Today’s blog post comes from Mary Rennie. She’s the one in the beige velour tracksuit bottoms in the Blogging Jogging post. The Millers spent a lot of time with Mary and her family in the 1970s and 80s, and she has stayed firm friends with Sheila. Here are some of her memories of the early days…
Thankfully, the age at which one becomes “elderly” and settles for a quiet life seems to be an ever shifting phenomenon … these days, the papers are full of marathon running centagenarians and skydiving nonagenarians, not to mention friends who have decided to scale mountains when one had assumed that that their pursuits, while certainly never sedentary, were slightly less adventurous! My own little sister (64), always the shy and timid one in our family, is in New Caledonia – half way through a round-the-world journey with her husband, in a small yacht.
When Sheila and I met at Toddler Club in St Dunstan’s Church Hall nearly 40 years ago, with our babies, Jae and Joe, there was no indication of such latent intrepidness.
As young mums, life revolved round our families. We both shared a passion for the outdoors (and thrift) so summer outings were often to the local PYO fruit farms. The children would be given punnets and the instruction from Sheila “Eat as much as you like – they weigh the punnets, not the children!” Jae, Joe, Gwen and Amy came home red and sticky with strawberry juice – poly tunnels were still to come, and strawberries were grown on the ground, with straw to protect the fruit. We made jam, summer puddings and pavlova, and filled our freezers, (a fairly new phenomenon) with strawberries and raspberries.
Our expeditions were often on our bikes, acquired when Gwen and Amy were babies. In the late 70s, children’s bike seats bore no resemblance to the range of hi-tec, safety conscious accoutrements on sale today. Ours were potentially lethal folding bits of metal with a very thin plastic covered foam cushion for the child to sit on, but thankfully no-one came to any harm.
We shared the ups and downs of family life, pregnancies, baby sitting, house moves, DIY, learning to drive, the 3 day week and power cuts, and above all, friendship and support. In our spare time, we went to yoga, then aerobics (a new import from the US!) – these days, we are evangelical about pilates …
Came the day, Sheila announced we had to start thinking ahead to going back to work. Computers were beginning to loom large … we enrolled on a BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) computer programming course at Canterbury Tech, rapidly becoming the most unpopular duo in the class (we were the only women, very keen to learn and did all the set tasks in double quick time. This meant the tutor was unable to slope off to the canteen as much as he’d have liked to!). I am sure this is why, a few years later when I’d moved to Wiltshire, I landed a job at Galileo, a start-up computerised reservation system for airline bookings – they must have been impressed by the reference to the BASIC course on my CV!
My family move to Wiltshire was a huge wrench, not least because it meant leaving behind such a good friend … however, I am happy to say that distance has been no impediment to our friendship continuing and I was at the caravan in Seasalter last weekend with Sheila – bike riding and fruit picking were high on the agenda!