A Life Less Ordinary

IT was her 90th birthday. And she had no-one.
But she knew we were coming so she'd baked a cake.
She had forgotten to add sugar though, and it had been in the oven too long.

She fussed and flapped and served it on a flowery china cake stand on a white paper doily. Then she cut us each a huge chunk with a long bone-handled knife and waited excitedly for our reaction as we bit into it. It was rock hard and tasted terrible.

'Mmmm lovely!' we said (of course we did)....but when her back was turned we scrunched telltale crumbs onto the plate and put the rest in our pocket.

We'd made her day, she said.

And then we got on with things. 'Let's start at the beginning,' I said. 'Tell me about your parents....'

I was a Brighouse Echo trainee journalist of just a few weeks and this was my first '90th birthday' interview. Coached to say little but listen, to encourage with a raised eyebrow here, a shrug there, a 'please go on' or an 'and then what happened?' to keep things flowing...I wrote down facts in over-large crude Teeline outlines in a spiral-bound notebook, putting an asterisk in the margin when a good quote came.

I remember a dark living room but sunshine through the window, antimacassars, a silver tea set brought out 'for best', a bobbled couch and an Engelbert Humperdinck LP.

I remember a cat, dusty silk flowers with cobwebs in them, veined, shaking hands, bingo and the Waring Green Forget-Me-Not-Club of which she had once been a member.

I remember a 14-year-old in the cotton mills, bobbins, aprons and headscarves, a cluster of friends and neighbours around the only TV in the street watching the coronation, a husband long-dead, and much-wanted children failing to be born.

I remember the garden was her pleasure and lavender her favourite.

And I remember her knotting her hands and looking out of the window as she spoke about a teenage brother who lied about his age and went to Flanders fields and never returned. And how she still had picture of him in a large, oval, silver locket at her wattled, wrinkled throat. And how she still wept for him, after so long.

And then the interview was over.

All these things I remember, yet I have forgotten her name. But when anyone asks what I found most satisfying about being a reporter, I tell them her story....or rather, my story.

You see, I had thought I would do the interview on the telephone - it was 'only a 90th birthday' after all -  but my editor, Stephen Firth*, had insisted...'no, you must go see her, it's important.'. And I didn't understand why....

And then I did. Not just because of the cake palaver (though I knew I'd never forget that moment!) or because of the joy we'd put into one person's day by simply taking the trouble to turn up.

But because the rapport we'd built up over the cake and over the admiring of the garden meant that while she was posing for pictures under the gentle guidance of the photographer, she told us something she hadn't shared with anyone else: she had cancer, she said; she hadn't got long and she was planning, in her final months, to make her first ever trip 'abroad', a first and final pilgrimage to visit to her brother's war grave.

I got my notebook out again.

She was a bit nervous but the hospital had said it would be ok for her to go and an old and trusted friend would be her guide. 'I'm going to see my brother again, after all these years'.

I don't buy the phrase 'hardened hack'. I never did. Even now the memory prompts a clearing of the throat.

An ordinary life, is what I remember thinking as we left, the photographer and I, and we walked down to the canal in Brighouse town centre to feed the cake remains to the ducks before going back to the office.

An ordinary life. Yet extraordinary. And goodness I worked hard at that piece, trying to do it justice, to do right by her.

She never made the visit, the dear lady. The cancer claimed her before the journey. But the light in her eyes as she spoke of her impending adventure has stayed with me.

It was an interview that made this naive, awkward, wannabee journo see that it's not only the 'big' stories that are worthy of time, effort and dedication - and instilled in me for the first time a knowledge, that no matter how seemingly insignificant, everyone has a story that wants to be told.

Wishing good luck to my inspirational editor as he prepares for life after the Echo. He taught me all I know.

* http://www.holdthefrontpage.co.uk/2012/news/weekly-editor-made-redundant-in-yorkshire-shake-up/