The Royal Wedding (in 1947), Telly, Cinema and Rations

One of my daughters asked me the other day if I remembered much about the queen's wedding in the 1940s. We'd been discussing the razzamatazz that's going to surround Prince William's wedding to Kate Middleton.

I had to stop and think. What did I remember about the queen marrying Prince Philip?

As it happens, not much. I know it was in 1947 and they were married at Westminster Abbey by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The reason why I don't remember much about the Queen's wedding is very simple. It has nothing to do with being over 81. The fact is that we didn't, as a family living in a rural area of Lancashire, have a television in those days. And nor did anyone else we knew.

I watched the queen's coronation in 1953 but that was on television in Washington DC where I was, by then, living with my husband, posted there by the RAF after the war. It was in Washington that I first saw a television, in 1951.

I've seen many pictures of the queen's wedding to Prince Philip but I'm pretty sure I saw them long after 1947. I don't even remember seeing photos in newspapers at the time although perhaps I did. Our main source of news back then was the Pathé news reels that we saw in the cinema. I was aware that the royal wedding was happening but it wasn't a very big deal round our way. I was a teenager and certainly had other things on my mind. Boys, for example.

One thing I do remember is that there were some local women who sent their ration cards to Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, so she would be able to have enough material for her wedding dress. We were still rationed for years after the war and even if you had money you needed ration cards to get material just as you did to get food and other things. I'm probably being very naive there. She probably had a hundred ways round rationing. Anyway, I remember local women sending off ration cards to contribute.

Talking of the cinema, my friends and I used to go to the cinemas in Blackpool once a week or so. The Clifton Palace was a small cinema where the cashier handed you a square metal token instead of a ticket to get into the film. There was a back door at the Clifton which was sometimes left open - I don't know why - maybe to clear cigarette smoke or as an emergency exit. Little boys used to wait outside till the lights went down and the B film started and then they'd creep in, giggling, and watch the films for free. In those days there were always two feature films. The B film, then the main one. Most of the films we saw back then were American. I'm talking about during the war now - 1940, 1941 - when I was 11, 12 years old. (We didn't think anything of getting the bus into Blackpool and then back home again at that age.) I remember the stars we saw were people like Abbott and Costello, Betty Grable, Dorothy Lamour, Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. All those "Road To..." films.

There were a lot of Westerns too - cowboys and indians, which have long since fallen out of favour. At the time they were very popular and often quite bloodthirsty. My pal Betty used to hide her face against her seat when there was violence and ask me to tell her when it was over. Strange really because she was a rather robust farmer's daughter and I'm sure even at her tender age she was used to the sight of real blood on the farm.

Later, when we got television, we watched yet more Westerns. Wagon Train is one of the ones I remember. Clint Eastwood in Rawhide was quite a lot later on I think. Then police series became popular. Dixon of Dock Green would seem totally outdated these days but, at the time, the idea of the wise local bobby wasn't so farfetched. When I was a teenager, about 18 or 19, there used to be a show on the radio called Dick Barton, Special Agent. Again, people would laugh at it now but my father listened to it faithfully. I'd always be getting ready to go out when it came on and once Dick Barton started I knew I'd have to get my make-up on and run or I'd miss the bus into town.

I know I'm rambling a bit here but thinking of those years, Pathé news reel, the royal wedding and the war reminds me of something else. Betty and I used to collect money during the war for the Penny A Week Fund. This was a Red Cross fund and the idea was to collect money to send to the Red Cross so they could send food parcels to our prisoners in the camps.

Betty and I were about eleven when we started collecting and we weren't meant to - we were too young. Everyone turned a blind eye though. Every Sunday mornings we'd cycle off on our rounds on our bikes, going from farm to farm in the countryside to collect contributions. Our local bobby was called PC Woodward and everyone thought he was really good-looking. He had a grim wife and a very pretty daughter called Arletta. All the people we collected from for Penny A Week gave more than a penny but MrsWoodward always gave exactly that - one penny!

The money went off to the Red Cross and they sent food parcels to POWs in German camps. I had a cousin in one camp and his best friend there was an Australian called Jack Hercules. My cousin and Jack knew that we collected for the food parcels and when they eventually got released at the end of the war they both came to England. My cousin came home obviously; Jack Hercules just came to visit. He then returned to Australia and, returning the solidarity we'd shown him during his years in the camp, he used to send us food parcels up until post-war rationing was stopped.

One of the other things Betty and I did to help the war effort was to hold a jumble sale. We asked people we knew - family and neighbours - to give us old stuff and then we held a jumble sale in a hen house to raise funds for Mrs Churchill's Aid To Russia Fund. We were twelve years old I guess, so it was about 1941 or 1942. The bobby's wife, Mrs Woodward again, said she wanted a preview of the sale so she could have first pick of the items for sale. We refused! We had some quite good stuff too. A milliner's shop had closed down because business was so bad and the owner gave us lots of hats to sell. Mrs Churchill's Fund was, again, for the Red Cross but this one sent medicine and surgical equipment to our Russian allies. I can't remember how much we raised - not very much I don't suppose - but we got a letter back from Mrs Churchill, signed Clementine Churchill. She thanked us for raising funds "to help our brave Russian allies."

Then we held a raffle. Heaven knows why we did all these things. I can't remember anyone prompting us. It was probably just the spirit of the times. Anyway, we begged and borrowed rationed food from relatives and neighbours - bags of sugar or a few eggs or a packet of tea - and then sold them raffle tickets so they could win them back... When we'd sold all the tickets we put them in a big ceramic bowl at Betty's house and started drawing them out. Betty drew the first ticket and looked at the name. "I don't like her" she said and promptly put the ticket back in the bowl. She didn't like the next person either. I had a go and put my ticket back in too. We kept going till we drew someone we liked. At some point Betty's mother came in and saw what we were doing. She stopped it right away! All the tickets went back in the bowl and she said firmly "I'll draw them now. We'll do it properly."

Looking back I can't see how so many of us got through those years really. Rations were so tight and food so scarce. There was a black market of course but we were in the countryside. In winter there wasn't much food about. My father kept a dozen chickens so we had eggs but he needed corn to feed them. He'd go up to the nearby farm to get corn for them on the black market. It was a bit risky and one night he ran into PC Woodward. Worried that he'd get into trouble he soon realised that the bobby, who kept chickens too, was going to the farm for exactly the same reason - black market corn for his hens.

Sometimes a local farmer would kill a pig and we'd get some meat. Or my father would kill one of the chickens if it got too old to lay eggs, or shoot a rabbit. We had a quarter of an acre of garden too, where he grew fruit and vegetables. But so many things were rationed for so long - bread, soap, sweets, eggs, butter, meat, flour. Everything you needed really.

But get through it we did. There wasn't really any choice.

Growing Older. Stay Open To New Cultures and Meet New People - Even in Your 80s

I live in a flat in Guildford in Surrey, in the south of England. I've lived here for over 35 years, since marrying my second husband after I was widowed at 38. (I'll write later on about my husbands, marriages, being twice widowed, losing another boyfriend to open heart surgery and meeting my current 'boyfriend' when I was 63.)

It's a nice flat, with lawns on either side and tall pine trees where gold finches nest and breed. On the other side of the landing my next door neighbour is one of the Cadbury family. Or rather, she was, but she now lives in the Middle East with her husband and children. For years now, she's let the flat out on fairly short term leases.

I don't really know why but every tenant she's ever had has been foreign. Whether that's because of the agency she uses, or the rent she charges or just because the demand for rental properties in Guildford is from non-British people for some reason I have no idea.

For me, it's meant an ever-revolving door of neighbours from other countries, continents and races, speaking other languages. And that's meant a chance to meet people I never would have met otherwise, help them a bit if they have queries about the building or about living in Guildford, and learn a bit about their cultures. It's usually been very interesting.

Currently there's a Kurdish couple renting. The young wife was educated in Canada and has an American accent. I'm not sure what accent her husband has. When they first arrived I was a bit put out because on the first day they opened all the windows in the building, though it was cold outside, and moved the pot plants I carefully cultivate on the window sills. Then a very odd acrid smell, unlike anything I've ever smelt before, came wafting from the flat. It wasn't like something cooking. I wondered if it was part of some sort of religious ritual, 'cleansing' a new home? Anyway, after a day or so the smell went and I closed the windows and put the plants back and that was the end of that. I soon invited the new tenants round for a drink and they arrived with flowers and chocolate. The young woman refused a glass of wine but her husband shared a couple of glasses of pinot grigio with me. I don't know if she refused alcohol on religious grounds. We didn't really discuss anything about their background or where they're from. These days it's difficult to chat freely which is a shame as it's interesting to ask where people come from and to talk about their country and your own. The only thing I really learnt about them is that the husband is a paediatrician at the Royal Surrey County Hospital, probably in his late 30s. They're both very pleasant, as most of the tenants have been.

