Life and loves
“We had a bottle of champagne,” she says, “and I must have drunk too much because that night, I was stotting off the walls.”
However, there’s another factor that may well explain Mrs Ramsay’s extraordinary physical resilience and mental sharpness: her connectedness to other people and wider society.
She has lived in Scotland since she was 23 and for most of the time has volunteered for a huge range of organisations including Save The Children, Edinburgh Zoo and the National Trust for Scotland and is still doing it – she tells me she’ll soon be making some more shortbread and lemon drizzle cake for an event to raise money for cancer research.
She also has a healthy circle of friends and acquaintances. Most of her family live abroad now, but she says that most days there’ll be something to go to – a group of friends like to get together, for instance, to do a bit of colouring in. She also does crosswords and jigsaws – there’s one on the go by the window – and reads lots of history and adventure novels. All of it has sharpened her brain until it gleams.
The memory is certainly sharp. She tells me about VE Day and going down to London to be part of the crowd outside Buckingham Palace. “London was buzzing, the excitement of everything. I’ve always been interested in history and I’ve always wanted to be where the action was.”
She says she has particularly fond memories of the period after the war, which for her meant nursing and working in a munitions factory.
“The best years, I think, were the 50s and early 60s. We’d got over the war, we struggled, we had a hard time after the war and everyone accepted it and now we won’t. That’s gone – they are always wanting something more and I don’t think modern technology does much for the young ones. They are giving them computers at six years old.” She points at my mobile phone which is on the table in front of me. “You all do it,” she says.
Mrs Ramsay also has reservations about some of the social changes since the 1950s – for example, she preferred the days when gay relationships were private – but in other respects she is startlingly modern. In Tessa Dunlop’s book, she describes how she once breast-fed her son Jimmy on a train.
“It was full of soldiers and everything else,” she says. “My younger sister Pat, by then she’d come over from India, she used to say ‘Phil, you can’t do that here!’ I said, ‘Ach, I just get on with it.’”
Mrs Ramsay also celebrates the advances made in the education of women, pointing out “we did not have opportunities like that”.
SHE has some of these memories written down in her memoirs, which she keeps in a series of notebooks, carefully handwritten, and she appears to be pretty gratified with her life and how it’s gone.
She did miss the companionship of her husband after his death in 1984 and does have a regret she never went down the Amazon. “There were no tourist parties when I was able,” she says. “That’s my only regret.”
Otherwise, Mrs Ramsay still likes to travel – she travelled to Staffa in the Inner Hebrides when she was 99 for instance, and keeps on sharpening the mind on books about history and adventure. This is part of the mindset and philosophy founded in India and Burma and honed in Scotland and the rest of the world. She sees herself as multicultural and, in her own words, a citizen of the world.
A century of life could take you anywhere but in the case of Phyliss Ramsay it is has taken her here: a life lived on inquisitiveness and openness. How does she see herself, I ask her. “Oh, I’m a free soul,” she says.
The Century Girls is published by Simon and Schuster at £20. Tessa Dunlop and Phyllis Ramsay will be appearing at Ayewrite! in Glasgow on Thursday at 7.45pm. See www.ayewrite.com