Writing for Fun
April 2015
The Telephone Cold Call - Joan Bond
Well, you have all heard and made up your favourite answers to cold callers but I found a new one yesterday. 'No the owner isn't here. I am renting the place for an enormous fee while madame is on a world cruise, which I feel I am paying for and I am not well . . . etc. etc. Taking up so much time, they rang off. But, I do remember when cold calls started; my twin nieces had to work in that job while the kids were small. I think they learnt quickly some very harsh expletives and for pennies too. Still it was a bit better than tilling envelopes at a shilling a gross.
I bring this up because I am trying to write this story and am constantly being disturbed by having to answer the damn phone as it just may be something important.
Well, as I digress I have returned to my previous epistle, which I didn't get the chance to read last time as I was so full of my old ladies they kind of took over. I suppose it's when I occasionally look in the mirror and see them. I have nothing to regret about looking old, well I am only thirty nine but boy did I enjoy earning those wrinkles. My husband was ten years older than I, so when entering exhibitions etc I became a crinkly pretty early letting him buy the tickets.
I have had a wonderful life, only child, not spoilt as I had to work and help in the home as long as mum was busy. But as a member of this society said, you always had your own toys and clothes, but I came at an age when Mum was always home when I came in from school and we had time to talk together at meal time as we sat around the table. Mum was a really good cook and we always had a pudding, which, because it was wartime, was unusual. She loved whist drives, prizes being cuts of meat from the butcher and groceries. She was such a happy soul and known as Aunty Lil at these gatherings and seemed to fall in the way of many treats. She actually managed to provide all the food at our wedding with different people giving something: sugar or margarine for the cake and even sultanas, unseen for years from a lady who had a relation in Australia.
I loved my boys; one like his dad who never wanted to move from home and the other who went for a bottle of wine to Paris and never came back. Still we travelled to many lovely places with him as he didn't do birthday gifts but look us everywhere. He paid for us to fly to the south of France one spring w here he was working for a boat company but it took us all week to paint the deck, on our knees, by hand of this boat he was renovating. You have never before seen such sunburned bottoms.
Between them though I have six, plus two grandchildren as my son married again. And they are all lovely to their gran or Joanster as they call me. When the first, Kate, was born the other grandma was worried about what she should be called. I just said Joanie and they did. Many a time I have been hailed when in a queue at a shop and people look around to see a little tot lugging my shirt. And now of course they are of an age to take me out and spoil me and I just love them.
I think, like the old ladies, I was always up for a lark and have met such lovely people on the way. I do talk to everyone. I suppose it's like being a nosey cow, but not really, I am just interested in them all, that's why I always loved my job. Meeting people all the time I have never worried about dying really as long as it doesn't hurt, but I have to admit when I was feeling rough a month ago and dreaded that a problem had returned I thought, bloody hell I am not going at the beginning of spring I have just got the garden straight. So here we are driving you mad again with my aspiration of culture, trying to be a writer!