There were four Spanish guys a few years ago. Students. They looked a bit stroppy but turned out to be very kind. They'd carry my shopping up the stairs when they ran into me and after a while told me if I had heavy shopping to knock on their door and they'd come down and carry it up for me. I thought that was very considerate - students have their own lives to live without elderly ladies appearing at their door asking for help. After they left a lot of letters kept arriving for them. They gave me a forwarding address and maybe they regretted that because I got the idea some of the letters might be from people  the boys owed money to...

Then there were two Lebanese guys. They were very solemn and not very friendly. The first thing they did was to put a Sky dish on their balcony, which isn't allowed under the flats' regulations. As I was Director of the Residents' Association at that time I got the job of going round to explain and tell them they had to take it down. They weren't very pleased but they did it. Like lots of young men, I guess, they didn't seem to be very domesticated - the outhouse where the rubbish goes was stuffed with empty pizza boxes all the time when they were renting!
Two French girls rented for a while. They were really pleasant, lively and full of Gallic charm. Everyone says the French health system is the best in the world and certainly the girls were not terribly impressed with the NHS (which I worked in for many years.) One of them went to a GP with a bad cold one day and was shocked to be sent home with (perfectly good) advice to take an aspirin! She gave me the impression she expected some serious treatment but I can't imagine what. We saw quite a bit of each other, my French neighbours and I, and I tried to speak some very rusty French with them. I passed French years ago when I got my School Certificate - but that was over 60 years ago. When they returned to France after their university studies ended they left me a letter saying they'd enjoyed being my neighbours. I thought that was very sweet.

Then there was a young Indian couple with two nice little girls. They were pleasant too. One Saturday not long after we introduced ourselves to each other the wife knocked on my door and presented me with a huge bowl of lamb curry. "This is for your lunch" she said. It was very kind of her - and very good. They were a quiet family, very organised I think. I remember giggling a bit to myself one day after the husband came in to my flat to borrow something or other and sitting neatly on my sofa, looking around at my flat, he said approvingly "This is a very well-maintained house". I don't really think of my home as very well maintained.

There was a sweet young Thai girl, a student from Bangkok I think. She inadvertently left the flat's central heating on at full blast when she went home to Thailand over the Christmas holidays. When she returned she knocked on my door in tears as the flat was full of condensation and there was mildew on the walls. I felt so sorry for her. She told me sorrowfully and very sweetly: "My mother told me not to upset anyone in England." She was so concerned about behaving well. She'd brought me a beautiful silk scarf from Bangkok as a present. We sorted the flat problem out together.

A young Chinese couple came to study at Surrey University. While they were renting next door and studying, the wife became pregnant. Quite soon after arriving in Guildford. They were very impressed at the pre-natal and post-natal care they and the baby received and the fact that it was all free. They came back to Guildford a couple of years later and did exactly the same thing. Had a second baby. I didn't think it was really right to come and use the NHS for free but I liked them and wished them well and now I wonder if they actually came in order to avoid China's one child policy? Perhaps they can get away with having two babies if they have them outside China?

When I think of all the tenants renting next door from other countries I realise I've met a lot of people from other cultures. It's surprising in a way though that, though we got to know each other, I didn't feel free to ask them much about their own cultures because all that has become so sensitive in Britain. It's a shame. It would be much more interesting if people could talk freely and ask each other questions. When I was young, you didn't automatically meet people from other countries. In my youth the unfortunate thing that got people crossing continents was mostly the war. (We had a Polish airman billeted with us during the war, for example, who had escaped the Nazi invasion of Poland with his wife and daughter.) I don't know if my mother and father ever even met a black person in pre- or post-wartime Lancashire. And I was 17 before I did. Now, there's so much opportunity to meet and learn from each other. We should all be free to talk, ask each other questions and enjoy finding out about other continents.

How To Be A Good Mother or Father: Here's The Secret: Just Do Your Best

There's a lot of tension in Britain these days about parenting. I'm not talking about the kind of parents who never should have had children, who see them as a nusiance and maltreat them. Social workers have to deal with some of those families and who'd envy them their task?

But lots of capable, well-meaning and loving parents seem to be made neurotic about raising their children - perhaps by the media and constant reports about what's 'best' for children.

Parents' worries seem to be mostly about education, health and safety. That's understandable. If you can believe any of what you read in the papers then, in lots of areas of Britain, school discipline seems to have broken down so that learning is no longer the priority. Pupils bent on causing trouble can do it easily, safe in the knowledge that teachers don't have any real sanctions to deal with them. To someone of my age, the sight of teachers being hauled into court or losing their jobs for some minor infraction, after decades of devoted teaching and on the say-so of a child still - obviously - wet behind the ears is a travesty. Have a look at what I wrote recently about school discipline when I was at school in the 1930s. I'm not saying bring back Mrs Roscoe's leather strap or Miss Gillett's cane (my teachers in Lancashire) but there has to be a balance between rigid control and chaos in classrooms. Otherwise none of the children will learn.

Their children's health will always trouble parents. But there seem to be lots more health problems to worry about now than there were when I was a child or when I raised my kids in the 50's and 60's. Lots more allergies and lots more psychological problems. On the other hand, parents now have access to health care and medicines that I, and my parents before me, could never have imagined.

And safety. When my kids were small, living in rural Surrey, they'd vanish with their pals on spring or summer days - Just William style - and I wouldn't see them till they called in for a glass of water or at teatime. They roamed about in woods picking wild strawberries, tried to catch sticklebacks in streams, played on a wood lorry left in a sort of lumber yard - who knows what they got up to. During their whole youth there was only one time that a man molested a local child. And we had an elderly neighbour who'd grab the girls and try to kiss them in a rather revolting way. Everyone just saw him as a pest. The girls, like other village kids, used to take a shortcut through his garden and I'd say "Don't let him get hold of you." If he did, they'd wriggle away and come home saying "Ughhh, ughhh, he tried to kiss me." They instinctively didn't go past him if they were on their own.
But my kids were lucky. Growing up in rural south east England back then wasn't like growing up in a grim industrial town or 'inner city'. Children did play free, outside, unsupervised, and were generally happier for it is my bet.

Still, parents have always faced worries in bringing up their children and it would be wrong for today's parents to imagine they face more difficulty than other generations. Think of this. I remember during the war that kids were hastily billetted all over the place, out of the cities that were being bombed, separated from their mums and dads for who knew how long, shoved into households where they knew no-one and were not necessarily welcome guests. One day when I was about 11 (it must have been about 1940) I remember a woman - a total stranger - came to our door and absolutely begged my mother to take her little granddaughter in because the Germans were bombing Liverpool. I still remember the woman's tragic expression and pleading. I learnt that the family were Jews though I didn't really know what jewish meant. We did take the little girl in, for several weeks - she had beautiful black hair and pale blue eyes and was called Sylvia. (We found out very soon that the beautiful black hair was full of lice. Mum had us kids and dad - and a Catholic Polish airman billetted in our house with his wife and baby because of the war - all out in the little back garden washing our heads with a soap called Derbac. It was the sole product available for head lice in those days.)

Just like children have their fears about the monster under the bed or in the cupboard, parents have their fears that their child will get ill or run over or be snatched away. But the thing is, life isn't always under our control. In the 1930s and 1940s people had far less control of their lives, health, education and safety than we do now. Imagine packing your child off to school every day with a gas mask, as my mother did for years, fearing a bomb or gas attack would mean you'd never see each other again. The best a lot of parents in Lancashire where I grew up in the 1930s and 40s could hope for, for their children, was that they'd learn to read - and find work in a mill or a factory when they left school at 13 or so.

As we all steadily got more control since the second world war, people seem to worry about any risk. That'll just ruin your life. And will probably make your kids neurotic too!

