Today is Bigsister’s 80th birthday, and
we are all just as surprised as her that she has now reached the age our Grampa
was when I first remember him.
I remember telling Dad, on a visit to the care home,
that she’d turned 60: “Well, how did she get that far that quick?”
Fifteen years ago I posted this blog on the
Newcastle Journal website.
It seems appropriate to share it here now.
SISTERS
One of the perks of being
involved in a Parents Teachers Association is that you get your pick of stuff
left over after the summer fayre or Christmas bazaar. This summer I picked up a copy of TheAccidental Time Traveller (by Sharon Griffiths) at Woodlawn Summer Fayre and
enjoyed it so much I passed it on to my Big Sister.
This autumn Bigsister and her
husband were invited to a wedding in India and decided to make a holiday of
it. Just before flying she rang me to
ask if I wanted the book back as she wanted something to read that she could
leave there when it was finished so save weight coming home. I said fine, no doubt someone in India might
pick it up and enjoy it too.
When she got back last weekend
she rang to tell me all about the trip.
Having exhausted India and how
lavish the wedding had been and how upsetting she had found the poverty, babies
begging, dirt etc. she said
"That Accidental Time
Traveller book was really good, I've brought it home and I'm going to make it
my book club book in January."
She lives in East Finchley, they
do things like that there.
Big Sister (just turned 65) was
particularly impressed at how evocative of life in the 1950s the book was.
I agreed saying "I don't
really remember the 50s, but it sort of lived on in Cwmifor"
"Yes" she said
"especially in our house - Mum kept the 50s going until well into the
80s"
We discussed how it was the
little details that made all the difference.
Like putting the kettle directly onto the coals on the fire; a kettle
singing on the grate was the background music to my childhood. Or using the fire to make toast using the
long toasting fork; toast under the grill or from a toaster just doesn’t taste
the same.
"And there were things I’d forgotten all
about” she said “like the Gibbs toothpaste in the little pink box you had to
rub the brush on."
"Oh yes" I said
"You had that - I thought it was so glamorous"
"Pardon?!"
"I thought it was
glamorous. Mind you I thought everything
you did was glamorous. You were
glamorous"
"You thought I was
glamorous!!"
"Yes."
"I never knew that. What did you think was glamorous about
me?"
"Everything. The clothes you wore. The make-up. The mascara in the little blue box with the
tiny toothbrush - that was really glamorous"
"That I had to spit on - I
must have got that from Mum - fancy you thinking I was glamorous"
"Well I didn't have many
role models - you were all I'd got really - and I wasn't the only one. Mum told me Great Uncle Tom thought you
dressed really smartly too, and he should have know because he was a
tailor."
"I wish she'd told me that,
I'd have felt a lot better about myself - I never thought I was glamorous"
Bigsister turned 12 about three
weeks after I was born and she was just the right age to be besotted and make a
huge fuss over a new baby sister.
Middlesister was coming up to 7, too old to be babied, too young to mind a baby, and
just right to feel put out at losing her position as the cute baby.
Bigbrother was nearly 14 and into manly
things like fishing, shooting and aeroplanes (although I do remember being
pushed in a pram by him but that’s another story).
I remember Bigsister singing to
me in my cot; my favourites being The Ugly Duckling (she made a great squawk
noise) and What do you want if you don't want money? (Adam Faith). She also read The Wind in the Willows and
Black Beauty to me well before I was five and
could read for myself (I cried at both and still do).
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Bigbrother, 'The Baby', Bigsister, Middlesister 1957 RAF Netheravon
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But it took fifty years and
talking about The Accidental Time Traveller for her to realise how much her
baby sister had adored her.
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