Some of you reading Sheila & company’s daily postings must, like me, wonder what Sheila’s secret is. Every day there is some uplifting, touching or funny anecdote about her life. All her friends and family are lovely, great or wonderful and it is so obvious that her two daughters – and five grandchildren – simply adore her. Sheila appears to sail through life, learning new things, having fun or helping others; and very often she seems to manage to do all three at the same time. Even her memories of childhood – her BOGOF grandparents, her holidays with aunts and cousins, and her early years in Hawick – all seem touched with the romance of Enid Blyton or some of the ‘comic’ books for girls of Sheila’s generation where they all have ‘lashings of ginger beer’ and super dorm feasts. I think of my own life, which at best I can call interesting, and feel a tinge of envy.
But then I remember some of the early bits that Sheila doesn’t talk about. When she was twelve her parents moved to Edinburgh, taking Sheila, Leslie and Robbie away from her beloved Hawick, friends and lovely grandparents (there I go with the ‘lovelys’ but I knew her grandma and Yanos and they really were lovely – both to look at and by nature). Leaving Hawick was hard, but much more pain was to follow about six months later when her mother died in her early thirties. And not very long afterwards another major upheaval when her father remarried and they moved to Burnside, on the outskirts of Glasgow. Perhaps it would be better to draw a veil over what Sheila thought of her stepmother, although she became very fond of, and supportive to, her elder step-sister all the way through her sometimes troubled life.
Sheila coped! I met her slightly older sister Leslie first when she arrived in my class at school and we were seated together – she was a Wilson (no relation to my husband) and I was a Wishart and in these days you didn’t get to choose your BF. Sheila started to pop up, sometimes with my young cousin, and Sheila was so different from Leslie. I thought Leslie was quite serious and well- behaved, and I must confess I had her soon tagged as a serious contender for the ‘top of the class’ slot, for which I had only a couple of serious contenders (Stewart was one of them). (This is where I confess that I was a swot, and as serious as Leslie -although I managed to get over that to some extent!) Sheila was a different kettle of fish with her wild curly hair, her great grin and madcap ideas. Now that I am older, I look back and wonder if Sheila was covering a lot of her sadness with a happy-go-lucky persona. But you know, if that was what she was doing, it soon became second nature. That must have been how she managed another traumatic experience a few years later when she was diagnosed with a back problem that meant her being encased in a plaster cast from hip-bone to arm-pit (we called arm-pits ‘oxters’ then – a lovely word used as in ‘having to oxter him home’). At home or school, she couldn’t sit on anything more upright than a deckchair. Sheila called on her by now wide circle of friends to carry her deckchair, and the tray on which she wrote, from classroom to classroom, giggling and clowning all the way. Nowadays, most teenage girls seem to expect stress counselling if they break a fingernail – well maybe not quite.
So I think part of Sheila’s Secret was her early experiences of coping with upheavals and traumas that few youngsters had to deal with. I think she learned that she only had this life and that it was better to get on with it than to sit and lament over what might have been. She obviously learned how helping a friend in need – even if only by carrying a deckchair – helped form bonds and did give mutual pleasure. And a smiling welcome always helps, usually by bringing a smile in return. I hope Sheila will forgive me if I say she reminds me a bit of our two lovely black Labradors (there I go again with the “L” word – it is catching) who assumed they lived in a world inhabited by people who loved them. So they always approached people with tails wagging, a smile on their faces, expecting to be liked, and the strange thing was that many people who were afraid of dogs would reach out, tentatively at first and then with a more vigorous pat or tickle. Like our dogs, Sheila always expects good from people and in return she attracts positiveness. I have only very rarely known her to speak ill of anyone, always looking for the good points, even in some of the flawed characters she’s met in her various jobs and pursuits. We could all learn so much from Sheila – an inspiring friend.
A mini gallery of Sheila smiles!
