Ups and Downs in the Life of a Distressed Gentleman

Paper Back Publishing Date: Nabu Press Number of Pages: Submit Review Submit Review. Pick Of The Day. Little Book Of Sufi Stories: Buy this book in a Combo. Other Books By Author. Monday to Saturday 9. E-Gift Coupon , click here. Insights Insights, Account, Orders. Why Shop at SapnaOnline. That really made my life. He loved the railways - "I put my whole soul into it" - and, as the badges suggest, adored bowls too.

We both loved the game.

I found with bowls that if I had any troubles I would forget them. After his wife's death, "I didn't want to remarry and that was it," is all he will say, though you wonder whether the fact that his mother had returned to the West Country after the death of her husband may have been a factor.

She lived into her 90s, near him in Bath.

To a generation weaned on getting and spending, it sounds a very circumscribed life: I'd jump on my bike and go anywhere I wanted to. The younger people now have a different outlook on life from what we had. I never craved anything big. I'm happy with what God has given me to do. He now lives in a Methodist home. And what now, having reached the magical , makes him get up in the morning and put on his immaculate striped shirt and tie? Can he enjoy the large garden seen through his window, or the manicured fields and Georgian squares nearby?

I look out of the window and if it's a lovely, warm day they take me out in the chair in the garden. I really enjoy going out in the fresh air. Today is a bad day: She had wanted a doll, but Mrs Aram says other residents think they are babies and try to tug them away. It is in some ways a distressing interview, and yet, for all the pain, Mrs Greenwood's story is also one of affirmation. She was born in Bermondsey, south London. Her father died when she was five and her mother, struggling with poverty and her husband's death, put her and her brother Tommy into orphanages.

She had her head shaved when she got there, and because they had already got a Lillian there they changed her name to Mary. She was in the orphanage for 12 years, latterly going outside to work as a governess's maid while still living in the institution. After a time in domestic service she determined to be a dressmaker. By now she had returned home - her mother had remarried and had another four children. The slums of Bermondsey were cleared and the family moved to a council estate in Downham, near Bromley, where Mrs Greenwood met her husband-to-be, Jack.

Mum's mother forbade her to see dad, so they used to pass notes on a wire between the two back bedroom windows. Jack Greenwood is perhaps the hero of the story - guitar player, amateur artist, sheet metal worker who started his own manufacturing business. He was an amazing character. They had a tandem. Mum never learned to ride a bike, but they went right down to Brighton and all over the south on this tandem.

Dad was a very go-ahead person. There was nothing he couldn't or wouldn't attempt. He had a painting accepted by the Royal Academy for the Summer Exhibition, and he was still putting a neighbour's clutch in at the age of After their marriage and the birth of their two daughters, they moved to Bellingham in south London and were there when war broke out.

Wartime evacuation of Shirley and her sister Margaret "was really hard on mum, because I was the same age as she was when she had gone into the orphanage. She went right down to about six stone because she missed us so much". After a year, she took them home to London. As the family business prospered, the Greenwoods moved to East Grinstead. Once retired, they followed Shirley Aram to Nottingham. In her 70s, Mrs Greenwood survived cancer and a nervous breakdown, the result, says Mrs Aram, of an accumulation of problems in the wider family.

But she recovered, and in she and her husband celebrated their diamond wedding. In , with Mr Greenwood showing signs of dementia, the couple moved into the nursing home. I think quite a lot of that is because she was brought up in the orphanage. It made her tough and she was used to an institutionalised life. It was hard for her when my dad died.

She was 89 and it was like the other half going. She was agitated and unhappy without him for quite a long time, but the memory has gone now.

She doesn't remember dad and, though I feel that's sad, it's actually better for her because she's not fretting. The memory now is more of herself as a child. We look at old photos - of a glamorous flapper with a stylish s bob, of a young woman in a ritzy hat, of a couple on a tandem. Poverty, dislocation, the privations and blind cruelties of the orphanage couldn't kill her beauty or her spirit. When I discovered that another resident of the Spring Lane nursing home, Bernard Smith, was celebrating his th birthday in the week of my visit to Lillian Greenwood, and that a third, Lotte Erde, would be marking hers on January 25, the completist in me took over and I grabbed them too - to the laconic Bernard's bemusement and the garrulous Lotte's delight.

I meet Bernard first. Coming into the dining room on his Zimmer, he manoeuvres into a chair beside me. The problem is, I never do get him going. Early on, I ask him about his wife and we never quite recover. She was very nice. She was ever so good to me. We were a happy family. And he starts gently crying and dabbing at the tears. Brian has left by now and we are marooned together, with his faded memories and pin-sharp sorrows. Or, as he says simply, "She left me. Mr Smith offers a few scraps from his life, nothing more.

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Trips to Southend-on-Sea, where his aunt and uncle lived, and hearing the Salvation Army band play on the front as a th-birthday surprise, a Salvation Army band played at Spring Lane. The headmaster at his school gathering pupils to tell them the first world war was over. Firewatching from a station clocktower in the second war.

Problems finding work in the Depression, before becoming a signalman. Working for a printer's after the war. And the secret of a long life?

Did he enjoy getting to ? I had a card from the Queen, the mayor came, the band played, it went on for two days. Being has its compensations. Then he shuffles off, laughing. The knitting I never hear about, the writing I do. She was born in Saltwood, Kent, and had four sisters and four brothers. Her father was an undertaker, and the black carriage and plumed horses made an impression that has stayed with her: The others appear to have been sheltered from news of it. For Mrs Erde, it was visible.

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We saw it going over and it bombed Folkestone. He had about 30 people to bury afterwards. When she was nine her mother died. Her father eventually remarried but not all of his children took to his new wife. At 20, Mrs Erde left to live with her sister in Surbiton, acting as a companion to small children. She went to look after the five children of a man whose alcoholic wife had died suddenly.

Her task was to find a housekeeper for him. She kept finding them; he kept rejecting them. And, reader, as you may have guessed, she ended up marrying him. Max Erde Austrian father, English mother was almost 20 years older. He owned a hotel in Kensington, ran the wine cellar and organised cocktail parties in another in Piccadilly. In , aged 80, a month before he was due to retire from the hotel business, he died.

They were happiest living in hotels, by the sound of it, though at this point Mrs Erde's reminiscences are fragmentary.

Bombed out of two hotels in the war, they ended up living in the Piccadilly hotel in central London, before moving back to Surbiton. She had one son, who worked for the Home Office, and she kept in touch to varying degrees with her five stepchildren. It seems to have been a strange and transient life or is "transient life" a tautology?

She didn't like it and died. She has never doubted that she would reach Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving….

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