Extraordinary LIVES
MY BEST FRIEND MARGARET
MY MUCH-loved best friend and I grew up in Lincoln and met as teenagers through mutual friends who attended dances at St John’s Hospital. This had a surprisingly fine ballroom. We, too, started dancing there to the big bands of the day, such as Joe Loss and Ray McVay. We married our husbands at around the same time — I was 19 and Margaret was 21 — when we both weighed 7 st 4 lb and had 23 in waists, although Margaret was tiny, at 5 ft tall, and looked like a little doll.
We were a close foursome and spent most of our spare time together, attending stock car races, going on country walks, sledging in winter, and taking holidays together — at first in a relative’s caravan near Skegness, then later in a static caravan in the New Forest and camping in tents, progressing to white-water rafting in the Loire Valley and eventually (although I said I never would) going on cruises.
We spent almost every Saturday with each other and always parted with the words: ‘See you next Saturday, unless you get a better offer!’ After babies came along, we’d stay in, dragging cots and other baby paraphernalia
between our houses. The four of us would play canasta. Margaret loved children. She and her husband John had two sons, Andrew and Stephen, and six grandchildren and a great-grandchild. After moving to the village of Waddington, just south of Lincoln, Margaret worked as an assistant at the nursery school in the village hall. She was devoted to those children; if they were happy, Margaret was happy. It was her job to store away all the toys underneath the stage after school, as she was the only staff member small enough to fit. After retiring, she volunteered at St Barnabas Hospice in Lincoln, spending one day a week there working as a tea-lady: a role she fulfilled for 25 years until a fortnight before she died. After we were both widowed, we found a way to carry on, sharing meals, memories and jokes. When I was in hospital with pneumonia last year, it was Margaret who visited me and helped me through.
You couldn’t ask for a more caring friend. Just before Margaret died she apologised for leaving me as the ‘last man standing’ from our old foursome. She was my best friend for 62 years and I miss her. I was moved to see the people of Waddington line the streets as her funeral cortege went past. They all knew and loved her as she’d looked after generations of children at the village hall school.
MARGARET NORTON, born April 5, 1936; died April 10, 2020, aged 84.