I remember taking my second child back to Washington DC in 1956. She'd been born in England and was 7 months old. (My husband, Gerry, was stationed in Washington in the Royal Air Force after serving in the RAF throughout the war.) A bunch of us went down from Washington one day to see American friends in Philadelphia. They were middle-aged, Steve and Babs Rotay, and had already raised their family. At lunch, I was slightly horrified to see my husband and Steve gaily improvise a baby chair at the table for my chubby, blonde, little baby. They plonked her in a huge 'carver' chair and strapped her in with a couple of Steve's leather belts. And gave her a chicken leg. I didn't like to say anything - the others were all a lot older than me and not long ago they'd beaten the Nazis - but I kept a bit of an eye on her. She had a whale of a time. She was in the thick of things - chatter, laughter, beer, whisky, smoke and all. She had a huge smile on her face and chortled her way through the afternoon.

I think what I'm saying is keep an eye on your kids but don't get neurotic. Whatever you do as a parent there will be events over which you have no control. In my case, I brought my 2 girls up both in the same way. One has had - so far, touch wood - pretty excellent health, the other has had illness after illness, including Hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion (in 1984 I think it was) after the birth of her son, and skin melanoma. There will always be things you cannot protect your children from. And you worry about them even when they're in their 50s!

After raising two girls, having a hand in raising three grandchildren, and now having a great-grandson, here's my advice about having and raising children if anyone's interested:

Love them to bits.
Do your best for them.
Treat them equally. (They'll see that you treat them equally even when they put on a whiney voice and say "It's not fair...".)
And don't worry if you make mistakes. They'll forgive you.

Free university education? Not in the early 21st century - and not in the early 20th century either.

 Last week I watched the student protests and the attack on Millbank Tower in London. Most of the students seemed to be protesting peacefully but of course there'll always be some who get out of control. I felt sorry for some of the coppers getting hit and cut, and the student who chucked a fire extinguisher off the tower certainly wasn't doing anything progressive. Experience suggests that most of the students smashing windows and breaking things will turn into ordinary middle-aged people with kids and mortgages even though they don't imagine at the moment that they will.

I haven't followed the latest ins and outs of education policy but I know the coalition government is planning to raise university fees and students are demonstrating for free higher education. My daughters both benefited from free university education and I was delighted they had an opportunity that few teenagers got in my day.

They went to university in the 70s though - in those days Britain didn't have a trillion pound budget deficit.

Back in the 30s, when I started school in Lancashire, the opportunity of free university education was still a long way off.

I started school at 5 years old, in 1934, at Joseph's infant school in Wesham. It was a Roman Catholic school, obviously. Most schools were religious and funded by the various religions. My best friend, Betty, went to the local Church of England school. At Joseph's, we sat on long benches to be taught by the only teacher, Mrs Roscoe, who was my mother's cousin. She was a middle-aged married woman with grey hair who wore shapeless cardigans and skirts. To maintain order and discipline she had a leather strap, 2 inches thick, and you got whacked if you stepped out of line. I remember little boys in the class coming back to the benches with their eyes smarting after she'd strapped their hands in punishment. Poor little things!

Unthinkable in today's schools, the strap did help the teacher keep order back then. None of us objected to it. It was just the way discipline was maintained. You didn't question the teacher or the school and parents accepted teachers' authority too.

When I was about 8 I left Joseph's and went to the Roman Catholic school in Westby. The teacher here, Miss Gillett, was another of my mother's cousins. Miss Gillett was an aging spinster who used a thin cane to keep order. No wonder, because she had about 30 of us kids aged between 8 and 14 and quite a few were farm boys who would have preferred to be anywhere but in a schoolroom.

There were no set lessons and we didn't know what we'd be studying from day to day. Miss Gillett would simply come in each day and say: "Today we'll do arithmetic" or "Today we'll do English." The farm boys regularly got caned for not paying attention or for being a bit cheeky. From time to time - I can't remember exactly why; we probably sniggered at something - all of us had to line up and Miss Gillett caned all of us. I remember getting caned, that little whip hitting my hand.

There were only 2 classrooms in the school. Up to 8 years old, children were taught by Mrs Martin . She wore a motheaten fur coat and thought she was rather wonderful. In our classroom, with children aged 8 to 14 all mixed up, it was sometimes a bit chaotic. I can't remember really learning anything at either school but somewhere along the way, someone - Miss Gillett I suppose - taught me to read.

One term when I was about 10, Miss Gillett kept me separate from the other pupils for a couple of weeks. She took me to a cupboard where there was a set of encyclopedias and told me to sit and read them. I had no idea why, but I dipped in and out of them a bit in between looking out to see what the other children were doing. Day after day I sat and leafed through the various volumes reading snippets of information.

I had some form with encyclopedias as it happened because some time before this a salesman had come to our door at home and persuaded my father to buy 6 (or was it 10?) volumes of a series called Arthur Mees' Children's Encyclopedias. The volumes had elegant dark blue binding and looked very appealing to me. I had it in mind from the start that they were fairly precious because my father had to pay 6 pounds and 10 shillings, which he could only afford to do in installments.

Anyway, at the end of the 2 weeks in the cupboard with these volumes I was taken to the nearby town of Kirkham and told I was to sit an exam. It was a scholarship to the Catholic convent - Layton Hill - in Blackpool.

Miss Gillett told me no-one had ever got a scholarship to the convent from Westby school and I was the only pupil being entered for it. She didn't say why she'd picked me.

I vaguely remember there were questions which required Yes/No answers and some which were problem solving types. After the exam I went home and forgot about it altogether until Miss Gillett told us one day that the scholarship results had been announced in the Lancashire Daily Post, that I'd won a scholarship and would be going to Layton Hill Convent and that all the pupils were getting a one day holiday off school to celebrate.

The other pupils were delighted to get a day's holiday but I was terrified. I wouldn't know anyone at the convent and I'd have to get a bus to Blackpool and back every day.

It seems strange, looking back, that there was a war on and we lived in daily fear of the Nazi bombers - listening every time we heard a plane because even kids could tell the difference between 'our' planes and theirs - and yet we kids were worrying about normal things like going to a new school or cheering because of a day off school. Some things never change.

Through my school years it seemed perfectly normal to have air raid drills where we went into the little shelter and put our gas masks on. We carried gas masks everywhere we went, not just to school, and even the littlest kids knew how to fit them. Only if we were playing near our homes did we leave our gas masks inside. Gas wasn't used in the second world war though as far as I'm aware. The fear of gas, and distribution of gas masks, was really a hangover from the First World War when so many men were gassed in the trenches. I was only caught in one incendiary bomb attack which I'll describe some other time. We were out in the back garden and heard a plane and all looked up, listening as usual for the noise telling us it was 'one of ours.' It wasn't, the noise was a German plane and suddenly there were flames coming up all over the place, all around us.

But as I say, children - like adults - have their own mundane worries even in wartime and when that summer ended and I went off to my new school I was still in a state of terror. With hundreds of girls, Layton Hill seemed huge after my little school at Westby. I now had to wear a school uniform, which I wasn't used to. There were around 30 girls in each class. I could sense that this school was going to be different from the 'education' I'd known before.

But I not only settled in quickly, I loved it. I found I loved learning and everything we were taught seemed fascinating after the rather unstructured and informal education I'd had up till then. After the first year we were all to be streamed into A and Alpha classes. The brighter girls would do Latin; the less academic would do domestic science. I quite liked cookery and wanted to be in that stream but I was placed in the Latin stream.

Had I not won the scholarship to the convent, I would have had to go to the local state school which didn't have a good reputation. My parents could never have afforded to pay for my education. As it was, they had to pay for hockey sticks and boots, tennis racquets and other sports gear and it was all expensive. The scholarship paid my fees and travel to and from school and, I think, my uniform. But both my mother and father seemed to know education was valuable though they weren't educated themselves. My father had left school at 12, which was common in those days, and I guess my mother left around the same age. Dad earned 5 pounds a week at about this time, working for a local market gardener who had a nursery. My cousins mostly worked in the local biscuit factory and my mother had been a weaver in the cotton mill. I would have had to do the same if I'd had to leave school earlier.

At 17, I got my School Certificate. This meant I'd passed exams in Latin, English Grammar, English Literature, French, Art, Science, Religious Knowledge and Maths. If you didn't pass English Grammar you couldn't get your School Certificate, even if you passed all the other exams.

The big question for me now was What next? In those days, most people from poor or modest backgrounds had only a dim idea about universities. I know that I liked the thought of going to a university but didn't know anything about them. I knew my father could never pay for me to go and wasn't sure if there was a new scholarship I could try to get.

