Blog post #22 Seriously Memory Lane!

It’s Mother’s Day today here in the antipodes, although back in the UK it falls sometime in the Spring, linked to the ever-movable feast of Easter.
Try remembering the UK Mother’s Day in the days of snail-mail!
Did my best and I hope my mum always knew that I loved her from across the globe.
My songbird mummy!
I’ve been thinking today of my earliest years in that tiny little cottage nestled under the hill, just over the way from Glastonbury Tor.
It was tough for my mum out there in the sticks with three little kids in a dilapidated cottage where, when it rained, the water came in through the back door, flowed across the flagstone floor and then out the front door!
How she and my dad toiled to make the place habitable for us!

I remember her telling me that at one point she was so unhappy that she grabbed her bike and rode up the hill and across to friends who lived five miles away, hoping for a little tea and sympathy. But she received neither, for they were out.
No phone you see.
No car either.
It would be a few years before my little old lovelies would have either of those!
So, she rode home again, crying all the way.

We kiddies knew none of this as she knitted us jumpers, quilted us coverlets, darned our socks, flitting about doing whatever needed to be done, with a little song never far from her lips.
And we were out to play in our wellies, climbing trees, rough and tumble, collecting windfalls, kick-tin, cops and robbers and all the games children played in innocence and laughter.
And at day’s end with grubby knees and happy hearts, it was Listen With Mother while eating bread and jam washed down with a nice cup of tea.

Spot my much loved dolly Sophie, who cried “Mumma” when she was tipped, forward and back; forward and back.
A present hidden behind my dad’s back as he leaned in to kiss me for my birthday and Sophie first made herself known to me from inside her prettily wrapped box.

Lucky little kids we were to have lived in such times of peace and simple delights.
My chosen music is Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken from The Merry Widow. (For it is so…….)
Couldn’t find Schwartzkopf, I’m sorry, but I do remember watching this as a Christmas Special in 1968, a decade after the little memories shared here.​
youtu.be/wO0Up7SIxJ8

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