RIP AGED MOTHER

Mrs Anne Daniels aka Agèd Mother

Agèd Mother has just died at the age of 90.  She was the mother of a close family friend who, since her husband's death, had lived partly with her daughter here, and partly with her son in York.  So we got to see quite a bit of her and she enlivened any gathering with her stories about how she had first gone into service with Lady Fermoy and later qualified as a fitter to repair and test aeroplanes during the second world war.   I used to write about her from time to time and so here is a piece that I wrote about three years ago when she would have been 87 and wheelchair bound for most of the time.  Nevertheless, always game for an outing.

I am pushing Agèd Mother around Waitrose again. She, in her wheelchair, attentively scans the aisles as we go up and down looking at the whiskies and the toilet rolls, the yoghurts and the shampoos.

I have written about Agèd Mother before. She is 87 and is sadly now feeling the effects of age in her knee and memory departments. “I know I have seen something that I want,” she says, as we go patiently back and forth, her eyes alighting eagerly on some scrap of coloured packaging only to dismiss it with a “No, it wasn’t that! What was it?”

Being an even-tempered and long-suffering sort of person I resist the urge to mutter, “I don’t know you haven’t told me,” but can’t help thinking it all the same. I mean it is not even as if this was my mother, though everyone of course thinks she is. She is actually Helen’s mother, but I have been brought along as, so often on these shopping expeditions that J and Helen organise, I am thought ‘good’ with Agèd Mothers. I use the plural because Helen has two: her own and her husband’s with a combined age of 185.

Helen and J each have each a trolley. I am the safe pair of hands on the wheel chair.  Actually I don’t mind at all. Agèd Mother, in her own way, is quite fun, and the whole quasi-Buddhist exercise of subjugating the self leaves one quite serene. I may very well be in the same helpless state myself in only a handful of years. If so I want to know I have credits in the Karma bank.

In small doses the very old and the very young are no different. All that is required is the ability to remain unembarrassed and an aptitude for one-sided conversations on Joyce Grenfell lines for which shopping provides splendid opportunities.

“Let’s look at the orange juice, shall we? Mmm, what sort shall we buy? Do you like orange juice? It can be rather acid, don’t you think, though mixed with olive oil it is supposed to be good for the bones, or rather the joints. Does that make a difference? I mean if it were good for the bones could one expect that it would be good for the joints as well?”

I pause for the response: “I don’t really know, dear - but orange juice, yes! Did I ever tell you my grandfather was the Mayor of Harrogate......” This is the signal for rapid intervention. The Harrogate story lasts ten minutes and is recited faithfully on each and every occasion we meet and sometimes more than once. I plunge in heavily to effect a diversion.

“Ah yes, Harrogate,” I say. “Beautiful town. But I wonder whether they drank orange juice there. At the mayoral meetings, I mean. You know, to wash down the toffee? Did your grandfather eat toffee, and if so how were his teeth?....” and so we go on.

If all else fails I recite Shakespeare to her: though to mutter ‘For God’s sake let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings........,’ can serve to raise the eyebrows amongst the unwary.

Written down like this it all sounds horribly patronising, but it does work. She doesn’t know what we are talking about, but then neither do I really. But we both are, on the face of it, having an intelligent afternoon’s conversation. I ask her to hold a random carton of orange juice while we beetle off in search of J’s or Helen’s trolley to put it in.

We are having a similar conversation about bread flour which, I tell her, I need to purchase. “There’s flour here,” she says observantly from her position two feet away from where I park the wheelchair to browse. Indeed, she is right! Bags and bags of it. What a surprise! But this is Waitrose after all.

I am looking for a special flour, I tell her confidentially, one that has grains in it. I ask her opinion of granary flours. She considers the matter gravely and confesses she can’t tell, or doesn’t know, or has forgotten. But she says this most positively and we are both satisfied that this is a valid exchange.

We are joined at this point by a young woman holding a bunch of flowers in search of some Canadian extra strong, reinforced gluten, flour in a black bag with a red maple leaf, which happens at that point to be directly behind Agèd Mother’s wheelchair.

“Look at these lovely flowers,” she says to Agèd Mother, her attention temporarily diverted from flours to flowers. She thrusts them under Agèd Mother’s nose. “I couldn’t resist them.”

“Oh those are nice!” says Agèd Mother beaming. I move the wheelchair to one side and tell her we are looking for a flour with grains in. She replies not to me but to Agèd Mother (which makes me want to complain that it’s the people in wheelchairs that are supposed to be invisible not their hardworking pushers) telling her that the aforementioned Canadian flour is excellent because the strong gluten prevents pumpkin seeds with their sharp edges from cutting through the dough and ending up at the bottom of the loaf.

We are rapidly bordering surrealist territory. Agèd Mother enters the spirit of things by nodding sagely and opining helpfully, “Of course it does.”

“I suppose you’ve done a lot of cooking?” ventures the young woman wistfully, on the basis of those four words, which have now elevated Agèd Mother to the status of a sage to be deferred to on all matters of baking.

