Vanity, vanity...

There are certain things that happen to a woman as you are getting older and they are not all as freely anticipated as long hairs sprouting on your chin or starting to grow a moustache.

(Himself sometimes twiddles the end of a particularly long whisker and jokes that I am getting ready to join the RAF if I haven’t used my tweezers for a while.)

For a start, you don’t just grow white hairs in your eyebrows; you grow great, long, black, wiry ones as well. If you left them alone, you’d start to look like that politician, what was his name? Big bushy eyebrows... Chancellor of the Exchequer... Jim. Jim somebody. Definitely began with a ‘J’. John? James? Jeremy?

Oh, no. Denis. Denis Healey.

And whilst the hair is growing luxuriously all over the face, it is rapidly fizzling out on the legs and under the arms and er-hum… Everywhere else. All those young women are paying for ‘Brazilians’ or ‘Landing Strips’ and designs with names like that, would, if only they would have the patience, save themselves a lot of pain and money. To our surprise, many of us older ladies find ourselves remarkably on trend.

It is, of course, much demanded that one should maintain  a sylph-like figure. To that end (so difficult to lose a baby tum, even when you are a great-grandmother.) I caught a bus yesterday afternoon and went to the big town instead of the little one for a special purchase.  

I'd heard they were miraculous. I chose black, rather than the white or nude ones which were also on offer; they seemed more glamorous. I was tired when I got home, though, and I had to water the plants and cook a meal and one or two other things, so I put off trying them on till today. I'll have a go this afternoon.

*

Well, I've tried them on and it looks like another bus journey. I followed the instructions carefully and rolled them up like you do with tights before trying to get into them, but I could hardly get them up as far as my knees.

They're back in the packet now. It was worth a try.

I remember my Mother

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.