An Ordinary Woman

Tottie, the first time I heard your voice – well, it was more or less the same as the last time. Loud – you had no idea about the concept of quiet did you? Screeching out the word darling. Never mind the traffic noise, the builders working nearby with their drills – everyone stopped to look at who was making such a racket – whenever you spotted someone you knew, it was always the same thing.

You worked at the playgroup – your son was one year older than my eldest, and they all loved you – you were like the pied piper there – as you were the whole of your life – followed around by a little trail of people. It was the shy children you loved most I think – the ones who hid most of the time. There was something about you that made them trust you completely; something that made them feel braver.

As our children grew, I often saw you in the village, on your big old rusty bicycle. That was when they found the cancer – you must have been in your late thirties at the time, and then of course we all knew, because that’s what it’s like in a village. Life didn’t stop though. You went off to Portugal. You and John didn’t have much money, but it wasn’t very expensive then, and you bought a ramshackle house in the middle of nowhere, and you restored it, and lived there for a few years.

Then your eccentric parents, who had the big house in the middle of the village – they were getting very frail, and you came home to look after them. You were the only one of your sisters who didn’t have a big career – they all said they didn’t have time. You came back all brown, with John, and Joe, and another boy too. Not your own – one you’d found, and taken in. I remember you telling me his parents were a bit hopeless – wrecked all day – and that was how he came to you. He followed Joe one day after school and he never went home again. I don’t think you actually ever adopted him formally, but by the time you came back he was as much a part of your family as Joe.

You all moved into the big house, and once again, we’d be stopped in our tracks by that loud voice, or passed in a whirr of bicycle wheels and a hurried wave. The cancer came back soon after, and you never really left the village again. You said your sisters were doing their bit for feminism, and you’d had enough of the BBC and globetrotting.

I think I only ever saw you get cross once, in all the time I knew you. Someone had been condescending about your parents, and you’d told them that your mother was not a poor old dear, actually – she’d done things that other people only dream about – been wild before it was fashionable – racketing around the country with Dylan Thomas thank you very much. The Queen of Bohemia. I expect that shut them up.

You carried on – your boys grew into lovely teenagers. They didn’t always get it right – sometimes they got it spectacularly wrong, but you stood by them in everything – fiercely proud of them both – even after that party that went a bit wrong,

You carried on rescuing people – you had a special talent for it. That young girl – she had her baby when she was hardly grown up herself. We used to see her struggling along – trying to cope with a screaming toddler on her own. Sometimes I’d see them both in tears at the same time. You swept her up, took her under your wing, I think you’d be pleased to know she ended up with your startlingly handsome nephew in the end - the baby is at university now.

I moved away but still saw you from time to time, and people talked – they always talked about you. That’s how I knew the cancer had come back again. The next time we met, the darling was just as loud, but you were quite a bit smaller – you’d shrunk on the outside – on the inside you were just as big. I told you how sorry I was, and you brushed it off – said you hadn’t finished yet. Then you told me about the puppy you’d bought John - “to keep him company”. I think you probably knew then, despite what you said.

The last time I saw you, you were at the other end of a long street, and I was with my eldest son – he must have been about sixteen and he was still so shy – he never really got over the bullying, and you stopped and flung your arms wide open, and you screeched his name at the top of your voice – and I remember thinking Tottie, you might have overreached yourself this time – he is sixteen now, not four – but as I watched his face, I saw the biggest smile appear, and I knew he still loved you just as much and that he didn’t mind at all about the embarrassment, because it was you. I think you were the only person who made him smile at that time – that was when his dad left home and everything fell apart for a bit.

At your funeral I’ve never seen so many people in one place before – most of the village turned up. All the “important people” came of course - the county people who came because that’s what they were supposed to do. But I think those you would have been happiest to see were the children – crowds and crowds of them, mostly awkward teenagers now, but some older than that, and all the others you took under your wing, all the misfits, the shy ones.

There were so many of them; I got talking to a man my age – I’d never seen anyone with tattoos on their face before - and he told me about how your mother had done exactly the same thing for him as you’d done for that boy in Portugal – he’d been your honorary brother. None of them wore black, or even dressed formally, except a few of the boys who wore rather inappropriate clubbing shirts because they wanted to look their best for you Totts – they wanted to say a proper goodbye, as a thank you for everything that you’d given them.

So we don’t see your bike anymore, and that’s a shame, but you have left a little bit of yourself behind in all those people – a bit of hope. You didn’t run a country, or wear a power suit; you were an ordinary woman who did rather special things.