I will say this for Agèd Mother, she knows how to milk a situation. She stretches out an arm and says in a stage whisper. “I used to bake for Lord and Lady Fermoy, you know, Princess Diana’s grandparents.” And indeed she did when she was a girl in her teens and before she ran away at the outbreak of war to become an aircraft fitter, leaving the Fermoy kitchens bereft of her culinary talents.

But the Fermoy story and how she first introduced the name of Diana to the household is another well-scratched record. Luckily, at this point, fate intervened in the shape of the young woman’s husband. Grabbing a bag of flour, we executed a hand-brake turn and sped off to the safer pastures of the jellies and the jams.

SAVE COWBRIDGE CATTLE MARKET

Here we are preparing to set off

Every Tuesday big lorries loaded with bleating livestock descend on Cowbridge, destined to be bought and sold under the auctioneer's hammer.  The sales are quite a sight and visitors often go along to hear the incomprehensible babble so beloved of auctioneers the world over as your man in the Barbour jacket leans over a pen full of grey, recalcitrant sheep, occasionally poking at them with some species of stick and spouting his unique language.  Eventually the lorries and trailers that have been parked on the flat ground at the rear of the market come up again and the sheep, or what not, go off on return trips to new homes or, in some less fortunate cases, go off on single trips to the abattoir.  Welsh lamb being always at a premium

Of course, the market is not what it was.  Not since Foot and Mouth, not since the general decline in agriculture.  Nevertheless our market is one of only three in the whole of South Wales - the others being at Carmarthen and Abergavenney; and Abergavenney's market is under threat, we hear.

As indeed is ours!  That was why 'up to 1,000 people' - according to the television whose voice is always to be believed - led by the Mayor, the Town Crier, various elected notables and an ancient tractor - gathered yesterday to protest against plans by the Vale of Glamorgan Council to sell for housing and their own gain the land on which the market stands.

Now there has been a market in Cowbridge since medieval times.  When Richard de Clare, Lord of Glamorgan, in 1254 granted Cowbridge its first official Charter, he did so on the basis that this was a market town.  The clue is in the name after all, which is also reflected in our Welsh name 'Y Bont Faen,' which means 'The Cattle Bridge.'  In those medieval times the site now occupied by the Market, which lies just outside the town walls, was used for archery practice.  The roadway is still called 'The Butts'   The market moved here in 1954, seven hundred years later, (the yeomen archers having disappeared by then) and the land being in the ownership of the Cowbridge Rural District Council, the successors of the Council set up under Richard de Clare's Charter.

Sadly, twenty years later Cowbridge RDC became absorbed in a newly created Vale of Glamorgan Borough Council based in industrial Barry a dozen miles away, a town with which Cowbridge has always had an uneasy rural-urban relationship.  But the Vale Council, which of course is dominated by Barry with a dozen times the population of Cowbridge, now owns the land on which the yeomen of Cowbridge once practised their archery and on which generations of farmers have sold their livestock ever since; and the Vale is short of cash.  So it is proposing to sell the site for housing.

True, the Council has allocated land elsewhere in the Vale for a new market - but as no-one has money to build a new market, this isn't a real solution at all.  If the Cowbridge livestock market closes then the lorries full of animals will have to rattle away on a round trip of almost 100 miles to Carmarthen - which won't do the animals, or the environment, any good at all.

But beside these threats the town will suffer in a wider way if the cattle market site were to be sold off.  As you might imagine it is not easy to practise archery in small spaces.  So the cattle market site is actually quite large. This makes it easy on a market Tuesday to accommodate the lorries that bring the beasts here and then take them away again.  And as the market is usually finished by midday and only operates once a week, the market operators kindly make their acreage available to supplement Cowbridge's limited parking facilities by some 200 additional spaces.  All these would be lost if the market site were to be sold, making it even harder for shoppers and visitors to the town.

Moreover, our theatre is located at the furthest end of the Cattle market site.  (It is even called 'The Market Theatre'). The Council have generously told us that we can stay where we are - and so can the nearby Scout Hall - but of course they are proposing to take away our parking. Now many among our audiences are elderly and some are disabled. If we had no adjacent car parking we should not be viable any more.  Which sounds very much as though the Council wish to close us without obviously being seen to do so.  I imagine the same thing applies to the Scout Hall.

Here we are at the Cattle Market site.  Our Theatre stands on the far side of the cattle sheds

Next door to the Cattle Market site are the Town's playing fields.  These also the Vale Council has its eye on and calculating what they might be expected to fetch as building land.  They are not yet in any plan, but ask the simple question where people who bring their children to play rugby or cricket games on the playing fields leave their cars, and the answer is of course on the Cattle Market site and if this is sold and the parking lost then the utility of the playing fields is hit as well.  If they are no longer used, then, the Council will argue, why not sell them?  Already the Council have abandoned the upkeep of the public lavatories, formerly provided for those using the fields and attending the Cattle Market.

