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.
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est england. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est england. Afficher tous les articles
mercredi 17 novembre 2010
mardi 16 novembre 2010
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.
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.
jeudi 4 novembre 2010
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.
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.
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