Page 1 of Old Girls Go Greek
1
Being older could be so quiet.
I don’t mean I was deaf, although I know I was lucky in that respect. A lot of my contemporaries were. Several of them were sporting complicated and by all accounts very expensive hearing aids by the time they passed sixty. One of them, who had been a keen attender of punk concerts and festivals back in the day, put this down to ‘speaker damage’. He had liked to stand right next to them, head banging in time to the pounding beat. Another had worked as a builder, a place where a lot of noisy equipment comes into play on a daily basis, and that was in the days before ear defenders.
No, what I meant was since I had moved to Lower Begley, my average day was very quiet. Sometimes I didn’t actually talk to anyone, apart from my black cat, Ivan the Terrible, and he wasn’t a great conversationalist unless I was rattling a bag of cat treats. Then he had a lot to say for himself.
When I was a baby, there was always noise, mostly from me if my mother was to be believed. Then with the arrival of my sister, the decibels increased. There was always someone shouting from their bedroom, arguing about school, who had left the lights on upstairs, why had someone put an empty milk bottle back in the fridge door.
After that there was university, and the aforementioned discos and what are now called gigs. We couldn’t text or email each other because the technology hadn’t been invented; instead, we just left our doors open and shouted to each other. Then with marriage to Malcolm, and the arrival of our own daughter, the cycle began again.
But suddenly at sixty-four, everything went quiet. Well, it did for me, because I had moved, on my own into a house on a no-through road in the middle of the countryside. Beautiful but relatively silent.
My daughter had grown up and gone out into the world, my husband ditto. Well, at least Malcolm had gone, running off into the uncritical embrace of his secretary. Whether he had grown up was debatable. And that left me, moving out of the marital home where I had expected to end my days, suddenly living quite happily, for the most part, on my own. And after about three weeks, it struck me how noiseless, how utterly soundless, a house could be. It was a fairly modern place too, so there wasn’t even the friendly creaking of old beams, the tiny scurry of mice in the attic. There was just me.
Occasionally I would hear the slam of my neighbour’s car door or the hum of her husband’s lawnmower on sunny afternoons. Or there might be the rumble of a tractor going past my house to the fields beyond it.
Tranquillity suited some people, but I didn’t like it much. I was used to the bustle of work and family life. I liked it when my daughter brought home her friends for unexpected visits and raids on the fridge. I’d always like company, friends dropping in for coffee and perhaps a grumble about how it was impossible to buy comfortable shoes that looked more attractive than the boxes they came in. Within a few weeks of moving, I knew I needed to do something. Well, no one else was going to do it for me. That’s another thing I had realised. I might still have family, friends and relations, but in the end, after the divorce, the buck for everything – bills, utilities, repairs, gardening, decorating – stopped with me. It took some getting used to.
I tried a few different activities. I was fortunate in that there was a village hall within walking distance of my house, where a lot of people like me (grey haired, retired) congregated for classes. There was yoga, slimming, knitting, pottery painting, badminton, jewellery making, that sort of thing.
After a few failed attempts to find something that would keep my attention, I decided to try the art class which was restarting for a new term and had been much publicised in the local village WhatsApp group. Well, I did get a grade four at O level all those years ago, and although my mother had rolled her eyes at this, at least I had passed.
The New Brush Art Class
Spring term starting this week. 10a.m. – 1p.m., beginners welcome, no special materials needed, just bring your enthusiasm.
It was held on Tuesday mornings. I went for the first time on an unusually beautiful day in February when the sun was shining, the sky was the pure, cloudless blue of an Enid Blyton illustration, and birds were twittering in the hedges as I passed. The small car park of the village hall was already filling up, and I could see ladies of my vintage, some of whom I sort of recognised, a couple of them lugging art folders and impressive boxes filled presumably with paints and pencils and maybe crayons for all I knew.
I meanwhile had dug out the battered tin of Rowney watercolours that had been Nicky’s when she was at school, and every pencil I could find, plus a new eraser, and I had stashed them all in an old canvas holdall and slung it over my shoulder. I felt quite bohemian.
As I reached the door, I took a deep breath and strode in.
‘Hello there, I didn’t know you were coming too. I would have given you a lift if I’d known. It’s me, Anita.’
I turned to see a cheerful-looking woman of about my age who I recognised as my nearest neighbour. We had waved at each other from our cars a couple of times, and once she had dropped off some post which had been put through her door by mistake. Like me, she was looking around at the bustle of other people, most of whom seemed to know what they were doing.
‘Meg Foster, lovely to meet you properly. Well, I thought I’d give it a go,’ I said, pleased to see a familiar face. ‘I can’t spend my life hoovering, I’ll have no pile left on the living room carpet if I carry on.’
Anita pulled a sympathetic expression. ‘Me too, and now the spring is here, Rick wants us to be out in the garden from dawn till dusk. He’s so fussy.’
‘Yes, but your garden is beautiful, I’ve seen bits of it over the fence. Not like mine. I like to describe it as a wildlife haven. Heaven knows what is living in the woodpile.’
‘Don’t look,’ she said with a grin as she lifted two chairs from the stack. ‘Are you any good at this painting lark?’
‘I doubt it, I haven’t picked up a paintbrush in ages for over forty years, unless it was to finish off my daughter’s homework.’
‘Great. Come and grab this chair and one of those easel things and sit by me,’ she said. ‘I started last year. I’m completely hopeless but I do enjoy it, and after the terrible weather we’ve had, if I stayed inside any longer I would lose the plot completely. And they are a nice group, and it is quite fun, although some of them take it very seriously.’
The sound of several elderly people getting themselves sorted out was deafening that morning. A tall rather stout man in a baggy Arran sweater had taken charge and was shouting over the hubbub, trying to organise everyone, and happily all the women were largely ignoring him. It took a good twenty minutes before we had settled into a circle, easels propped impressively in front of us.
It turned out Arran-sweater man wasn’t actually in charge at all, and the class was being led by a young, blonde woman in fuchsia dungarees and a batik headscarf who had turned up ten minutes late, much to Arran-sweater man’s annoyance.
Completely unabashed by his hard stare, she went to stand in the middle of our circle and clapped her hands to shut us all up. The noise subsided quite suddenly, so that only Arran sweater man could be heard muttering.
‘…paid good money to come here. Ten o’clock means ten o’clock.’
Our tutor ignored him. ‘Good morning, everyone. And welcome. For those of you who are new today, my name is Cassandra?—’