As it happened, the problem of finding a scholarship never arose. My parents explained to me that now I had my School Certificate I'd need to leave the convent, find a job, and bring some money into the house. They could no longer afford to feed and clothe me without me contributing something each week.

This was just a matter-of-fact reality and I accepted it without question. I knew we were stretched financially as my father was buying our terraced house in Wesham in some sort of mortgage arrangement. I don't know how it worked. He didn't even have a bank account. But once a month we went to a solicitor's house in Kirkham and handed over an envelope with the payment in it in cash.

I had no idea how I'd find a job or what sort of job I should - or even could - look for but an opportunity presented itself almost straight away. The convent secretary was one of the nuns, Mother Clara. She explained that the convent was admitting more pupils and she would need an assistant to help her. If I would stay on at the school - now as assistant secretary - she would teach me shorthand and typing and I'd get a small wage. I was happy to agree. It was a strange first job. Still a teenager, I was now working at the school where my luckier school friends were still studying in the sixth form. I wasn't allowed in the staff room until my second year in the job. And I was learning to be a school secretary. So I was halfway between staff and pupil really.

I remember showing Mother Clara a letter one day that had been sent from an African country. I forget which one all these years later. It was from the parents of a girl called Rosette Solomon. Out of the blue, they announced that they had dispatched their daughter to England and she would shortly arrive at the convent as a boarder. I can't remember how payment was made but Rosette duly arrived at Layton Hill in Blackpool. She attracted quite a bit of interest from the staff and pupils as she was the first black child many of us had ever seen!

How Colours Fade As You Get Older

Now I'm in my 80s, my daughters often tell me, when I'm ready to go out, that my make-up needs a bit of attention. I put too much eyebrow pencil on and too much lipstick. The eyebrow pencil, when it's too heavy, makes me 'look like a clown.' Daughters will always be honest with you about your appearance. The lipstick may be all right, but a bit too heavy.

They'll take some of the eyebrow pencil off and maybe some of my foundation. I don't blend it well enough apparently. It feels funny when they tidy up my make-up. I used to wipe ice-cream and chocolate off their faces when they were little. Now they'll wipe make-up off mine. The roles are reversed.

What I've explained to them is that as you get older your sight often gets weaker and you see colours less vividly. They may see the make-up is too heavy but when I peer in the mirror I see faint lines where I put the eyebrow pencil. And where they see bright red or coral lipstick, I see faint colour.

I don't like the idea that my make-up looks odd though so I'm happy for them to adjust it when they're around.

On the other hand they both compliment me a lot on my skin. Even though I drink quite a bit of wine and have done for years, my skin is clear and I have relatively few wrinkles. My forehead in particular is unwrinkled - my daughters say I must use botox, which of course I don't! But I think your skin is largely determined by your genes and I must be lucky there. I don't have an awful lot of faith in skin creams. I use Oreal products quite a lot but I notice that they always have something new out. The newest thing I bought from them is an under-eye cream that comes with a little vibrating mechanism. You put the cream on and use the vibrating thing to massage it into your skin. But it seems obvious to me that if the skincare companies keep producing new creams for your eyes or face or hands then they haven't produced creams that really work. One year they say "This is the cream you need for puffy eyes" or dry skin or age spots. If it really was though, they wouldn't produce a new one the year after.

Fear of Getting Older? It's The Indignities That Are Most Worrying

In September and November 2010 I lost two old friends. One was in his nineties and died unexpectedly after a stomach operation. (Or at least, as unexpectedly as possible after ninety.) The other was, like me, in her eighties. A very dear friend for many years, she fell and hit her head one day and died just a few days afterwards.

When people die suddenly, even if they're old, it's a shock. In my experience though, people start looking for ways to feel better about the loss. "He'd had a good life" they say. Or "at least she didn't get ill and suffer for years." And there's certainly something to be said for that outlook.

I have another old and dear friend who has recently been diagnosed with Alzheimers. She's a year older than me and started losing her faculties about two years ago. At first she would simply repeat an anecdote. The moment she recounted it, she'd say it again. It was clear she had no idea she'd just told me the same story. It was a shock when it started. What on earth was happening to her? She'd always been so bright. After that she began to lose her memory for lots of things and muddle dates and times up. If I invited her round for a drink or to dinner, she might turn up on the wrong day, or call to ask me to remind her when she should be coming round.

Then she began to talk about her mother and father, long dead, as if they were still alive. She started to mislay and lose things and she'd say: "Oh that's my mother -she's taken my make-up again." I'd gently explain that her mother had been dead for a long time and she'd seem a bit shocked but then carry on with what she was doing.

Alzheimer's is obviously a progressive disease and though I didn't know much about it before, I saw it changing her behaviour and getting worse. She had always taken great care of her appearance but started to neglect it without seeming to realise that she hadn't washed her hair or hadn't put her lipstick on.  She got progressively confused, frustrated and tearful about everyday things and sometimes I'd call round and find her crying. Once, she invited me to tea and put a plate of bread and paté on the table - but it wasn't  paté, it was cat food. Now, although that may sound funny it wasn't because she was unaware of what she'd done and couldn't understand what the problem was when I explained it to her.

I also worried a bit about her beloved cat as I wasn't sure she was remembering to feed it regularly.

Eventually she had 'carers' who came in twice a day. There are all sorts of common sense things, apparently,  that English carers can't do these days. They told me they couldn't wash her hair or do her make-up or change her sheets. For over five months - I think they said six months in total - they didn't change her sheets. I think that's scandalous. They were paid a fortune but the excuse was that they didn't have "the right" to go into her bedroom and change the sheets unless she asked them to. Something like that anyway. Common sense should tell the authorities that if you have a woman in her 80s with Alzheimers people sent to help, and paid to help, should take charge, take responsibility, and change the bedclothes.

She began to look progressively dishevelled and no wonder. I used to drive her down to the hairdresser before I had to give up driving, so at least her hair was washed and cut.

Eventually she had a few episodes where she was found wandering in Stoke Park or in Guildford and she had a few falls and after spending time in hospital she was put in a home in Wimbledon. In her lucid moments she told me, often, that she didn't want to leave her home and go into a 'care' home. But in the end she had no choice.

For many people my age I think that's the sort of thing we least want to experience. Toppling over and dying or having a heart attack and dying, are not pleasant thoughts but most of the people I know, of my age, tend to agree the worst thing would be going into a home and declining slowly as you get towards ninety. We enjoy living independently and we don't want to give that up. We may not talk about it very often, especially not to younger people, but we do fear needing someone to spoon food into our mouths, help us to the bathroom or wash us.

Personally I do think a bit about dying - I talked to my younger daughter about this the other week - but there's no use worrying about it. At 81, I may have another 10 years for all I know. For me, the most important thing would not be the number of years I have left but the quality of them. It's not so much the end of life that would worry me, more the thought of indignities I might face as I get nearer 90.

Still, I've had a pretty good old age so far and I was watching David Attenborough the other day in his new TV series on the origins of life on earth. He was born in 1926 and is three years older than me. He was jumping around filming in Australia, Canada and Switzerland. He didn't seem to have any problems scaling rocks or clambering about pointing out fossils on the seashore. That's what I call a good and healthy old age and as he's older than me, it makes me think I've got more active years to come.

Heavy Drinking and the Over 80s

I think there's a lot of panicking these days about certain habits. People aren't meant to go out in the sun for fear of skin cancer. Aren't meant to smoke for fear of lung cancer. Aren't meant to drink much for fear of high blood pressure or heart disease or liver disease.

For all I know it's all very good advice. But I have to say, particularly with regard to drinking, that I seem to know an awful lot of people my age and older who drink like fish and are still in pretty good condition.

I have a book somewhere in which Churchill wrote that he drank at every meal and on all occasions in between. He smoked cigars too, almost all the time. Obviously, he wasn't a man who believed the saying "All things in moderation". He had a couple of strokes, it's true, but he lived to be 91. I saw him (and photographed him) in Washington DC after the war and he seemed pretty hale and hearty.

I can almost say the same for my partner? boyfriend? - I never know how to refer to him - who drinks at least 4 pints of beer a day and is nearly 86. He's not hale and hearty perhaps but he's perfectly on the ball, lives entirely independently, follows the news avidly, and motor racing, has a social life and sees his daughter and grandchildren every week.

Most of my other friends, some younger, some older than me, drink regularly too. I can't see the point of worrying too much about it at my age. I like white wine and I like a drink with lunch sometimes and a few glasses with dinner, always. On my 80th birthday I had a party and around 30 of us drank champagne all evening. Friends returning to Guildford from holiday in France brought two cases and others bought champagne along too.  It was a lovely evening and the champagne went very well with all the food my younger daughter prepared.

