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| 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.
