New Year 2020... and a seismic 2019

Happy New Year 2020... and an account of a seismic 2019

Dear friends

Thanks to any of you who have sent me a Christmas card – I love getting them, but have great difficulty sending them  - so here’s my Christmas card equivalent; a Happy New Year letter.

The main thing about 2019 is that our wonderful, kind, well organised, vibrant, buoyant, funny, and universally loved mum died in October, at the age of 93.

I was in Poland when she died – which says a lot about her. We knew she was ill, but she was absolutely happy for us to travel and do whatever we wanted to do – as long as we facetimed her every day. (She LOVED her Ipad, was frantic once when I took her charger away by mistake, couldn’t wait till I could get the charger back to her the next day, so she went into town to buy a new one that same day…)

So many people came to the funeral and the prayers in the week after the funeral – some, people we’d known as children, making the journey from London or Manchester in torrential rain to a muddy Preston cemetery, in memory of the last surviving friend of their parents….

We’ve found some lovely things in the flat … including a 1945 fixture card from Hurstpierpoint

Rugby Club that’s now gone to the Hurstpierpoint College archive, anEat British with Dan and Doris Archer’ recipe book (that’s now with the Archers archive), notes from when Mum interviewed cleaners and nannies in the fifties and sixties (it was great to see names of people we recognised, some of whom stayed in touch with the family for years) and some GORGEOUS jewellery, crockery, glassware and clothes.

Here’s the eulogy that Lynn and I read at the funeral:

Mum was born in 1926 in Lewisham, the only child of Hannah Febland and Sam Cline.

From the age of 10 it was just her and her mum.  She went to eight different schools during the war, and they lived with a succession of aunts.  No matter where they were, she was always encouraged to practise the piano, something she continued throughout her life.  Even at the age of 90 she was still going out and “playing the piano for the old people” and she was proud to announce that she had practised the piano just last week. 

She trained at the London Apothecary College as a dispenser, and loved her work so much that when she married our dad, a doctor, who already employed a dispenser, she was disappointed not to be able to continue.  However, she spent the next 40 years being the very best sort of doctor’s receptionist, kind to everyone who phoned the practice “because they must be ill, or they wouldn’t have phoned”.

Mum and Dad were active in the Preston Hebrew Congregation until the shul closed, and then moved to St Annes where Mum found herself in charge of laying the tables for every Kiddush, and was also a much-celebrated minutes secretary for the League of Jewish Women and St Annes Ziona.

After Dad died in 1989 the shul became the focus of her social life, but also, as most of you will know, there was nothing she loved better than visitors.  Her afternoon teas were legendary.

She loved her iPad, and kept in constant touch on Facebook and FaceTime with Lynn and me, her grandchildren Gilly Jen and Anna, and her wider friends and family.

We are so proud of our amazing, funny, clever, engaging, beloved, beautiful mum.  Right up to the last day of her life she was completely herself, independent, and full of love for her family.

Since Mum died I’ve been trying to emulate her by being more organised, tidy, elegant….  and KIND.  The lesson I thought I was learning when I grew up was to be like my dad, so I got lots of degrees and worked all the time!  Now, hearing the lovely things people said about mum (during her life as well as at the funeral and afterwards – even the librarian, the postman, the hairdresser, cried when they heard the news) I’m realising that life is just as much (more?) about being kind and caring as it is about working all the hours there are.   

You can hear Mum playing “till there was you”, the 1957 song by Meredith Wilson which was also sung by the Beatles, here.  I recorded it on her 92^nd birthday, a year before she died. She started as a classical pianist before going on to learn all the chord inversions so she could play beautiful ornamental accompaniment to songs from the 30s, 40s and 50s with just the top line and the guitar chords.

I have a big collection of her music at home – if you’d like to come and look at it and take some away let me know!