My two daughters sometimes say they're worried about drinking - we all like wine - but I tell them that I've been drinking for 60 years and so far haven't come to much harm. Back in the 1950s, we all drank cocktails and martinis all the time. The girls' father was stationed in Washington DC with the Royal Air Force so we lived there for some years and the RAF lifestyle in America after the war was all about partying and drinking! I have a lot of photos of those days and in every one of them the girls' father has a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. In his case, sadly, the cigarettes did get him and he died in 1968, in his late fifties. However, he loved drinking and smoking and wouldn't have wanted to give up even if we'd had all the constant rather nagging health advice we get these days.

In the 60s, back in England, in Surrey, we drank sherry and gin (and babycham? - can hardly remember babycham but I think my elder daughter sometimes drank it as a teenager). And later on, in the 70s I suppose, once people really started going on holiday to France and Italy, Malta and Spain, we all started drinking wine.

Two male friends of mine died during 2010. They were both over 90 and both liked a drink. I'm sure health advisers would tut tut and say it's best to avoid drinking more than whatever is the medically preferred weekly limit. Perhaps they're right. But presumably there are lots of factors dictating what will and won't harm us because otherwise probably none of us would live to be 80 or 90. I had two brushes with cancer in my 60s (bladder cancer) and I haven't smoked since. The surgeon told me he's never had a patient with bladder cancer who hadn't smoked. But since I like a glass of wine, or several, and I've already lived to be 81 and a bit, I'll take my chances with alcohol and keep on drinking. I won't go as far as Churchill did and drink on every possible occasion but I'll stick to my glass of wine with lunch and a couple of glasses with dinner.

Disabled Children Born in the 1920s - My Baby Brother's Fate

I was born in 1929 and was brought up as an only child. But I wasn't the only child my parents had. A few years before I was born, my mother gave birth to a little boy.

My brother was born at home in Kirkham in Lancashire, just as I would be. But whereas I was healthy, he was not. He was a very sick baby. My father told me years later that he had a hole in his back - a sort of wound that was unhealed. Although I can't be sure, I think he must have had spina bifida.

I don't know what the treatment is these days for a baby with spina bifida. It's not a condition I know much about. But in those days, it was often thought best that a very sick or disabled baby was left to die. Or - who knows - even "helped" to die. I think that is what happened with my brother. My father told me many years later that our doctor said just after the birth that the baby would only live for about a week. Obviously it was terribly upsetting for my parents. Their first child...

My father arranged straight away to have his son christened. We were catholics and in those days we believed without even really thinking about it that an unchristened baby who died would go to limbo and spend eternity there. (What a terrible thing for a religion to tell parents facing the death of a child.) Anyway, my brother was christened. The priest came to the house for the baptism and the sick baby was given the name William.

Each day that week William lay in his cradle and each evening my father administered a medicine to him. He was told by the doctor to fetch the medicine from the chemist each evening. When my father eventually talked about the death of my brother, when I was an adult, he told me that the doctor had never explained what the medicine was or what it was for but my dad noticed that each evening after he had the medicine, William was worse. At the end of the week, he died.

My father told me that it hadn't even occurred to him to question the doctor's orders - in those days the doctor, like the priest, was a bit like God - you didn't question them and you certainly didn't challenge them. It didn't even cross your mind. However, looking back, my father said he'd often - naturally - thought about his sick baby boy and had concluded that, whatever the doctor had ordered, it had probably killed William.

He could never know for sure and I will never know. My mother had died by the time my father talked to me about this. I don't know if he had ever shared his opinion with her. Probably not. She was ill most of her adult life with pernicious anaemia and he probably would have thought she wasn't strong enough to talk about losing the baby.

My dad was of course a man of his time and when he talked about William and his death he talked about it simply and objectively. He just said that he thought the doctor had probably told him to administer a 'medicine' that had killed the baby. He didn't say he thought that was terrible, or for the best, or anything else - just that he thought that was what had happened. I'll never know if he was inwardly angry at the doctor or calmly accepting that a medical judgement had been made or even reassured by the belief that William had been spared a long life of pain and disability.

I suspect, because it was back in the 1920s, that he may simply have thought that's how life was and that was the professional decision taken by the doctor. It makes me shiver though to think that my kind dad may have spent that week trustingly giving 'medicine' to his sick baby son in the hope it would improve his condition, if in fact it was killing him.

Computers for the Over 80s - Internet, Google, Adsense, Facebook

Because I'm elderly - 81 and nearly 2 months as I write - I'm not brilliant with computers. I saw an article in a paper the other day that made me laugh. It was an article titled something like "Silver Surfers" and it was about people over 50 using the internet. For heaven's sake. My daughters are both over 50 and I wouldn't call them silver surfers. I don't think either of them has a grey hair. They're young!

Even I'm not a silver surfer - what a patronising phrase. I colour my hair. (Only a bit, with washout colour, not with peroxide or anything. I left that behind in the '50s.)

Anyway. I use the internet and I have a PC in my home study and I use the internet at both my daughters' houses too, when I'm visiting. At the start, before I'd ever used a computer, my daughters bought me a PC and I went on a short course in Guildford to learn how to use Word and email and look around the internet. I didn't do anything very adventurous; the idea was just to use email mostly to stay in contact with family members. At first I had no idea that if you had a query or question or wanted information on any topic under the sun you could just key it ito Google and get hundreds of results. My two daughters, son-in-law and grandson gradually showed me all the different things I could do.

I'm still fairly basic in what I do with the PC and the internet though. There's a lot I don't understand and a limit to what I want to learn. Facebook, for example, holds no interest for me whatsoever. All the Word commands frustrate me a bit too. Sometimes the text becomes small all of a sudden and I have no idea which key I pressed or how to make the text larger. And the other day I got something up on the screen that I couldn't understand and a message appeared beside it saying "What's this?" I was baffled. How would I know what it was? How would I answer the question even if I knew the answer? One of my granddaughters explained later that it wasn't asking me what the thing was - rather I should have clicked on the icon to get more information. A lot of computer "thinking" is lost on me. There are lots of websites that I can't find my way around too. I fly several times a year as one of my daughters lives in France, but she always books my flights. I haven't used the Flybe website myself to buy a ticket. I'm worried about giving bank details online.

My daughters helped me start this blog after one of them asked me lots of questions about my childhood. "Why don't you write a blog?" she said. I knew perfectly well what blogs were because they're referred to everywhere now - on the BBC, in the papers - but I had no idea I could just write one. They helped me start this and helped me register me for Adsense, explaining that you get paid for blogs if people read them. I'll believe it when I see it.

All this is in order to say that although I'm not very good with computers I had a pretty good IT idea the other day. I was in a pub in Shere, in Surrey, the White Horse - and got talking to two elderly men who it turned out were from Lancashire, like me. When they were young, they had friends who went to school in Kirkham. We didn't talk for very long but I guess if we'd gone through a list of names we would have known some people in common.

So I wonder if Google or some internet company couldn't make a sort of IT Contact Board or Message Board in a mobile phone where you'd note lots of people you know, and so would other people, and you'd get signals when someone was nearby who knew people in common. It could be quite interesting. Imagine if you're young and you get a signal that someone in the same cafe or train as you knows your boss. The Message Board would indicate the people around you and which person you had the "match" with. You'd chat and perhaps find out information on your boss from someone who used to work for him.  Or from his daughter. Or ex-wife! Or imagine you get a signal and find that someone knows your daughter or friend or neighbour. It could be a god way of extending social and work networks. It could also be dangerous of course. Imagine your daughter finds out that a brassy blonde in the bar where she's sitting has listed her husband as one of her contacts...

It could also be used as a proper Message Board. Say a train is cancelled you could put out a message saying you could give three people a lift to the West End of London, for example. Their phones would tell them where you were, so they could approach you. Or if you were outside a concert with a spare ticket, you could signal that to everyone too.

This is the only computing idea I've ever had and I expect someone will tell me that all that is already possible with some mobile phone or other, or iPod or Google phone. Never mind. I think it's not a bad idea and it just goes to show that even at my age, if you learn something new, like internet use, it'll get you thinking and give you new ideas. Even if someone else has had them first.

Growing Up In Lancashire in the 1930s

I was born in a Lancashire town called Kirkham, a few miles from the Fylde coast.

