In linking the quote for this week with Art Journal Journey my mind went to that British film "Mrs Caldicot's Cabbage War" when I saw the quote I had to use for the journal page today. It's about Thelma (Pauline Collins) who is sent to a run down nursing home by her son and daughter in law.
It's a good fun film, in which amongst other things they refuse to eat the endless tasteless cabbage meals they were given and go out for some fun on the bowling green.
"Agnes was feeling particularly down. She had just been to watch a wedding at the local church with her grandson Benji. Benji had been asking lots of questions about when his Gran got married and wanted to know all about her and Grandpa's lives when they were younger.
Lots of images of friends now gone passed before her eyes and did nothing to lighten the mood she was in. She had lost touch with so many of her old pals as each had taken different directions in their lives. Her husband, George, was almost 80 and no longer were they the Agnes and George of old. Oh what fun they had had when growing up. What scrapes they had been in. She dare not tell Benji of some of the things they had done. Harmless things, like playing 'knock a door, run' and raiding neighbour's bonfire piles before the big day when they were to be lit. Were they really errors of her life or just part of growing up?
She shook herself and put on a smile telling Benji about the time George took her out to tea and they ate all the cakes on the cake stand not realising that each one had to be paid for. Poor George had not had enough money on him and she had had to empty her purse and help him pay for the cakes. The dress she had been saving for for the Queen's Coronation just blew away in the wind that day as her savings dwindled and the pair of them felt quite sick afterwards. But she did not tell Benji that last bit.
Agnes remembered her school days when she had been sent off to a boarding school and how she disliked the place. She remembered the real scrapes she and her friends got into and the time she led a revolt over them having to wear straw boaters in the summer when they walked past the boy's school and how the boy's would jeer at them. Worse still it had almost ended up with her being expelled the time she climbed the flagpole and tied a pair of the house mistresses undies to the pole.
Agnes had had some upsetting news that morning and she had thought that going by the church and seeing a neighbour's daughter's wedding would take her mind off things and she would shake out of the doldrums - but no, it made her feel even sadder. She said to herself "the older I get the more I see the error of my ways, but the less I care". She knew that wasn't strictly true, yes, she had regrets about some things that had gone on in her life but they were not for sharing, and certainly not with her lovely grandson Benji. "If we didn't have regrets, didn't have those moments in our past to see what errors we had made we wouldn't grow up to be good Grandparents to our little ones. So I don't care." she muttered to herself. And with that she called out to Benji to set off to see what Grandpa was up to."
