HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY, MUM!

Had my Mum lived, she would have been 100 years old today.  When she was in her 90s she used to say she just wanted to live long enough to get a Telegram from the Queen, because she was very fond of her, perhaps because they were born at about the same time - the Queen in 1926 and Mum in 1924.  However, sadly Mum died on 22nd December 2019, so she didn’t get that Telegram - and in any event, the Queen herself died in 2022 so it would have been a Telegram or card from King Charles III and I’m not quite sure how Mum would have liked that.  

I decided to make a collage to celebrate her birthday - there is a lot of purple, because that was Mum’s favourite colour - and mine too, as it happens, but you already know that!  

In the top row on the left, I was about 9 years old, so Mum would have been about 30.  In the middle photograph, taken on her Wedding Day, when she got married for the second time, she was 38 years old and in the photograph on the top right, she was 90 years old, that photograph taken at her 90th birthday party.

The numbers making up the 100 are collages of her and the family made using my Phinsh app.

The bottom row of photographs show her on the left in October 2019, not long before she died, getting acquainted with her iPhone!  She was a quick learner, and thankfullyher brain was still very active, mainly I guess because she still did a crossword and several puzzles and Word Searches every day so my sister let her have her old iPhone.  However, we never did tell her she could get on to the internet, because she liked a little “flutter” and no doubt, knowing her, she would have been looking on the “Paddy Power” website and placing bets!  

In fact, one day, not long before she died, she said to me “I’m going to ask you to do something for me, Maureen, and you won’t like it!”  I wondered whatever this could be, so when she told me she wanted me to go over to the nearby shop and buy her lottery tickets and also some scratch cards, she was right - I didn’t like it!  I have never done the lottery in my life and as for scratch cards - what a waste of money!  However, I did as she asked, but had to tell the man in the local Tesco that he would have to help me because I was a “lottery virgin”!  He laughed and when I told him that the tickets and scratch cards were for my Mum, he asked who that was.  I told him “Betty from the flats” so he nodded his head, and said knowingly, “Ah, you mean the Duchess!”  She was well known in the shop and it amused me to think she was called that.

The middle photograph at the bottom is a birthday cake made for the 100th birthday of a friend’s mother - and duly photographed - so it can now be used for my Mum’s 100th birthday.

The last photograph is Mum with my sister and brother and me, taken just two weeks before she died by Mr. HCB.  I am so pleased that right up until she died, she was still quick-witted enough to be able to do her crosswords and puzzles and only very occasionally did she want any help, but I wasn’t always able to help her.  

Mum enjoyed seeing her family and she was always especially proud of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren.  She was a wonderful baker - her Christmas cakes, Victoria sponges, lemon meringue pies and sausage rolls made with her own pastry were legendary and she was still baking until she was almost 90 but as she got less mobile, it became more difficult -  we all missed her lovely cakes and pies.  I do have her old recipe books, so guess I could have a go at making some of the cakes and pies, but they definitely wouldn’t come up to her standard and my Victoria sponges never rose like hers did.  When I bemoaned that fact, she would often say “All you need, Maureen, is two eggs and their weight in flour, sugar and margarine, then you can’t go wrong.”  Well, I could!

I can’t believe that it is over 4 years since she died - but lots of things remind me of her.  Violet creams in Aldi - which I hated, but she loved, along with Parma violet sweets yuk.  Walnut whips and palmier biscuits, but they had to come from M & S otherwise she wouldn’t eat them!  Mr. Kipling’s iced fancies were some of her favourite little cakes but she hated the chocolate ones, so always saved those for me - I often used to leave after visiting her with several in a little bag!  

Mum was very superstitious - although I’m not at all - and when I was younger, I was never allowed to cut my nails on a Sunday, and woe betide anyone if they put an umbrella up indoors.  Even now, if we put one knife across another on the worktop, I say to Mr. HCB  “Remember what my Mother used to say ‘Uncross those knives!’”  She said you should never put new shoes on a table and if she found a pin on the ground, she always recited “See a pin and pick it up and all the day, you’ll have good luck!”  If ever she was giving a purse to someone as a gift, she always insisted on putting a coin in it - and I’m sure, if I thought about it for long enough, I would think of many more things she did and said.

There were difficult and sometimes sad times when we often clashed - happy times and not-so-happy times, but all in all, I think Mum enjoyed her life - and I’m just sorry she didn’t live to be 100 years old.  However, she would have hated the lockdowns, so perhaps for her sake, it was a good that she died before the pandemic.  I just wish I had asked her more about our family history while she was alive, and I'm sure many reading this will echo that. I know she was in the Women's Auxiliary Air Force during the Second World War, and I would love to have known more about her liaison with an American serviceman, my real Father - but now it’s too late and left to me to try and find out more about that. 

So Happy Heavenly Birthday to a treasured Mum, Grandmother and Great Grandmother - if I know you, there will be lots of cakes and pies for any party up there - and we will be sure to have a little drink in your honour today, but sorry, it won’t be Advocaat and lemonade, your favourite tipple although you may be enjoying a toast with the Queen, who, it is understood, loved Dubonnet and lemonade!  Love M xx