‘Pam Ayres of Stamford’ with a talent for fun
I AlWAys called her Iris Primrose, because I loved the name.
To her many other friends in lincolnshire she was Iris. To her daughters, lesley, Marilyn and Patty, she was ‘Mum’.
To us all she was a bright light, not least for the wry observations on life in the poems she wrote throughout her life.
It took her until her 90th birthday to get round to having a collection published, but by then we’d already named her The Pam Ayers of stamford.
A particular favourite of mine is Pensioners’ Tea Dance, based on her love of dancing that endured into her late 80s, until a broken hip slowed her down a little:. It’s the Sunday Tea Dance and they’ll all
be here today Aches and pains forgotten, dance the
afternoon away Foxtrots, quicksteps, waltzes, some slow
but some still nifty With memories of how it was, way back
in 1950. Oscar’s in the toilet and he’s struggling
to wee He’s got trouble with his prostate and
he’ll likely miss his tea Eddy’s got a new love that he met at
Thornton Heath She does a lovely tango, but she hasn’t
any teeth.
As a young woman during the war, she met Norman Wyles, a dashing pilot at RAF Wittering, and they married in 1947. Their three girls were born in quick succession, but in 1959, when Patty was nine, Norman died of a heart attack. It was tough raising her daughters alone, but she took it in her stride, working as a secretary and bookkeeper at stamford and Rutland Memorial Hospital. she always said her poems were how she got her life into perspective.
In 1977, she married again to Tom lowe and they were happy for 20 years before he, too, died. I met her through my friend, Patty, her youngest daughter. Over the years she became a mainstay in my life, a second mother, always there when I had troubles. I don’t know what I would have done without her, or what I am going to do now.
she could be blunt and unsentimental, but most of all Iris Primrose was a glass-half-full person, with a rare gift in her writing for making us laugh at ourselves. Iris Primrose Lowe, born August 20, 1923, died April 29, 2018, aged 94.