Coffee morning

Maggie and I share a birthday, early December, two Christmas babies. This amuses her no end and she reminds me of it each time I see her. She did this morning as I joined my mother and little niece for the monthly coffee morning in the church hall, turning round to me and asking me if I knew she’d be 80 next year.

She doesn’t look it. Or perhaps more accurately, she does look it but she doesn’t act it, retaining as she does an infectious sense of joie de vivre and a set of sparkling mischievous eyes that I suspect have been her life long companions. We fell to chatting of this and that and nothing over home made bread pudding and strong tea served in mismatching mugs. Behind us on the wall hung a poster and a range of church notices. One of them was a photograph of a group of children and young people from a school in Kenya whom the small congregation support through their fundraising efforts.

It tickled me enormously to see that a couple of tall and gangly boys at the back of the group were holding up a hand made paper banner that said ‘Thank you Sheerness Methodist Church.’ It’s hard to imagine two places further removed from each other than these, and yet in spite of the distance and a multitude of differences – from language to lifestyle and everything in between – the two groups have forged a connection that enriches the lives of both. We were talking about the Kenyan project when I spotted Irene come into the hall. Dressed in a green anorak and matching headscarf and pushing a large tartan shopping trolley, Irene’s tiny frame was swamped in the confusion of fabrics as she made her way over to us.

Irene was clearly upset when she sat down. Her shaky hands poured three sachets of sugar into her cup and some of the tea slopped into the saucer as she stirred with a spoon and much agitation. As she took a few sips from her cup and her heartbeat steadied, I looked at Irene’s face. Her eyes were red rimmed and misty yellow, the skin on her cheeks flecked with pigment and drawn down to the bone beneath, her lips pale and slightly purple tinted. At last she took a breath. “I couldn’t find this place. Oh it’s so hard to find isn’t it? Why have they moved here?”

I have known Irene for many years. She was one of my Grandmother’s close friends and I remember how I looked forward to her regular visits to Gran’s house, with her husband Howard, because she particularly liked caramel wafer biscuits. Gran would buy them specially and I’d help her to arrange them with the custard creams, bourbons, shortbread fingers and jammy dodgers on a plate covered with a paper doyley. The neat foil wrappers of the rectangular caramel wafers shone brightly next to the beige and brown crumbliness of the others on the white oval plate. In the contrary way of a child, I never especially cared for the taste of the caramel wafers but I loved their glamour. I loved Irene’s glamour too, since she wore gold earrings and her hair swept up into a neat chignon clasped with an exotic clip.

Howard was a quiet man as I recall, already in his late 50s or early 60s by the time he floated into my consciousness. He and Irene would come up to my Grandparents’ house every Tuesday evening. Whilst Gran and Irene sat and chatted and watched the television in the living room, Granddad and Howard would sit at the dining room table and play games. Scrabble, ultra-competitive and strict in its scoring and played in silence except for the clack of the tiles in the green letters bag, would cede to the gentler games of cribbage or mah-jong when I joined them at the table.

Granddad and Howard both died in the early 1980s and Gran a couple of years ago at the age of 89. Irene, a little younger than them at 82, has terrible problems with her short-term memory and it distresses her a great deal. I don’t see her often and hadn’t realised quite how bad the problem was until she said that she couldn’t find the church hall, a location that she must have passed literally thousands of times in the decades that she’s lived here.

It feels particularly poignant that Irene’s aware of her loss. I’d – wrongly as it turns out – assumed that the tragedy of memory loss was shielded from its unwilling host by the discrete veil of forgetfulness and the brain’s theft of its own ability to reflect inward on itself. You always hope that, should you live to see 80, that you’ll be like Maggie - still full of life, still reciting humorous poetry from memory, still baking cakes, still taking holidays, and still raring to make the most of every day. Like our own birthday date, I guess its something that we don’t have a choice about.