I thought of Kirkham the other day because I was having lunch in the White Horse pub in Shere (in Surrey where I now live) and got chatting to two old chaps, two brothers. I noticed they had Lancashire twangs to their voices even though, like me, they'd lost most of their accent from decades of living in the south of England. They turned out to have had childhood friends in Kirkham and we reminisced a bit about what the town and surrounding area were like before and during the war.

Kirkham had one main street with a few shops, a cinema, a municipal swimming pool and an ancient Grammar School for boys. My family moved to the neighbouring town of Wesham (pronounced Wessom) before I was old enough to remember the house where I was born. In those days women tended to have their babies at home. My mother also gave birth to a boy some years earlier, my brother, but he had spina bifida and died not long after he was born. It was seen as perfectly normal to give birth at home in the same bed where your babies were conceived. It was years later that it became normal for women to give birth in hospitals. Certainly it was pretty normal by the time I had my first child in 1953. That was in America. My second was born in 1956, in England, also in hospital. I wonder if the old house where I was born is still standing, like me, 81 years later.

Wesham was a much smaller town, with just a handful of shops and a railway station and at the bottom of the town a weaving mill where most people from Wesham worked. The cotton mill, to me as a small child, was a really fearsome place full of noise and the clanking of the weaving looms. No-one could be heard in the din of the mill machinery and the only way the workers could communicate was by sign language - which was called me-mo-ing - or by lip reading. My mother was a weaver in the Wesham mill.

I only ever got to go right inside the mill once. It was probably in 1934, when I was about five. My mother had recently gone back to work there and I don't know who was supposed to be looking after me but I was found crying for my mother outside the mill. I was taken in and reunited with her and that was the end of her return to work! From then on she stayed at home.

My father was a labourer with the Water Board and earnt a bit of extra money helping with tasks like haymaking on local farms.

I had 3 aunties and 1 uncle. Auntie Polly was the eldest, then Auntie Nellie - who was deaf and dumb following an attack of scarlet fever when she was two - my mother Isabella was next and then Auntie Lizzie, who suffered from epilepsy.

Auntie Lizzie worked in a café in St Annes and on Saturday nights would bring round to our house a bag of cakes that were left over, unsold. This was one of the highlights of my week. Sometimes if I was lucky there would be vanilla slices or cream crisps; other times there were only bath buns.

Auntie Lizzie had no children and her husband, my Uncle Jim, worked as a signalman on the railyway. This was a lonely occupation, sitting alone waiting to work the signals for the trains, and he ended up having a nervous breakdown, having first tried to commit suicide by gassing himself. Fortunately, my cousin Joe Lambert, Auntie Polly's son, called round, found him and rescued him and poor Uncle Jim was carted off to the local mental hospital where he remained for many years.

As well as my aunties and uncle and a lot of cousins I also had both my granddads. My mother's father, Granddad Gillett, was pretty fearsome to me. He seemed about ten feet tall and had a grim face with a large hooked nose. He had apparently ruled his children, including my mother, with a rod of iron. None of them got married till they were thirty - he wouldn't let them. They all lived at home and I gather he took a good proportion of their wages off them as he retired early and even went on holiday to Spain with Monsigneur Rockliffe, our parish priest - a thing unheard of at that time in Lancashire society. The Monsigneur obviously squirelled money away somehow - when he died he left enough money to buy everyone in the parish a prayer book. All the books had a dedication to him inside them. I've still got my copy. He disapproved of books that weren't religious. He came round one day and saw that my Aunt Polly had bought a romance. He threw it on the fire!

Granddad Gillett allowed his children out on Saturdays once they were grown up, but they had to be in by 9pm. Granddad would be standing by the door with a cup of cold water from which they all had a drink before going up to bed.

Auntie Lizzie finally broke ranks and got engaged and then Auntie Polly and my mother followed suit. My father and mother courted for seven years before marrying, partly because Granddad was so strict and partly because my father - who used to come into Wesham on Saturday nights to seee my mum - suffered from an inability to get past the Swan Hotel where he used to put up his bike. After seven years my mother issued an ultimatum: we either get married or it's all off! They got married and I never knew my father to go into a pub or take a drink, except perhaps at Christmas or just a glass beer after helping with the haymaking.

Granddad Gillett died when I was 8. We had a sort of lying in state where Granddad was propped up in bed with 6 big candles burning, 3 on either side of him, and all the aunts and uncles and cousins gathered round saying prayers for the dead, with our parish priest in attendance. I was positioned at the bottom of the bed, peering up at my dead granddad. I have never forgotten the experience. I was bought a new grey coat to go to the funeral. In those days everyone went into deepest mourning when a close relative died and mother and the aunts all went to Preston, the nearest town, to buy their black. My mother apparently tried on a dress which looked a bit peculiar round the collar but the sales assistant assured her "it's the latest cowl collar, madam." It wasn't. Mother had put the dress on back to front. In spite of granddad's recent death apparently all my aunts fell about laughing.

It was a nice day for the funeral, sunny but cold, and everyone cried by the graveside. Afterwards the whole family went to the Swan Hotel - I think it was the only pub in Wesham - and had a funeral breakfast. Salad and boiled ham at that time was a great luxury.

Another memory, apart from seeing my grandfather dead in bed, is the way my aunts and their husbands, having been weeping at the graveside, were now all laughing and joking and making merry. I was shocked by this. I've been to enough funerals now, at my age, to know this is often the way, but then, with the logic of an 8 year old, I felt it was not right!

The tradition of wearing black when you were in mourning for a close relative persisted up until the late 1940s. When my mother died in 1949 I was 19 years old. We were told she died of pernicious anaemia. Young people then, unlike today, didn't wear black clothes. My father wanted me in black from head to foot and I was appalled. One of my aunts prevailed upon him at least to let me wear a white blouse with a black suit, which I did.

I was by myself with my mother when she died. It was a beautiful June morning and my father had gone to fetch the doctor. We had a little car by that time but no telephone. My mother, who had not had good health for years, became ill in the night and father wakened me at about 5.30am to sit with her while he drove to fetch the doctor from Wesham. She died whilst he was gone. I had read about people having a 'death rattle' and it was true with my mother.

Like granddad, my mother stayed at home in her coffin until the funeral.

At first, I was nevous about this and was necessarily in the house alone with her whilst my father went about making arrangements for the funeral . But then I got used to it and would go in and see her and give her a kiss and talk to her a bit.

I'm jumping ahead of myself here though and will go back to our life in Wesham when I was a small child.

Our house was an end-of-terrace but on the 'top road', not down near the cotton mill, which was reckoned to be a bit more elite! The front door opened right onto the pavement, with a little hall called a vestibule before you opened the door into the living room. We had just one living room, a fairly big kitchen with a walk-in pantry, and 3 bedrooms. There was no fridge back then. The pantry was just cold. There were shelves where my mother kept butter, milk, cream and meat. They were all covered to protect them from flies. She made cakes and plum and damson preserves for the winter. We had no bathroom or indoor toilet. The toilet was up at the end of our small garden but was at least a water closet and not one of the old type privies which were all they had on my aunties' and uncles' farms out in the countryside.

We had chamber pots under the beds for night time use. My mother and father had a splendid one, black with pink roses all over it, which had been a wedding present.

For baths, every Saturday night a tin bath with a high back, which hung on a nail outside the back door, was brought in and set before the fire. I was then bathed by my mother and put into a clean nightie, with my clean clothes laid out ready for Sunday. I wore a vest which always had a St Christopher's medal pinned to it with a little gold safety pin. Why my mother thought this was necessary, as St Christopher is the patron saint of travellers and I never went anywhere, I don't know. After the vest I wore a garment called a liberty bodice, a sort of sleeveless jacket with buttons up the front. I wore navy blue fleecey knickers and long brown woollen stockings, kept up with garters made by my mother from pieces of elastic.

I suppose all these garments were necessary because we had no heating except for the coal fire in the living room. The coal man used to come round with his horse and cart, and coal on the back and my father would buy sacks of coal. Also, we had no electric light, just gas light. The lights had mantles made of gauze and you pulled a small cord to get the gas to flow. Then we lit the mantles with lighted tapers. Outside our house was a street light and that was also gas. A little man used to come along in winter with a long pole and a taper on the end to light it.

Once You're Over 80, Your Friends Are Sadly Prone to Pop Their Clogs

Early this afternoon I was getting ready to go to the White Horse pub in Shere in Surrey with one of my daughters. I'd booked the local Dial a Ride service and we were going for lunch.

