Marjorie

 I once knew a woman called Marjorie and she was very old. My prayer partner of many years was also Margery — but as you can see a different spelling though it sounds the same. I'll tell you about Margery next time maybe, but we're thinking about Marjorie today.

She lived in a small Sussex country village, in a little Victorian cottage — what we'd call a terraced house here in England and you'd say 'a row house' in America (I think).

I met her because she went to church in the chapel just along the lane from her home. I liked that chapel a lot. For one thing, it was a simple, unassuming building only made to hold a few people, tucked away into the hedge with a patch of grass alongside where the preacher could park their car (but not in the winter when it puddled so bad your wheels would have sunk right in). And for another thing it had the best people in it — steady, calm, quiet, cheerful country folk, all of them ancient, whose faith had sustained them and whose eyes had seen all the changes of the world. Oftentimes a cat came to join in the worship too. I wasn't part of that congregation, but I'd be sent there to preach, and they came to be one of my favourite places to go.

When worship was over I'd stay a while just to chat and catch up with their news, and I remember one time sitting with Marjorie and asking her about her life. She told me how long she'd lived there and who had owned the cottage before her (a relative), and where she'd grown up — which was very nearby — and what her childhood had been like.

Now although you could walk from that chapel to Marjorie's place in just a few minutes, someone would fetch her in their car because she could only walk just a short way, a few steps only, and very slowly and needing to lean on a stick. 

So what sticks in my mind from that conversation with Marjorie (and this was decades ago) was her description of how she passed her time. She told me this with no self-pity. She was just saying. It was the time before we had cellphones, and our phones were plugged into wall sockets, so you had to be where the phone was if you wanted to use it.

A lot of people had their phones installed in the hall — passage, entrance corridor from the front door — because originally no-one chatted on the phone. People chatted with family and neighbours physically present, in fireside chairs over a cup of tea. The phone was to place a call with a definite objective, or receive news, or seek help. And since Marjorie had lived in that house since she got married and she was very old, her phone was out in the passageway.

Victorian terraced houses are mostly built on the same template, just bigger or smaller according to wealth and status. Marjorie's was the smallest sort, built for artisans and their families.

They look like this at the front.

Or they might have a bay window and look like this.

And the floor plans of these Victorian houses looked like this.

On the left you can see the downstairs. So you go through the front door into a narrow passage which has no windows and leads past the living room and the dining room to the kitchen right at the back of the house. Got it?

How Marjorie said she passed her days was sitting in a chair close to the telephone, there in the passage. That way she could answer it if it rang — and make phone calls herself. If she sat in her living room, she wouldn't be able to get there in time if it rang.

I have never forgotten this picture of what it means to be old. A woman whose husband has died and her children all elderly themselves, determinedly clinging to independence, not wanting to leave her home full of memories, the echoes of being married and raising a family, the country lane that had been the place she lived since she was barely more than a girl. Sitting beside the phone all day because otherwise she wasn't quick enough to make it there before it stopped ringing.

This image, this thought, tells me more than anything else how much we have lost and left behind.

I remember a woman called Dorothy who lived in a similar little house just across the road from my daughter Grace's first home.

Dorothy didn't sit by the phone all day, but if it wasn't raining she would stand out in her front yard, waiting for a friendly face to come by, someone willing to stop and chat for a little while.

And going back even more years, past the years when my daughters had homes of their own, past the long-gone time when I preached on Sundays in the Sussex villages, before the little country chapels closed, when Marjorie was still alive — going all the way back to when I was a girl in Hertfordshire — I used to call in to see Lucy, who was eighty. She could still walk slowly with a stick, and she lived near enough to the church to go to Evensong on Sundays. But on weekdays, she would sit by the open window in her front room, hoping someone passing by might stop and have a chat.

A low window, you see, right by the pavement (sidewalk), where an old lady could sit hopefully, and someone might pause to say hello.

Back in April this last year, my friend Steph died. She too had grown very old. The time came when she could no longer go to church, even if someone came to fetch her. She had a frame with wheels, and incorporating a tray, that helped her make the slow walk to the kitchen for a cup of tea or to the bathroom. Her daughter and daughter-in-law came in to take care of her every day. Once a week I went to see her — walking at first, and then when I became more unwell myself, taking the daunting step of going back to driving again, so I could still go and see Steph on a Thursday afternoon. Those were such happy visits, full of laughter. We had the same sense of humour and we liked the same books. We gossiped and we prayed together; both of us looked forward to those times. The lane I walked to reach her home — on days I was up to walking — was a footpath really, running by a mossy stone wall and a patch of woodland. It reminded me of the country places I lived when I was a girl, and the village where Marjorie lived, and times gone by.

These days, isolated by the wrecking ball of repeated change, and by illness, and by the whole world retreating to online communication, I have lost those connections. There is no longer an old lady along the lane who might welcome a visit, or if there is I don't know her, because I don't know anybody here. Steph was my last connection with the way things used to be. And now this blog is my window on the world, and you are the person passing by!

Marjorie, Dorothy, Lucy, Steph — they are all gone now, they with their quiet undemanding courage, making the choice to stay in their own homes because however lonely it might be, still it was exactly that — home.