as Harry Smithson’s story,” Rosie told her. “You can come and see if you like. On Sunday afternoon? I’ll make tea and cakes and you can quietly say your own goodbyes to a gentleman without whose life you would never have been born.”

“I will, I will!” exclaimed Donna, “I only wish my dad was still alive. He’d be thrilled.”

And that’s what happened. Donna came to Millers Cottage, and so did half a dozen others, all women I’d worked with, and they stood by the flower bed and its poppies that were in flower, and there was almost silence as they stared at the simple grave.

Almost silence, because Donna quietly wept.

But there was one addendum to the events of my birthday. When I arrived home from the pub there was an envelope on my doormat.

Rosie picked the envelope up and frowned. It was much too late for the postman, and anyway there was no stamp on it.

She opened it.

There was a birthday card, with a brief note attached.

“I remember your birthday, sweet Rosie,” it said, “and I thought I’d wish you well but you’ve obviously got some sense because you’re out, celebrating, no doubt. Anyway, happy birthday and all my love, Roy.

All my love, Roy… All my love…

Roy….

© Peter Rogerson 07.04.21