Traditionally it was Mothering Sunday. Working class girls like my grandmothers got the day off from being in service as maids in the big houses, to go home and visit their mothers before Easter. I think they made 'Simnel cakes' , fruit and nut cakes, to take home as gifts. No doubt they took flowers too.
For an adult orphan like me Mothers day has a poignancy and I thought about my mother a great deal on Sunday.
I'll share...
Serendipitously I was staying with my friend Gill in London and walked out into her lovely garden as soon as the light was good for photos. It's all ahead of us up in Scotland and it was a delight to find primroses and violets blooming already. Gulp, I nearly cried. I used to get up early on Mothering Sunday and go to the woods to pick wild flowers for my mum. And, back to the present, another delight since my mother was an ace photographer in her spare time, I managed to figure out how to take flower closeups on my camera, so here are a primrose and a violet for you. Violet a bit out of focus, but hey.
I thought about her during the day when I was out and about in London too, especially when I was near Carnaby Street where my grandfather was born and brought up. His streets, my heritage (along with the music hall songs). And I was near Bloomsbury where my mother lived when studying at University College.
Unusual? Yes.
Twelve girls got into Dartford Girls Grammar School on scholarships each year and my mother was one. One young person got to university every three years on a Cooperative Society employees scholarship and, thanks to London grocer father, it was her. She had enough funds to do A levels in a year and her degree in two. She did. Even more unusual, she did Biology and chemistry. there's a faded newspaper cutting in her papers which rather patronisingly writes about a girl of her class being given the opportunity to study science....
And, by the way, when she got to university she was the first woman to wear trousers to UCL . I love her!
It's all a reminder to be very very grateful for those who came before us and gave us so much that has enabled us to become who we are.
And, when I think of all my mother taught me (empathy, thinking scientifically, love of nature....), a reminder that all we do, at home from day to day, for our own little girls, and boys, carries so much into their future lives.
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