An annus horribilus

Christmas has just gone and too many people are gone this year.  In 2018, I wrote Christmases past. It was a litany of deaths in the previous few years.

This year, my annus horribilus, is a litany of deaths in this one year: husband, colleague (DG), two cousins(MM), one the son of my cousin (K), the 17 year old neighbour and then our long-term lodger (PdB). 

Losing my husband shouldn't yet happen. He's younger than my father's healthy cousin. But yes, he was older than me and not quite well without being able to put your finger on what the problem was. The medics would put it down to his diabetes without double checking. He told them his diabetes was under control and it was. 

Maybe the next few years won't bring deaths. A respite.

House sharing

Without house mates to share in Leyton, it looked like I was going to have take a room in a local convent. That was not my style! But my thanks anyhow to Mother Cecil, the head teacher at the school in the Parish of St Mary & Michael who found me the room at the convent. At least it was very close to the Toynbee Theatre  where I went every week for amateur dramatics.  That am dram group taught me the value of networking and relationships for amongst my fellow players I found a flatmate Pat Stirland. I also acquired sequentially two nice boyfriends (N, R), a flat mate and Pat's stalker! 

Pat moved in with me in the school summer holidays and I never had to go to the convent. She came with a cat & a pregnant labrador. For some weeks, we had a very mucky kitchen with puppies wriggling everywhere.

Pat was divorcing, and having nowhere to live, reasoned that the best place for her two children was with their father. She took them away on holiday when she went down to Wales that August. She came back from the long drive absolutely shattered. We sat chatting on my bed, when a flash went off. Someone in the street was photographing the car she'd borrowed from a friend. The police came. Pat was so tired she was hardly conherent and the police asked me if she was drunk or on drugs. 

Pat stayed only a few months because she'd met a new man in Wales and moved in with him, but not before she found me a couple of other flat mates from her office: Loretta & Philomena. Philomena was from Dublin I think. And Loretta? South African? Philomena moved on. I can't remember how I knew Vera from Australia. She was a nurse on an intensive care unit. Somehow we also met Graham, and he took a room - I don't remember how we all fitted in! However, the landlord did not want male lodgers, and we didn't tell  - I was the main tenant. 

Diary Mon November 25 1974

Vera & Loretta and I, finding work for idle hands, have turned Graham’s room into a girl’s room and written him a note to tell him to sleep in the bath. We’ve put his books, bible and posters in the bathroom and even got a playgirl mag pin-up to put in “Joanne.” Room – now we’re just waiting for him to come home! We (Loretta & I) are skulking in bed  in anticipation.

Tuesday 2.15 am

He believed…. ‘til he saw the tampons, said it was too much,  then he found Vera’s labelled clothes in “Joanne’s” case”!!!

I gave up the tenancy when Vera and I went to India for a couple of months. When we came back she took a flat somewhere on the other side of London.  Eventually she went back to Australia and we kept in touch until 1978 when I sent her a piece of our wedding cake but the Australian post office had a massive strike, heaps of undelivered post that they couldn't cope with and burnt, so I lost touch with her. 

For the month after I moved out, before the tenancy finished,Graham shared the house with a homeless old school firend of mine, LJ - he called her Jacko - and saw her in London a few times so through her I vaguely knew what he doing. When email became a thing, he kept in touch. Now by email we compare our families and cancer treatments!