Dulcie Domum! Moi?

When my university flatmate Paula’s breast cancer returned I promised myself I would write to her regularly in lieu of the chats over coffee we might have had if we’d lived closer.  Phone calls are all very well but you never know whether the person you’re calling is unwell or tired or just doesn’t feel like talking. 

A letter she could read as and when she liked, in bed when tired or even while in the chemo suite.  Here is part of one written in 2018.

Wednesday13 June

Last night Mrs Leftfoot and I had one of our monthly trips out.  This time to a concert at the Lit & Phil.  It was a fundraiser for the restoration of a huge portrait of John Buddle (google him, alternately ask Fester and he will bore you about him for hours). 

The band comprised Liz Conway (to whom I gave Phil’s most treasured dulcimer a few years ago) and an Australian/ Tazmanian couple called Bushby.  “Music from Three Continents” being Australia, America and Europe.  Dulcimer, harp, guitar, cittern, whistles and a surprising variety of bagpipes (I lost count).  Very civilized, quite folkie and we saw a couple of people we knew. 

Walking back to the car a girl wearing culottes overtook us.

“Oh” I said “you don’t often see culottes these days.  We wore culottes in New Tyne Morris back in the 80s.  God forbid women should wear trousers to dance, even in a mixed Cotswold morris team.  They were black needle-cord.  I made them myself -         I must have used my flatmate’s sewing machine - and the deckchair material waistcoat!  I’ve probably still got the culottes’ pattern somewhere.”

“You would” says Mrs Leftfoot “Tell me, who was in the Dancing Deckchairs, apart from Sidney?” (a mutual friend)

“Well there was a couple from down south, who went back, and Dick Price ...”

“Don’t know him”

“... and his wife Anne, lovely woman, she died a few years ago ….. Richard Burton who I went out with” pause to hawk and spit at that memory “Oh yes Jill, a friend of Bess Cavalier’s.  Oh you know the usual lot of folkies, re-enactors and similar types …..      Oh and Ralph played the melodeon.”

“Don’t know him.”

“Ralph?  Tall, skinny, Scottish, couldn’t play and talk at the same time, looked gormless whilst playing and slightly less gormless when he wasn’t playing.              He became a vegetarian but didn’t research it properly and ended up in hospital with malnutrition.”

“The things you come out with!”

“I know.  It gets more like Victoria Wood every day.  Mind you ever since I told Mrs Eft I needed braces to hold up my dance skirt as recommended by my friend Mrs Quilt the quilter, I’ve felt as if I was living in a Posy Simmons cartoon.”

And with that I shall close and get on with a draft press release for Treefields School’s Centenary Summer Fair, where I shall be wearing a Cullercoats Fishwife costume borrowed from the said Mrs Quilt.