Bar billiards queen Myra wiped the floor with the chaps
My wonderful wife Myra had many qualities. She was loving, kind, thoughtful and humble — and she also had a fantastic way with a bar billiards cue.
In fact, it was Myra’s skill that brought us together. we were members of a league in reading so I knew her by sight, but it was only after travelling to a tournament in eastbourne that we got together.
She was 25 and I was 30, and we’d both been married before, but there was no getting away from the spark between us.
An only child, Myra’s mum had died when she was 12 and she hadn’t had the easiest time as a young woman either: when she was 21, she had been admitted to hospital after her weight dropped to four stone.
no one could work out what was wrong, but eventually she was diagnosed with coeliac disease, an allergy to gluten.
Her health was one of the reasons she never wanted children of her own, although she was a super step-mother to my four from my first marriage.
A legal secretary by day, bar billiards was where Myra’s passion lay. She amassed all manner of titles, from the england ladies Singles Title, which she won several times, and the ladies All england doubles as well as the All england Mixed doubles.
Male opponents underestimated her at their peril — she usually wiped the floor with them.
The closure of so many pubs and clubs in recent years has meant that the game we both love is dying out. But Myra carried on playing whenever she could, even when she contracted rheumatoid arthritis in 2008, which left her with quite a lot of pain in her hands and feet.
four years ago she suffered the first of two heart attacks that left her heart severely damaged.
It’s ironic that six weeks before she died her doctor told her that her heart was in the best condition it had been in for a long time.
four weeks later she experienced heart failure and died 12 days later in intensive care.
I miss her so very much. for 39 years she was the best partner I could have wished for — and never more than at the bar billiards table. Myra Hawkins, born May 11, 1953, died May 4, 2018, aged 64.