The phone rang and a friend announced that one of our friends, John Berry, had died. John was 92 - almost 93, I'm not sure. We'd been friends, a group of us, for a good 16 years I suppose, though in recent years we hadn't seen much of him. A few months ago we all went out to dinner and he was on good form - completely on the ball and in good humour.

Recently, we heard he'd gone into hospital for a stomach operation, suspected stomach cancer. But no, the surgeon found no cancer and John was going to spend a few more days in hospital and would then come home, even though an army of carers was apparently going to help him at home.

However, it wasn't to be and he didn't, obviously, recover from the op.

When you get to be 80 you have to accept that, increasingly, your friends will die. Somewhere around 55, I suppose, or maybe later, you become aware that you're going to more funerals than weddings. At 81, the funerals become all too common.

A few weeks ago a very close friend of mine died after a simple fall in her home. She was a bit unsteady on her feet and just toppled backwards. Unfortunately, the fall was enough to fracture her skull and she died that same weekend. When I looked at her obituary in the Surrey Advertiser I was shocked to see the obituary of another friend of mine too. I hadn't heard yet that he had died but there was the announcement, already in black and white.

Quite a few of my friends are younger than I am but I'm very aware that my friends around and over the age of 80 are vulnerable, just as I am. Perhaps it makes us appreciate each other more. It should do. When you're young, by and large, it doesn't occur to you that each time you see a friend may be the last. For those of us over 80, there's always that possibility. I treasure all my friends but I know that the very old are the least likely to be around next year or the year after. That's not being pessimistic, just realistic. And being realistic is useful since it means we can appreciate each other's friendship that bit more while we have the chance.

German Terrorists, Irish Terrorists, Muslim Terrorists

Some deluded young girl, with her head full of militant islamic faith, was jailed for life the other day for trying to kill her British MP. She stabbed him in the stomach because he voted for the Iraq war.

Only 21, she'll have lots of time to figure out what a foolish thing she did in the name of 'religion'.

At 81, I've seen a few terrorist movements come and go. I've concluded that every society is going to have some disgruntled minority or other which decides its principles give it the right to go round killing other people.

In the second world war the nazis decided they had the right to terrorise German jews. They started out going round kicking jewish citizens and smashing their shop windows. They got so much support for their thuggery from the German population as a whole that they grew from what might have stayed a relatively powerless and German national terrorist movement into an all-out effort at world domination. My generation, along with the Americans and other allies, had no option but to fight them.

Then we had the IRA. That was different from a terrorist movement that wants to dominate in that the Irish nationalists didn't want to take over Britain or dominate the British. They wanted to get Britain and British soldiers out of northern Ireland. Once the leaders Martin McGuiness and Jerry Adams became elected politicians speaking out against violence, it was predictable that a new bunch would start up, feeling they have the right to blow up people going about their daily lives.

And then we got the islamic terrorists. They do want to dominate. Like Hitler and the nazis, they want world domination. And like Hitler and the nazis, they think they're superior to everyone else.

I suppose I've become philosophical about these things since I think they'll always be with us. The human brain gets deluded very easily it seems. Human judgement and objectivity are terribly delicate things. Some causes are of course worth fighting for. Others are entirely unjustified attempts to force intolerance on others. There'll always be tussles over values and behaviour. Islamic terrorism is just the latest attempt to replace tolerance with intolerance and freedom with coercion.

Children, Grandchildren, Music and Pop Music

My youngest granddaughter always seems to pick musicians as boyfriends. I don't think it's deliberate; it just turns out that way. She went out with one in a band called The Metros. Then another one. Now it's a young man called Johnny in a band whose name I can't recall.

I had a meal with her and her older sister in Wetherspoons in Guildford last night. The girls came down from London just for a few hours to chat over a meal. (Six pounds for a  meal and a drink in the Guildford Wetherspoons seems like a good deal to me.)

One arrived from her job on a magazine called Stylist, which I've never seen, and the younger one arrived from her Anthropology course at UCL.

So who are you going out with now? I inquired.(Her elder sister is getting married in 2010 so I know who she's going out with.)

Oh, she raved, it was still Johnny. Really liked him. Some complications.

She told me the name of his band but I've forgotten it. She showed me a photo on her mobile of a dark-haired young man wearing a sort of jacket open to show his chest.

Very nice, I said neutrally. To be honest, since my sight is failing I didn't really get a good look at him.

'He's Suggs' godson' she said. 'You know, nana, that band Madness?'

(The girls and their brother, my grandson, call me nana because it's not quite so awful as Granny or Gran or Granma. As soon as they could speak I encouraged them not to go the 'Gran' route.)

Anyway - Suggs in Madness doesn't mean anything to me and both my granddaughters laughed when I said the last pop group I could really picture was the Rolling Stones.

Their mother and their aunt, my two daughters in other words, used to sit rapt, gawping at the television screen when Mick Jagger and Keith Richards came on in the late sixties I suppose it was, and early seventies.

The drummer sat completely impassively as far as I could see, apart from whirling his arms around - and Bill Wyman was equally unmoving. I suppose they had to keep still though to contrast with Mick Jagger, leaping about and flailing his arms around. My generation thought they were pretty revolting at the time. We were mystified at our teenage daughters being so enthralled by this ugly, vulgar, loudmouthed louts. Then there was the whole black cloud cast by the death or murder of Brian Jones.

I remember telling my girls that this lot were nothing like real musicians and singers - Elvis, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald.

'They'll be here today, gone tomorrow', I said. 'The Rolling Stones won't last two minutes.'

I have a feeling I said the same about David Bowie.

Of course, over the years I got used to the Rolling Stones, and Bowie too, and I had to admit they were talented and made some good music even if it's not my sort of music. Strange how many of these rebels and youth icons move from the very edge of society right into the middle eventually. Isn't Mick Jagger a Sir? That would have been unthinkable in the early days when my teenaged daughters were so entranced by him.

Funnily enough, when I went to meet my granddauthers at Guildford Station last night, I had a quick look in the WH Smiths there and noticed an autobigraphy by Keith Richards, which I think he'd called "Life." A sign next to the books said Buy One Get One Half Price.

I can't really say why but it seemed odd to me somehow that such an old rock music rebel as Keith Richards would have his life story on a shelf in WH Smiths next to a sign saying Buy One Get One Half Price. I suppose it's because he burst on the music scene in Britain as a sort of uncontrollabe rebel and here he was in the shops, all these years later, appearing as a special offer.

Giving Up Driving - When Your Sight Starts to go Your Car Has To Go

For 80 years I had really good eyesight. My children were very pleased for me that it was so good but would occasionally say it wasn't fair that they had contact lenses and reading glasses at their ages while I could still see signs way off in the distance when driving, recognise a friend walking up Guildford High Street from way off and only needed weak reading glasses in poor light.

But things change. If you stick around long enough, your sight starts to fail.

I started having a few odd visual effects around the time I turned 80 - little blue dots everywhere in the morning - and began to have trouble seeing detail in the distance. Like a car coming if I was cossing the road. I saw the optician a couple of times and my doctor referred me to en eye clinic and the people there hummed and ha-ed a bit and eventually told my doctor, after a few months, to tell me to stop driving.

When he told me he looked very apologetic. He knows I have a very active life, go out with friends a lot, visit my daughters and grandchildren, and he knew how important the car was to me.

I had to accept that he said I simply wasn't able to drive legally any more, and I don't think he was suggesting I drive illegally. When you've been driving for sixty odd years, being told you're becoming a danger to yourself and others and have to stop is upsetting. I won't say I cried a bit when I got home, but I won't say I didn't either.

After I got over the emotional side of it, the practical hassles of giving up driving started to hit me. How would I get around? I live outside Guildford and go into town to shop. I go out to see friends a lot. I needed to drive to see my kids and grandchildren. How would I get to the airport for holidays? How would I get to the pub for a pub lunch with friends?

I called one of my daughters and told her the terrible news. "The doctor says I have to give up my car. I have to stop driving."

I think she was shocked to. Both my daughters are used to mum being fairly independent. I listed all the things I wouldn't be able to do until she stopped me and said we should look at it differently.

Firstly, she told me to accept it. It was better to give up driving than to hit a car or pedestrian or be hit because I couldn't see as well as I used to. I had to agree with that. Then she reminded me I have plenty of friends who still drive and will help me get about. Next, she said I should think about the money I'd save on petrol, road tax and car insurance - and the money I'd get for the car - and I could put all that this year to taxis.

