A Day to Remember A

A memorial service today for A, who died last month and who we used to be in writing group with, although sadly it has been quite a while since the group met. The service celebrated A's long life and her many interests - not just her writing but also many other activities including singing, walking, painting, politics and the church. And there were many stories about her I'd never heard - she was always so modest and therefore wouldn't tell stories about herself. I imagine she would have said people wouldn't be interested. In the writing group she'd always say that we wouldn't want to hear her work as it was rubbish but fortunately we usually persuaded her to read out what she'd written. Often an evocatively descriptive piece about something she had seen on her travels - so vividly portrayed, like a picture in words. I found out that she had been a pupil of the teacher who would become the inspiration for Miss Jean Brodie, that she had been a scientist for, among others, the Coal Board, and as a young girl she had been the model for a set of murals of Alice in Wonderland painted on the wall of a gym in an Edinburgh Primary School. Murals that I believe are still there and a little part of her that lives on.