If only Cowbridge could run its own affairs again.  We have a lovely Town Hall and an oak panelled Council Chamber. In his ceremonial robes our Mayor looks like a medieval monarch.  We have aldermen in top hats that are the envy of any of our twin town visitors.  But this ancient council is powerless over anything more important than a park or a cemetery.  That they oppose to a man and woman selling the Cattle Market site is of no consequence.

So in case anyone reading this is moved by our plight, which could so easily one day be your plight too, could they please write to the Vale of Glamorgan Council and tell them to leave the Cowbridge's Cattle Market site alone.  Because you want to come and visit, don't you?  And if you do come and visit I am sure that you want to be able to park your car.  And perhaps visit Cowbridge's Theatre.  And, you never know, you might even have animals to sell, too.  Or, in the middle of the night when the cars and lorries have gone and the site is just the big and empty square that it ever was, you might be tempted to take up your longbow again and practice your archery.

ON A BICYLE MADE FOR TWO

My neighbour Annie and I used to work for the same consultancy firm back in the nineties and we both became friendly with the firm's librarian and researcher, Verna, who worked in the company's Edinburgh office.  We all used to meet once a year at the Christmas Party - a dinner and disco affair at some country inn in which we (and spouses too) were put up for the night.  The party went on until lunch the next day.

I hadn't seen Verna and her husband for more than a dozen years, although we had exchanged Christmas cards.  She and her husband are great cyclists, or rather they are great tandemists, possessing two tandems (lightweight and heavyweight - obviously -) on which they tour, not only their own country, but other people's as well.  They have even ridden across part of America, I understand.

Thus far they have never managed to tandem into Wales however, so it was with great pleasure that Annie informed me that they had announced their intention to come and that she was putting them up for a couple of days. We all had dinner together last night and they asked me if I could provide an itinerary of about 30 miles for them to cycle around today.

We are blessed here in the Vale of Glamorgan with a wealth of interests.  What to choose? I sent them to a Neolithic burial cairn (two if they don't mind a small detour); a power station; an interesting old stone town and the site of Wales' first monkish university;  the castle bought and restored by newspaper proprietor Randolph Hearst which now houses an international school and has gardens that run down to the sea; the lightouses and spectacular seascapes at Nash Point; the village of Ewenny whence came the yew wood for the longbows for Agincourt and the interior of whose priory was captured in a painting in the 1780's by Turner and which hasn't change one jot since;  the haunted Pwllgwrach, around which you can hear foxhounds baying on windy nights in winter (legend has it that at the same time that Turner was painting his picture of Ewenny the then hunt master at Pwllgwrach was being hunted and torn to pieces by his hounds for the crime of getting a poor servant lass in the family way and, according to some accounts,  murdering her as well).  Until recently the house was lived in by the Agatha Christie's nephew to whom were bequeathed all the rights to 'The Mousetrap.'  

The house also boasts a quintail, which, in case you don't know, is a bit of jousting equipment - a white metal figure with a sword that can swivel around a vertical pole.  This you gallop towards with your lance under your right arm and the object of the exercise is to strike the quintail in its exact centre.  If you do this then nothing happens: you can count yourself lucky and proceed to the jousting tournament. But should you miss and strike the quintail off centre then the device swings around and the quintail clobbers you with its sword as you go past.   Thus at the price of a sore back you progress.

I did offer them the Roman silver mines as well, but as these lie on the A48 (which Verna thought sounded excessively like a main road) they eschewed them.  In fact you can't actually see anything; you have to be told that somewhere in that bank beneath the gorse bushes you may discover a drift, long since collapsed or filled in, where once folk with names like Caractacus and Spartacus hacked their way into the limestone in search of silver for their goblets and lead for their central heating.

We shall have to see how the intrepid couple get on.  They are coming here for aperitifs this evening and no doubt some tapas type food as well and if the sunshine continues we shall sit in the garden.  Judging from the clouds however the weather forecast may be right and at seven o'clock we shall be watching the rain.

I cannot leave the subject of tandeming, however, with mentioning that I once had a chance to ride (and unfortunately wreck) a four-wheeled tandem, made from two ordinary bicycles welded together and with some clever linkage that turned the handlebars in parallel.  It was like a four-wheeled tricycle, I suppose, and was painted a rich burgundy colour.  Sadly, one day when I was riding the contraption alone - my friend who had built it had ridden it over to my house - I went around a corner too fast, whereupon the wheels simply buckled.  The sensation (to continue with the jousting theme) was not unlike a horse falling beneath you. You see you can't lean over on such a four-wheeled contraption and a bicycle wheel has no sideways strength.  So that was the end of my tandeming career and I have never been on another multiple person machine, although Verna did say that she would let me have a go on hers.  I wonder if she should trust me?

The picture, I am afraid, is not from the family collection but is courtesy of the ever dependable Wikipedia