My mother had kind grey eyes. She had long, dark brown hair which she wore parted in the middle and swept up in a thick roll about the back of her head. She had a small, smiling mouth and smelled of Pink Lilac talcum powder. She would sing me to sleep every evening. I thought she sang like an angel. She didn't; she sounded very much like me and you don't want to hear me attempting to warble. She had a very bad stammer. My aunt, her younger sister, told me recently that she had been told that it started before my aunt was born, following some incident during World War 1. At that time, my soldier grandfather was away in Egypt, doing his bit, leaving my grandmother alone with her small daughter in an isolated cottage at the top of a steep hill. They had no water or electricity and it was my mother's task to fetch the day's supply of water from a spring in woods on the other side of the lane. One night, one of the many discharged and abandoned ex-servicemen who were roaming the countryside came to the house. Something happened. The stammer started after that. That was all my aunt knew.
She was my whole world, my security, my warmth, my safety in a frightening world. She died forty years ago this coming April.
I still miss her.
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