Sweet shop owner called in to solve a murder...
BRITAIN is full of unsung heroes and heroines who deserve recognition. Here, in our weekly obituary column, the moving and inspirational stories of ordinary people who have lived extraordinary lives, and who died recently, are told by their loved ones . .
MY MOTHER June was ahead of her time, not least because she was one of the first women in Bournemouth to own a car.
Her parents had a newsagent’s shop and when my mother was 18 they pitched their good-looking daughter — who was said to bear a strong resemblance to Princess Margaret — into the family business, buying her a tobacconist’s of her own.
This was in the Fifties, before people worried about the harm caused by cigarettes, and Mum used to reminisce about brands aimed at women smokers, with names like Passing Clouds, Misty and Capri. She enjoyed trying them all to see which she liked best — and flirting with the visiting sales reps.
In the Sixties she bought a cafe next to the rail station, giving her a brilliant view on the day the Queen came to Bournemouth and was driven right past her window. This made my mother’s day: she was a great royalist.
Her customers included a painter and decorator called Wilfred Swift, who had settled in Bournemouth after being demobbed from the Army. He ended up being my father, and Mum often joked that she only married him because he was helpful in the kitchen and washed up when it was busy.
When I was born in 1971 they bought a tearoom in the New Forest that proved popular, but when I was five we moved back to Bournemouth so Mum could look after my ageing grandmother — alongside running her latest enterprise, a shop selling sweets and chocolates.
Mum had another sideline, as an amateur graphologist. She advertised her services in a local paper and the editor once asked her to help solve the murder of a woman whose attacker had supposedly written an unsigned letter of apology to the police. Although the killer was never caught, much of what Mum suggested about him tallied with the findings of a criminologist working on the case.
In her 50s Mum set up a cattery next to the bungalow she and my father bought. She enjoyed tending the garden and, in particular, trying to grow blue hydrangeas, without success.
Even when she eventually grew physically frail, she still had a sharp mind. She spent most mornings on the phone to her stockbrokers, who remarked that she must have insider knowledge of the share market. It may have helped that she read the Daily Mail every day and devoured the business section.
After Mum passed on, I requested that the engraving on her headstone should include an image of a blue hydrangea.
JUNE SWIFT, born June 1, 1930, died March 3, 2017, aged 86.