'You hate parking and you like a drink with lunch or dinner' she said. 'That means you're absolutely made for taxis. Once you get used to callings cabs you'll really like going out without bothering about the car.'

It was just a matter of getting organised, she said. Also, she said, 'You're over 80, mum - you should get some free transport - travel on the buses, and maybe there are council-run services too?'

I told her I'd work on all that. Which I did. The next day I rang her back with quite a lot of news. 'I'm not sure I've accepted giving up the car' I said 'but I've done some sums and research and here's what I've found.'

I'd calculated how much I could put towards taxis. If I sold the car, and since I'd save the road tax and insurance and payments for servicing, I'd be able to afford quite a lot of taxis. I'd rung the local council and they told me about a cheap service for oldies, 'Dial a Ride', which I could book to go substantial distances. If I wanted to go to Wisley Gardens with a friend then I could book Dial a Ride and travel there and back for a few pounds (which I have done since.) I don't know if Dial a Ride is a service local to Guildford funded by the council or if all councils provide the same sort of service as a national thing.

I'd also looked at ordering groceries and household stuff online from supermarkets for free deliveries. I live in a second floor flat so, for some time, it's been a bit of a nuisance carrying bags of shopping up the stairs. I stop on each landing to get my breath back a bit and then carry on. Maybe it was time to order online and get free home deliveries. I haven't done this yet but I know what's involved and may do it at some point

And lastly but most importantly I told my boyfriend/partner, Bryan, and all my friends. 'I have to stop driving - what will I do?' They all rallied round, as we all always do all rally round when any one of us has a problem. One would take me into Guildford shopping once a week. One would pick me up for the weekly pub quiz. Another would collect me for our dinner out every week.

I began to feel it would all work out.

It's been the best part of a year now since I gave up driving. I can't say I miss it. Sometimes it's a nuisance when you just want to hop in the car and go to the library or visit a friend. But mostly it just takes a bit of organisation. With good friends who help and with free buses, (expensive) taxis and Dial a Ride, life without the car is not nearly as awkward as I feared. I love not having to find a parking place and reverse wonkily into it. I love being able to have a glass of wine without wondering if I'm over the drink-drive limit. One friend, Rosemary, has made it a weekly outing for us both to go to Sainsburys and shop. We take our time and have a coffee and it's lovely to see her and chat as well as get the shopping done.

Today I'm going with one of my daughters to a lovely old pub in Shere, the White Horse, for lunch. I've booked a dial-a-ride vehicle and the driver will drop us off at midday and collect us after 2pm. I'll be able to share a bottle of wine with my daughter over lunch and neither of us will have to worry about drinking and driving. Since dial a ride fares are so cheap, getting to Shere and back will only cost a few pounds.

I suppose we all fear change as we get older. Sometimes you just have to accept it. I had a cataract operation which helped my sight for a while but I can't seem to find any treatment for the macular degeneration which put an end to my driving. Once I'd accepted I wouldn't drive again, I could get on with looking for alternatives that work.

Still I did laugh when I read that Tony Curtis's wife said at his funeral that he objected strongly to being made to stop driving. Right up to his death, she said, he was looking for ways to get his driving licence back!

Eyewear, Glasses, Magnifying Glasses,Dark Glasses and Failing Eyesight

I have macular degeneration, the one they can't cure. Dry, is it? I think dry macular degeneration can become wet and they can cure the wet version but, for now, mine's dry. I don't really understand it.

Anyway, the doctors didn't give me much advice or help but the optician turned out to be very helpful. He told me about a low vision clinic where they give partially-sighted people all sorts of help - lights and glasses and whatnot, so I went along.

I was registered as partially sighted which is new to me. I had to give up driving at the start of 2010 which was a heck of a nuisance but I get access to a free book-and-ride service and I take buses which are free and I sometimes use taxis in and out of Guildford, my nearest town. I'm not sure if I get the free rides and buses because I'm now officiallypartially sighted or if it's because I'm over 80. Either way, it's pretty good.

The clinic also sent away for me to get two pairs of free glasses. I didn't know what they'd do really but I'd explained that I have trouble seeing the telly and trouble seeing the gold finches at the bird feeders I put out, and trouble reading and writing. I used to read books all the time. Now I can't.

The boxes arrived today and the two pairs of glasses are quite something. They're not like normal glasses at all. They're like specialised equipment. If you've ever had a diamond valued, you'll have seen the kind of eyepiece the jeweller uses. These glasses are sort of like professional equipment. Each pair has four lenses. There are two smaller lenses near the eye and then two more a bit furthre away. One pair is ivory coloured; the other is kind of silver blue. They're very cool looking. The blue ones look like they could be skiing equipment!

The ivory ones let me read and write. The blue ones magnify the distance. Now, I can sit and look at the gold finches and see amazing detail of their red, black, gold and white feathers. Even the seeds they're eating. It's wonderful. I can see the television and computer screens without peering at them from inches away.

But I do feel my home is getting ever more cluttered with 'vision aids'. Every room features high powered lights, magnifying glasses, dark glasses (which I need to cut daylight glare when I go out - the glare started to affect me after a cataract operation), and now I've got the two latest developments in close-up and faraway glasses. In the kitchen there's a magnifying glass which has a high powered light attached to it so I can read recipe books. I take this to restaurants too, to read menus.

Having poor sight certainly requires a bit of organisation, especially when you have to give up driving. But if all sounds like I'm a walking advert for the optician, I'm not really. You probably would hardly notice the old girl sitting at the restaurant table with friends or family, taking a look at the menu through a little hand-held glass with a light in it. You might just, I suppose, wonder what I was doing out on a not very sunny day wearing big dark glasses. 'Morning head' you might think. And it's true I like a glass or two of wine with dinner. You would, though, almost certainly notice if I went out with the blue high perfomance four-lens glasses on. I expect you'd notice how advanced and science fiction they look and you'd probably wonder what I was doing wearing them. You'd probably say to yourself 'She looks a bit ancient, frankly, to be going skiing.'

Gliding for the over 80s

My first post was about a trip on the London Eye in October 2010, which I really enjoyed.

I described the trip to my children (adult children - I'm 81 and should have called this blog An Old Englishwoman's Life I suppose.) They seemed to think it was a bit adventurous to go on the London Eye at my age. "Not really" I replied. "It wasn't as interesting as the gliding."


"What are you talking about?" they asked.

"The gliding.  A couple of years ago I went gliding. In Cambridgeshire."

News to them. Apparently I didn't mention it at the time. They were probably having some work or marriage drama or drama with the kids.

I told them I'd gone gliding with my...what do I call him? - partner, boyfriend, companion? of 16 years. All the terms sound a bit silly at my age but I was widowed twice before I met him and lost another partner to open heart surgery so I didn't want to get married and I wasn't going to move in with a man. So, let's say partner. Anyway, he came along - he's 85 now - and a friend of ours, Ron, recently widowed, came too.

Was it scary?, my kids asked me.

No.

Not even when you were towed up by the plane and it let go?

I explained that though Brian and Ron were towed up by small planes, my glider was sort of catapulted from a sort of elastic thing. "Except" I explained "it broke just before we left the ground so they had to use another one."

You mean you still went up in the glider just after the thing broke?

Yes.

Anyway, I thought it was wonderful. We got great views of Cambridge - more of the countryside though in fact. Little rivers and fields and church steeples and animals like toy farm animals. It was a lovely summer's day and of course there's no engine so it's lovely and quiet up there. You're just gliding in a little bubble. And half way through, the pilot sitting behind me told me a bit about using the controls - backwards, forwards, up , down and what have you - and then said "OK take the controls. You're flying now."

So I took the controls and flew.

My kids said "Whaaat??!!"

One of them said "Wasn't the pilot worried that you were practically eighty?"

But I said I didn't think so because he'd already told me he was 75.

Anyhow, gliding was wonderful. I was 10 when the second world war started so all through my childhood we were all very conscious of the planes, the spitfires and others on our side and the bombers on the German side, and the pilots. Later, I married the girls' father - obviously - and he was still in the  Royal Air Force. He'd served in the RAF in the war, fighting the Nazis in North Africa and up through Italy. I've flown lots of times as an adult though I never flew as a child - in those days you didn't fly anywhere on holiday. But I think one of the best experiences of flying was being in the little glider and taking the controls for a while.  I may do it again next summer if I think of it.