Back In Time

As I observe these simple items, I can’t help but reminisce about the past . . .

I’M pleased my fellow volunteer, Martina, is already there when I arrive at the charity shop. Autumn had been warm and the temperatures seemed to be holding into winter.

But last night they’d plummeted, so she’s got the draughty old place a bit warmer and put the kettle on.

“Three big bags of clothes came in yesterday,” she tells me as we have a brew. “It all needs sorted, and there’s the new window display to do as well.”

We’ve talked about the window for a couple of weeks, as we want to put more cold-weather stuff out on show.

“You get on with the window,” I tell her. “When Jonathan and Alice come in they can see to the sales and I’ll do the sorting.”

To be honest, I’d probably prefer either of the other two jobs, but we want to encourage young volunteers.

I know students Jon and Alice enjoy dealing with customers and Martina is definitely the best for the window.

She’s an artistic sort. You want to see her house – it wouldn’t be out of place in one of the glossy homes magazines.

But though the sorting isn’t my favourite job, when I tip out the contents of the bin bags, I find I’m smiling.

Suddenly I’m back in my early teens, in the late 1960s, at about this time of the year . . .

****

“Will you take this round to Auntie Ellen’s?” my mum had asked me at the time, handing me a bag.

Not a black bin bag. Probably a carrier from the town’s big department store, now gone.

Auntie Ellen wasn’t actually an aunt, nor a relative, but she was a close friend of the family and lived along the road with her husband, Stan.

They were good people, active in the community, and every now and again they’d do a local collection of stuff people didn’t want.

They would hire the church hall and have a jumble sale as a fund-raiser for a charity they were involved with.

Do we still have jumble sales? I haven’t heard of any recently. Maybe they’ve been superseded by shops like this one I’m now in, but certainly they were frequent occurrences then.

Posters round the town would advertise the date and time and, when the doors opened, there would often be a queue forming!

In the bag I’d been instructed to take round to Auntie Ellen’s was a donation to the event in the form of numerous board games.

Though Ellen and Stan were on the same road as us, their house was different to the 1930s semis that generally made up the neighbourhood.

Older – mid-Victorian – and larger.

“Oh, thank you so much,” Ellen had greeted me. “Come inside out of the cold, Jen, and we’ll put it with the rest.”

She took me into a room which rather resembled the one I’m in now, half a lifetime later.

“Your dad’s going to help Stan take it to the hall tomorrow night,” Ellen had said.

This was Thursday and the sale was Saturday.

My dad had a big van, but I reckoned it would take him several trips – there were so many dolls and other toys, books and clocks – I remember one still ticking.

An easel, a guitar and other remnants of abandoned hobbies. All sorts.

There were clothes, too, and I had my eye on a jumper.

It was a mad-looking, oversized thing, each sleeve a different, clashing colour, and the back and front, too.

I was going to a dance on Saturday, where I was expecting Peter to be.

I was crazy about him, but so were a lot of the girls in my year at school.

I’d been wanting to find something to make me stand out.

And this jumper, if I wore it with my new yellow mini-skirt – well, if that didn’t make him notice me, nothing would.

I asked Ellen how much they’d be selling the jumper for at the sale, and gave her the money there and then.

Then I took it home, well pleased.

Of course, my mum insisted on washing it before I wore it and the colours all ran, which made the garment look even odder.

But I had faith in it and wore it to the dance with defiant pride – until a voice bellowed out to me across the floor.

“Hey, you . . .” It was a

lad called Ginger Johnston, on account of his red hair.

I’d seen him around but didn’t really know him, though I learned later his family were friends of Ellen and Stan’s.

They had contributed unwanted items for the jumble sale.

“. . . that’s my old jumper you’re wearing, Jennifer Gray!” he continued loudly.

Convinced everyone could hear, I was so embarrassed I was going to leave.

But before I did, Peter arrived and asked me to dance.

After that we were inseparable.

I feared we might drift apart when he went to university, but we survived it and got engaged right after he graduated.

I found a job in the town where he’d been at uni and where we intended to make our life together.

It was a coastal town, unlike where we’d come from, and I became fascinated by the sand dunes on the beach.

“It’s the way they change all the time,” I told Peter, “with the tide and wind.”

Later, though, after Peter told me we should cancel the wedding, their unpredictability came to cause me unease rather than delight.

It was a total shock to me, his announcement.

Forget the charm of the ephemeral sand dunes. I now wanted things that didn’t change and lasted.

I moved back to my home town in the unyielding Pennines.

