Jae recently reminded us of Jenny Joseph’s famous poem, Warning. Written in 1961 when the poet was 29, it starts with the famous line, “When I am an old woman I shall wear purple”. Friends often quote just that one line when they see how I dress, purple gloves, coat, fleece, scarves, shoes, bags, even a hat! Not all of them are the same shade, so many purples. And I certainly don’t wear them all at the same time, well, not always…
The second line goes, “with a red hat which doesn’t go and doesn’t suit me”. About forty years after Jenny Joseph wrote it, this line inspired the creation of The Red Hat Society, specifically for older women (over 50!) in the United States. Branches of the society have expanded all over the world since then, or groups inspired by them, usually meeting for afternoon tea, all wearing red hats, not too bothered about whether the hats suit them or not, just having a laugh, not worried about what other people might say.
We knew a lovely red hat lady when we were little; our Auntie Lizzie, whose red hats were decorated with extravagant red feathers. She was one of the many thousands of women left widowed after World War I, married for only a brief space of time to Gilbert Taylor, one of our Grandma’s brothers. (So just as Grandma had been, she was a Lizzie Tayor). They had no children. And when we knew her, she was in her sixties and retired, living on her own in a small top floor tenement flat. Everything was very different from our normal house: its tiny kitchen and the fact that we needed a key to use the toilet outside the flat, at the top of the stairs. The Kili group will be carrying up chemical toilets for use morning and evening. In between, it will probably be en plein air! At least that didn’t happen at Auntie Lizzie’s.
Just round the corner from her flat was Hawick public library. That suited her very well as Lizzie had the spare time and the appetite to do a lot of reading. But on one notorious occasion, when she returned books unexpectedly quickly, the librarian was foolish enough to ask her if she really read them, or just looked at the pictures. It was just a joke, I think, but she was greatly offended and would have boycotted the library after that had she not loved reading so much.
She often had Sheila, Robbie and me to stay for the weekend and she made a huge fuss of us. It was fun to be with her and we loved our visits. A song popular at the time, sung by Guy Mitchell, went like this:
She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt
She wears red feathers and a hooly-hooly skirt
She lives on just cokey-nuts and fish from the sea
A rose in her hair, a gleam in her eyes
And love in her heart for me
Hawick’s weather didn’t lend itself to hula skirts and or any other sort of exotica, but she loved the song and laughed her head off when we sang it along with her.