Last month I finished off another batch of my ‘imaginary toadstools’ for my shop - these ones are darned and patched with various threads and vintage materials. When I create more natural toadstools, such as these...
...I give them folksy names, which are fanciful but not totally unbelievable - ‘Angel Eyes’, ‘Spice Ball’ and ‘Scarlet Bonnet’ are just a few of the toadstools that dwell in the woods in my head.
However, even I have to admit that I have never come across a toadstool with visible mending on its cap, so I let my imagination go wherever it liked with the naming of these. And here we have my favourite, ‘Aunty Dora’s Bedroom’.
Now, bear with me, while I explain. I had (as some of you may have) several ‘aunties’, all of a certain age, some of whom were bonafide aunts, some who were a kind of cousin or just friends of my mother’s. I had an Aunty Dora, who lived in Yeovil, Somerset and she was a proper aunty. We didn’t have holidays as such, but usually once a year mum and I would go to stay with Dora for a while. I loved her and always looked forward to our visits. Apart from the novelty of being in a more modern, comfortable household than ours, with a television, proper wall to wall carpeting and a dining table, she was very kind and fun to be with. She always had a little gift for me; just simple things, but I was easily pleased and when she gave me a small plastic box full of brightly coloured map pins (the kind with fatter ends, which I’d never seen before) I was thrilled; she’d brought them back from her job at the Milk Marketing Board, I think. Once when we arrived, she gave me a empty blue glass perfume flagon which still smelled fragrant and every time I sniffed it afterwards it reminded me of our stay with her. And a matchbox sized green plastic television which had a blank grey screen, but when you looked in the peephole in the back, it showed a photo of picture of Spain or France or somewhere exotic, and when you clicked the button on the top, the picture changed.
So, to return to her woolly namesake; I used typically 1970s colours, as that was the era in which I saw her most and although I don’t think she had such outlandish colours in any of her bedrooms, somehow it reminds me of those kinder days. I can only find one photo of her, (which is not the best) of us both enjoying a summers day in her back garden when I would have been about eight or nine, I think. I seem to be sucking on an ‘ice pop’ (another treat) and I am wearing some new and ever so trendy (I thought) espadrilles which were turquoise canvas with a bit of a chunky heel and woven hessian down the sides. New shoes were few and far between, but these were special ‘holiday shoes’ and I felt quite the thing.
Wherever you are Aunty Dora, thank you for those lovely memories.