Initially I lived again with my parents. They’d moved by then to a smaller house.

“There’s always room for you, Jen,” they assured me.

I knew that my brothers would have received the same welcome if their lives had gone wrong, too.

But both of them were, and are to this day, happily married.

Ellen and Stan weren’t now such close neighbours of my parents, but they remained good friends.

I was still prizing above everything reliability in my life and it pleased me that Ellen and Stan were still totally the same.

It was through Ellen that I got involved with the local charity whose shop I’m working in today.

Initially, I couldn’t give as much time as I can now that I’m retired.

On my return, I’d quickly found a new job and I was busy with that and building a new life.

It was very much a Plan B life for me, though.

I’d loved Peter and believed I still did. That was the life I wanted, the one

I’d had planned with him.

There was a guy at work, Kev, who I knew “liked” me.

I didn’t encourage his attentions to the point where I must have sometimes seemed rude.

One evening, I was round at Ellen’s for a meeting of those who were, at that time, the most involved with the charity.

We were planning to discuss fund-raising ideas.

Ellen and I were in the kitchen and the others hadn’t arrived yet.

I’d come early because I knew Ellen would be preparing refreshments for us all – she always did – and I wanted to help.

She and Stan did such an awful lot as it was.

This was the end of the 1970s and, in keeping with the fashions, I was busy spearing little cubes of cheese and pineapple with cocktail sticks,

Meanwhile, Ellen sorted out glasses for the couple of bottles of wine that Stan had brought home with him.

“Has he gone?” she asked.

It was clear she meant Stan, who’d left the wine with us and departed the kitchen.

“Good,” she continued. “I wonder, Jen, if you could help me on the twentysecond, too?”

“The twenty-second?” I repeated.

I assumed it was something else for the charity, though I hadn’t anything in my diary for that date.

“Yes, it’s our wedding anniversary and I want to do something to mark the occasion,” Ellen said. “But you know what he’s like. Not wanting a fuss. No fancy restaurants or that.”

She added this last bit in a brilliant imitation of

Stan’s voice and we both laughed.

“I thought I’d just arrange a little informal party here,” she continued.

“I’ll be happy to help,” I said. “How long have you been married, then?”

“Sixteen years,” she replied.

I was surprised. My parents had been married coming up to 30 years and, as Ellen and Stan were older, I’d imagined they’d been married longer.

“It was the year before we moved here,” Ellen explained as if she read my thoughts. “Stan is my second husband.”

This was news to me. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t have asked any questions, but Ellen seemed to want to talk.

“I married my first husband, Greg, when I was just in my teens,” she explained. “There were people who said it was too young.

“But I’m glad we did marry early because, even then, we didn’t have many years together.”

She was silent a moment, the glasses forgotten.

“He died just four years later, in an accident,” she revealed.

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“It’s OK, love,” she replied. “I was happy with Greg, and I’ve been happy with Stan, too.

“At first I didn’t think it possible that I would be happy with anyone else.

“No-one could compare with Greg. He was my ‘someone special’, sent specially for me.”

“Your soulmate,” I murmured, the description coming to me easily since that was how I still thought about Peter.

In my mind, he remained the only one I believed I could be happy with.

But it wasn’t true, was it? Ellen had found another soul mate. Her and Stan were as close as any couple I’d ever met.

The next day, I accepted a date with Kev at work . . .

****

I’m brought back to the present by Alice speaking.

“Anyone for a bacon butty? I’m going to Ben’s.”

We take it in turns to go to the baker’s on the corner.

“I’ll have a hot pasty,” I say, searching for my purse.

“Me too.” Martina nods. “We need something to warm us up.”

The shop is still cold. I hadn’t noticed it so much, lost as I was in my

He remained the only one I believed I could be happy with

memories of jumble sales and the dance with Peter.

I then think I must be day-dreaming all over again as a new voice calls out.

“Hey, Jennifer Gray, that’s my jumper you’re wearing!”

But, no, it’s Ginger Johnston himself standing there in the doorway.

Except his hair’s grey now.

I re-met “Ginger” – Jeff – in my second year back at home at a party.

He, too, had been away, but had returned and was teaching at our old school.

I’d hardly spoken to him when we were at school – my eyes were only for Peter.

But at that party where I saw him again – at Ellen and Stan’s – we got on great.

I thought it might be just because of the “catchingup” aspect that our conversation was so easy. But as it turned out . . . I smile at him.

“It’s freezing in here,” I say, smiling.

“This jumper that I knitted for you, husband, is the warmest I could find this morning!” ■