On the fifth anniversary of her leaving us, today’s memories are of my Mum – not from my childhood, but from the children’s.
M was born in hospital in Bursa, and Nanny Joyce was here for the occasion, although I think she probably wished she wasn’t, at times! She was pretty horrified (as was I) by the way I was “looked after” at the hospital, and also by the seeming crowds of constant visitors at the hospital and at home afterwards. However, she was delighted with her new grandchild (her seventh) and really helpful to me at home for the short time she was able to stay. B was born in early December a few years later, and I think I took her to England for Christmas, with M, when she was a year old, although Mum came to meet her in the summer of her first year.
Before the children started school, we would take them to England at Christmas time if we could, then later, the term break at the end of January became our regular UK holiday time. M spent her first Christmas in England, and her third; in her second year we were in Saudi Arabia! Nanny always made a fuss of both the children and they loved going to her house; we stayed with her when they were very small and she was still well, in the nineteen nineties and early 2000s.
Mum made delicious food and ignited or nurtured some foodie loves that still persist – Walkers crisps are a firm favourite that the girls always buy when we go to England, and Nanny Joyce’s avocado cheese toasties were her most popular snack long before Instagram existed. Of course, Christmas food was always extraordinary.
Her house and garden were something of an Aladdin’s cave for the children. She had two small dogs that both enjoyed attention, and there were always boxes of pencils and paints for drawing. Her own paintings, photographs, and other artwork were all around the house, together with fascinating objects from her travels. The house and her clothes always smelt of Nag Champa, the incense that she burned almost every day. Her style and taste were very eclectic, and reflected vibrantly throughout the house, each room painted in a different colour (or colours) and furnished with throws and cushions, icons and mobiles, so that there was something interesting everywhere you looked.
Nanny’s clothes were striking, too, and she always stood out from the crowd. She loved purple, Indian prints and textiles, and natural fabrics. She valued comfort and hated conformity. She built a wardrobe of sale bargains and second-hand clothes, which she added to occasionally but rarely discarded anything from. She looked after her clothes and wore them for years and years (that’s where I get it from!).
After Dad died, she quickly developed a style of living and being that was really the antithesis of the punctual, clock-watching, perfect housekeeping, routine way she had had to live while she was married. That’s not to say she didn’t love him, but it’s very clear that her natural personality was very much suppressed within marriage, and the artist in her was given free rein when she later lived alone.
When we were children, Mum frequently and regularly said she wanted to learn to paint, but with four young girls, my brother, my Dad, and her mum to look after, it was impossible for her to find the time. She finally had the chance to take some painting lessons when she was widowed, and she revealed and developed a natural talent that she had always known she had. She was particularly fond of using watercolours and pastels, but I think she also learned to use acrylic and even oil paint. Her output was quite prolific and all of us have some of her wonderful paintings; she even sold some at one time.
Mum loved coming to visit us in Turkey in the summer. When the children were small, my boss would find her a place to stay in the summer camp where I worked, and later when we had our own house with access to the same stretch of coastline, she continued to try to come every year. She always brought gifts of clothes and toys, and most frequently, art supplies, delighted that the girls were creative and interested in art and design. In her sixties and seventies, she would shock the neighbours by strolling around and sunbathing in a tiny bikini, always totally unashamed of her body and loving the warm sun.
Wherever Mum went and whatever she did, she was always interested in people and in the culture of the place she was visiting, particularly the cuisine and the arts and crafts. In Bandırma and Erdek, she loved to wander around the markets looking at the heaps of fruit and vegetables, or rummaging through the bargains on clothing stalls. If we spent a day in Istanbul, we went to the spice bazaar or the grand bazaar and wandered. We spent a particularly lovely day once on a ferry along the Bosphorus, accompanied and guided by Orhan, who made sure we paid just pennies to take a local ferry rather than many pounds for a tourist boat!
As this New Year begins and the world seems ever closer to catastrophe and destruction, it would be easy to despair. Whenever there was bad news, Mum would always say, “I don’t know why we can’t all just love each other.” She loved her family, her dogs and all animals, the environment, the water meadows in Sudbury, the countries she visited, hot sunny weather, music, food, painting, and her friends. Her example is not a bad one to try to follow.
Joyce Ann Lambert 1933-2015
Fading Memories 