Читать книгу Getting Organised - Carolyn Caterer - Страница 4

Mabel Fraser stood up and stretched out slowly. While in her seventy-fifth year there was still plenty of life in her. She was careful to ensure that she took excellent care of herself, which explained why she was still happily pottering away in her rather substantial garden and enjoying the delights of her vegetable patch. Of course she used a gardener for the heavy work, but she was more than able to deal with most of the day to day stuff herself and enjoy the fruits of her labours. Second only to her love of gardening, was her love of cooking and Mabel took a huge amount of pleasure from turning the fruits and vegetables she had nurtured into delightful dishes, based on the sheer simplicity of what her garden offered up.

Having lived through the war Mabel was a pretty tough and resilient person. Her marriage to Gerald had been long and happy. They were both on the stage and had met in a production of ‘The Seagull’. She soon had Gerald begging her to marry him and was more than happy with her choice, which produced two sons and at the last count, three grandchildren. She was quite amazed that she could soon be looking at becoming a great grandmother and felt a twinge of sadness that Gerald wasn’t around to share this with her. He had been devoted and romantic, all the things she could ever have wished for in a husband, and her only regret was that he had passed away, too young, after a short illness ten years ago.

Fortunately Mabel had the great gift of being able to count her blessings, so rather than dwell on her life without Gerald she concentrated on making a new life for herself and had taken up a number of new hobbies; from watercolour paintings to learning Mandarin (the former proving to be far more successful than the latter).

In Mabel’s mind life was always there to be explored and she was never one for letting her age get in the way. In fact she was enjoying the chance to flirt with the young men in their sixties at her art classes and they seemed to respond with enthusiasm, so much so that Brian Britton’s wife had pitched up one evening and warned her off her husband, much to Mabel’s amusement.

Mabel had been very pleased when she saw that Abigail had moved into the small group of houses where she had lived for the past thirty years. It was nice to have someone new join her nearest neighbours and she felt that Abigail had something of an interesting aura about her, though she couldn’t quite put her finger on what this might be. However it was always good to have someone new in the neighbourhood that she might take under her wing, and she instinctively felt that this was something that Abigail was sorely in need of. Being an outgoing and forthright person Mabel was somewhat perplexed by people like Abigail who seemed so meek and lacking ‘get up and go’. Plus, she would have to get her to do something about her handshake; nothing gave a bad first impression more than a limp wet hand being placed into yours and Mabel shuddered at the memory of her first meeting with Abigail when she had popped around to see her with a welcoming gift of a pot of coriander to place on her windowsill.

She had sunk back at the temerity of Abigail and wondered how she had lived a life that was so lacking in confidence, but that was a question for later. For the time being she would observe and be welcoming, in order to gain her trust, something that she felt could take a good deal of time and investment, but would in the end be worth every moment.

Some might have been of the opinion that Mabel was an interfering busybody, but in truth Mabel found people fascinating and loved to share her accumulation of a lifetime of experience of living on planet earth, which she deemed to be her legacy to mankind. She was proud to have lived through the Second World War (albeit as a fairly young child), the introduction of the welfare state and the swinging sixties with all the excitement which that entailed. Oh yes, Mabel was far from the boring provincial housewife. She had led an active life and wanted to ensure that the same held true for those that she took under her wing. It seemed in these times of abundance people were increasingly settling for lives half lived and she was determined to ensure that those people she chose to take an interest in would never fall into this category, but would instead discover a life of opportunity and fun. She felt instinctively that Abigail was the kind of person that was just waiting for something to happen and that made Mabel even more determined to help her in any way she could.