It was time to get the spare bedroom ready. My family were due to visit and I needed to empty drawers and bedside cabinets to make room for their clothes. This clear out was well overdue, why oh why had I saved some of this rubbish? Clothes that were never going to fit me again in a million years! Books and other items that long ago should have gone to the local charity shop and what was this, I pondered, as I picked up the old deep cardboard box from the back of a drawer? Tipping its contents on to the bed I gazed at the array of odd buttons, broken chains, huge “Dynasty” type earrings and poppet beads in all shapes and colours with matching earrings of course! LOL. I suppressed a giggle, ye Gods, had I really worn these? And then I saw it, the yellowing tissue paper concealing, yet lovingly protecting its contents like a soft shawl around a new baby. Even before I unwrapped it I knew it’s every flaw from the tiny scratches to the exposed cheap metal from where the “rolled gold” had, in time, worn away. A man’s signet ring, the memories it evoked engraved in my mind as clear as the two initials engraved on its square front T.F. Sitting on the bed and looking at this ring I am hurled back down the corridor of time, I feel sad, reflection on times long since gone and never to be recaptured again. A time of innocence and naivety, where sex and the mention of it was taboo. Golden summer days, when, if one was lucky enough to own a bicycle, ( I always had to borrow one!) a ride out to the mountains and country side with a bottle of pop and a packed lunch was an exciting and memorable adventure. Our school days were now behind us as were our school “sweethearts” those little boys with ever runny noses and shiny cuffs. This then was our “in between time” neither child nor yet woman even if we thought otherwise! Too old to play street games and yet, too young to go courting, (going steady had not yet entered our vocabulary). In those days we had left school at 14 and I was already into a year working. How grown up I felt when I was finally allowed to go dancing! Despite the dance finishing at 12.00 I was under strict orders to be home by 10.00. The year was 1949: I came in at the time of the big band era and learned to jive to the sound of Glenn Miller and other big bands whose names have long since been forgotten. Soon, they were replaced by my (then) idols Guy Mitchell, All Martino and my supreme idol, Eddie Fisher. It was at one such dance I was to meet my first “grown up” boyfriend. The casual “Can I walk you home?” would lead to more dates and (sigh) my first romance!! Having just gained permission to go dancing, the forbidden boy friend had to be kept a secret from my dad. Our summer days were spent cycling in the countryside, a treat for this inner city kid away from the tenement house environment. The bleak winter months brought its problems, most times we were broke with not enough money to get us into the local picture house, thus denying kisses and cuddles on the back row! We walked around the town freezing and wishing we had married friends we could visit just so we could get in from the cold. How all that would change when I was invited home to meet his family.