The rest of 2019 pales into insignificance behind this. The only reason I’ll say any other news is that Mum always backed me to have absolutely no limits in my life…  The book of my PhD came out in January (“Candles, Conversions and Class: five generations of a Scottish Jewish Family”), published by the Scottish Jewish Archives Centre.  Mum had proofread it for me at least four times …. It was launched during the 110^th birthday exhibition we held for my aunt Hannah Frank (1908-2008) – for which I got a £7,000 grant from Creative Scotland, to run a load of wonderful activities around the exhibition, working with some brilliant Glasgow Uni History of Art students – including doing lots of audio describing to make the art accessible to people with visual impairments.     

In April we were able to install a  LIFT at Halton Mill (the coworking space and event centre that I 

help to run)  – after a three year fundraising effort that I’d started, with a group of people, after being inspired by attending a disability liberation workshop in 2016.      

I launched my podcast “Fiona’s Travels” in May, the first series including interviews with people I met, and music I heard, while I was travelling in 2018…. And I’m planning a second series in 2020.

In June I NEARLY managed to organise through SCoJeC (the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities) the organisation I’ve worked for for nearly 10 years, for some amazing Syrian dancers to perform in Scotland…it didn’t quite come off but would have been wonderful if it had…. And then went to Orkney and Shetland with SCoJeC, hosting a talk with author Ethel Hofman, and doing talks about my own book.  

Apart from that I spent most of the summer playing Klezmer music – first at a festival in Normandy, which inspired me to go back to the Yiddish Summer Weimar festival, and then on to Klezfest in London.  With support from my mum, I had a fab birthday party in September at Halton Mill which raised £800 for KIVA – a microfinance organisation that makes loans to small businesses in the developing world.  (I’m already getting repayments and reinvesting the first lot of loans…)

All this travelling (and the autumn trip to Poland – which involved an evening being a barmaid in a theatre bar in Berlin on the way out, and an evening out with one of the aforesaid Syrian dancers on the way home!) was partly made possible because I had a couple of lovely people staying at my house and feeding my cat during the year; Kerstin from Brmingham in August, and Veronique from Canada in the autumn.      

We had a wonderful family get-together for mum’s 93^rd birthday, two weeks before she died – here we are (my sister Lynn, Mum, me, my nieces Gilly & Jen & my daughter Anna, taken by Will Anna’s dad).

And here’s a ‘real life’ pic taken on the same day to finish off.

Thanks all for reading this far, for sending me a Christmas card and your news (if you have done). 

Thinking of you and thanks so much for sticking with me through all those years where I concentrated more on work than people.   I’m hoping they’re over!   At the beginning of October I gave in a year’s notice to both of my jobs – at SCoJeC and at Halton Mill – I’m a ‘WASPI’, one of the first women hit with getting our pension later than expected, but it will come through next Autumn (all being well!).    I’m planning a pretty quiet year in 2020.  But I still have a feeling that what I might call a “quiet year” is still a bit exhausting to other readers…  In SCoJeC we’re doing a small-scale ‘Being Jewish in Scotland’ survey working with some Glasgow Uni final year stats students, and organising at least four tours of different performers and speakers around Scotland – and we’ve got a new £15,000 grant to deliver our education programmes in schools around the country.  At Halton Mill we’re just putting together the spring/summer brochure and possibly negotiating with a new café owner to work with us…. And I’m hoping to get a ‘creative responses to Hannah Frank’s Art’ exhibition and associated workshops off the ground by the end of 2020.

I haven’t mentioned the B***** word – which has been at the forefront of my mind since June 2016.  I think after Auschwitz and Birkenau (where I was when I heard that my mum had died) and after mum’s death, it’s all is kind of secondary in my mind, but still dreadful.  Good luck to all in the (currently) United Kingdom and all who sail in her – we’re going to need it.

Lots of love

Ps – had a little cry just then – every time I wrote my blog posts when I was travelling, I’d send them on to Mum to proofread and comment on before I sent them any further. Who’s going to be my Caring Reader now???