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Wednesday 22 February 2023

Doreen

My vision issues make reading and participating in comment quite challenging just now, but I continue to enjoy your blog posts which the computer reads for me.

Today, I want illustrate life's vicissitudes through the story of my mother's lifelong friend Doreen. They are the kind of things we like to pretend do not happen.

Shortly after my parents married, they rented the two-bedroomed terraced house where I spent my first years. It needed thorough cleaning, so Mum busied herself scrubbing floors, washing windows, scouring the kitchin, sweeping the yard and hanging curtains. I can imagine the hot, damp smell of soap flakes, coal tar soap, scouring powder and disinfectant. There were few detergents. She had escaped her claustrophobic village and mother for her own little house in town, where she built a new life and blossomed.

In the back-bedroom of the house across the lane at the rear, a woman of similar age lay in bed-rest at her mother-in-laws', heavily pregnant with twins. She watched my mother at work and wondered who was this energetic and pleasant-looking young woman she had never seen before. Her mother-in-law came across to make contact, and Mum went across to meet Doreen. They had lots in commom and talked for hours.

They became lifelong friends. We visited each others' houses all the time. I called her Aunty Doreen. I have a lovely photograph of my pregnant (with me) Mum with Doreen, her husband and the twins walking along the promenade on a sunny day-trip to the seaside. They are all laughing and happy.

A few hears later we moved to a bigger house in the next street, so saw a little less of each other, but still visited often. It did not therefore surprise me on returning from school one afternoon to find the twins at our house. They were a girl and a boy then aged around ten. I was around seven. What I did not know was that they were there because their father had been taken seriously ill at the mill where he worked. He had had a massive heart attack. After a time someone knocked on the door and my mother sat the twins down at the table because she had something to tell them. "Your daddy's died" she simply said. It must have been almost impossible to say. They both burst into floods of tears. I didn't really understand but knew it was awful. People at the mill remembered how disturbing it was to see his overalls and shoes still at his peg. His body lay at rest at hone in the front room until the funeral. Doreen was still in her thirties.

But life goes on. With support from relatives, friends and neighbours Doreen brought up the twins into teenagers. A few doors along the street lived Maurice, a railway engine driver who had lived alone since his parents had died a few years earlier. He was a good-looking, gentle giant of a man, shy and quiet. The twins thought him wonderful and he became like an uncle who played with them. He formed a close friendship with Doreen and eventually proposed. Doreen was forty-two, Maurice about thirty-four.

"But he's so much younger than me," Doreen told by mother.   

"Gerrim married," Mum replied.

So she did, with my mother looking radiant and lovely as Matron-of-Honour. She had never been a bridesmaid before.

The photographs show a happy day, although as I have seen in other families including ly owm, her late husband's mother does not look entirely behind the idea. The marriage worked and lasted over thirty years.

On his days off, Maurice liked to do odd-jobs, and I sometimes found him round at our house quietly washing the windows.

Then at around the age of sixty, Doreen became very ill with bowel cancer.

"They'll be taking me out of here in a box," she told my mother visiting her in hospital. And we all thought that was true.

And yet, against all the odds, she survived. She had an ileostomy operation and it was successful. It was my mother who died two years later of breast cancer and Doreen survived her by twenty years before falling into old-age and dementia. Maurice lived on for another ten years.

To get through life without encountering such dreadful ups and downs is very fortunate. For the rest of us that do, I don't know how do manage to cope. We must be very resiliant. It's not all rosy, is it!

30 comments:

  1. No, not all rosy by any means. I am sorry to read about your mother's death far too early. My best friend also died of breast cancer in her 40s. Doreen and Maurice were two of the fortunate ones who obviously enjoyed a happy and loving life together. Really, that is the best we should wish for ourselves isn't it.

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  2. I like to read these memory posts. We all share some ups and downs in our lives and it helps to realize that everyone has had trouble to get through at some point. I am sorry about your vision problems but glad you are finding ways to use technology to help you cope.

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    1. I'd be in trouble without the tech because the problem is neurological, not optical. It's exactly the same in both ever.

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  3. You told this story very well Tasker. Thank you. Co-incidentally, my own mother was called Doreen. It's not a fashionable name any more but maybe it will come back one day. I guess that if bashful Maurice had not hooked up with Doreen, he might have remained a bachelor all of his life. It's a bugger about your eyesight isn't it? If I had a magic wand I would wave it above your head and everything would be A.O.K. once again.

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    1. Thank you. See response to previous comment. I knew 3 Doreens., all of similar age. Seems to be a 1920s 1930s name.

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    1. Jaycee says it - we all have to face something like these hardships at some time.

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  5. My phone prints out my spoken word for messages and email. There must be a way on the computer. A few years ago there was a blogger, Lois, I think, in California, who experimented with very new technology to print her spoken word. It must be miles advanced by now. As garbled as it occasionally became, it was a thrill to read and decipher. Perhaps you can locate something like that.

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    1. I have something like that but my problem is more in reading rather than writing. If you can't see the next word, or the right hand side of long words, even when you turn your head, the same in both eyes, it makes it hard to read. If we read from right to left, I wound not have such a problem.

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  6. I love memory stories like these.

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  7. It's one of those days when blogger simply won't let me sign in properly - not even to comment on my OWN blog. It's me, Meike.
    Thank you for Doreen's story. I enjoyed reading this, as I enjoy most real-life stories. We all know these ups and downs, don't we, and as you say, we are pretty resilient (at least most of us are). The downs make us who we are just as much as the ups.
    After my big eye operation in 2018, I sometimes dictated emails into my ipad, and it would "write" what I said, provided I spoke clearly and did not use my Swabian dialect.

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    1. I sometimes find that right-click and open link on new tab then signs me in when Blogger is being awkward.
      Pleased you like the piece. I was concerned it might me uncheerful.

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  8. It's a good thing we don't know what lies in store for us. A very thoughtful post.

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  9. In all this I never knew you could make the computer speak to you and translate people's blogs. Getting your memories down in the written word and spoken. Hope your eyesight problem resolves itself soon.

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    1. Should be on your PC - Microsoft Narrator - but you have to persist as it's not that easy to use.

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  10. Lovely story Tasker. I lost my first husband to kidney cancer after thirty nine years but later married my farmer - we were together for twenty three years before he had a Glioblastoma brain tumour. Two wonderful happy marriages the first one producing my son - I count myuself very lucky - we survive life's ups and downs.

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    1. Thank you, Pat. At 90, you must have seen so many leave.

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  11. Sorry I appear as anonymous - Weaver.

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  12. It is not all rosy. It was never meant to be. It is the hard times that teach us powerful lessons. It is the hard times that make us appreciate the good times. In the end, if you are a lucky person, the good outweighs the bad. Life is terribly beautiful.

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    1. Yes. Our ers has been cushioned from many of the most terrible thinks, and anyone who has researched family history will know.

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  13. I know I left a comment (not just my reply to Debby's) on here, and I know I saw it yesterday, but today it has gone. Maybe you have accidentally deleted it, as I can not recall anything offensive in it.

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    1. I don't remember one. Nothing in spam. If I deleted it, it was most definitely by accident and I apologise. I do have a tendency to click the wrong button these days.

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    2. I remembered eventually - Anonymous just below River's comment.

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    3. Goodness! It is ME who should be having their eyes examined... sorry about that, Tasker!

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I welcome comments and hope to respond within a day or two, but vision issues are making this increasingly difficult. Please note: comments on posts over a month old will not appear until they have been moderated.