extraordinary lives
HAVE you lost a relative or friend in recent months whose life you’d like to celebrate? Our Friday column tells the stories of ordinary people who lived extraordinary
WE GREW up in Hoxton, in London’s East End, in the Thirties. Our father was a boxer — though his day job was a painter-decorator — and we lodged in a house owned by Pedlar Palmer, a world bantamweight champion of the 1890s. Our relatives were Cockney costermongers, selling fruit and veg at Hoxton market. I have followed the family trade and am the Pearly Queen of the Royal Borough of Chelsea. There were four sisters, though sadly one died aged two during a measles epidemic. Mavis was a kindhearted, pretty girl with blonde hair. Like most East End children, when war broke out we were evacuated. We went to Luton, but the house we lived in was beside the railway line, which the Germans bombed, so it wasn’t much safer. Mavis was 14 when she left school. She had a few jobs, but her passion was for making clothes. From an early age she had helped our mum make clothes for the family — she was very good at needlework. She
MY SISTER MAVIS
was 18 when she married her first husband, a Glaswegian named Arthur, and they had two children. But the marriage was unhappy and didn’t last. Afterwards she met Jimmy, another Glaswegian. He was a lovely man and they had three children together. They moved to Islington, North London, to be near Dad, who had separated from Mum. Mavis was widowed and had to care for her family alone. By then she had begun fostering children — she loved them all as her own. We always said ‘where there’s kids, there’s Mavis’. She married once more — yes, another Scotsman, called John — and had two more children before being again widowed. She loved to make costumes for the children’s school plays and to raise funds for good causes such as hospitals and the homeless. In 1995, she received a British Red Cross Care in Crisis award for improving the life of a vulnerable elderly neighbour who couldn’t look after himself. In her later years she suffered from heart trouble and moved to the seaside at Hastings, East Sussex, where she made lots of new friends. Her funeral was attended by her seven children, 17 grandchildren, 20 greatgrandchildren and some of the 40-plus children she had fostered over the years, all grown into fine adults.