Frances, Frankie, Mum…
She was a person who made plans. Back when we were living in the UK — in our beautiful Old Bridge Cottage, by the river — I remember desperately wanting a cat for company. Mum asked “What will it do all day? It’ll need a plan.” She wouldn’t be convinced that cats are perfectly happy without plans. Mum lived by her plans.
And she executed them with precision and with finesse: she planned (and cooked) the most amazing meals; in HK, she built a reputation for organising the most incredible events and parties; and as many of us know in these more recent years and months she busied herself managing meals, parties and events here in France. The most mundane activity was approached with a vigorous eye towards timings, meeting points, and contingencies. On her visits to London, our routine outings to her much loved Westfield mall were executed with a precision that even admirers of Roger Federer’s backhand would have found a wonder.
And make no mistake, mum’s plans took energy and in some cases courage too. I’m not sure if mum ever saw it this way, but I’ve always believed she was a pathfinder, not preaching, but showing the way through getting things done, through moving, always moving… Her training and hard work at tennis gave her the opportunity, as a young girl, to travel beyond Manchester, to Torquay, and the exotic Le Touquet. Her flare but also real commitment to languages laid the basis for her glamorous years as a stewardess, first with Sabena and then BOAC. Along this route, she met many dear friends, Ina, Raye, Lorna, Brian, Anne, Carole, Annetta and eventually of course Geoff, our dad, on a flight from London to Karachi.
And of course there was her planning and courage — with Geoff — in adopting me. I’m not sure if she could have planned for the energy that would require. As a young (and not so young) child I — with Greg’s help — tested mum’s direction, but she rarely wavered; resilient, she was always resilient.
Over the years, we — me, Greg, and dad — came to rely on mum’s planning… maybe a bit too much. There was the time Greg flew to the Philippines for a tennis tournament and, in mum’s absence, left his rackets on the plane. Or her incessant pleas in organising dad. “Geoffrey!!” came to be her signature holler at home.
But there was a great care and love to mum’s plans. She wanted the best for us, she taught us to know what matters, showed us how things come to matter between those who care for one another.
On this website we’ve made to celebrate mum’s life and many friendships, we’ve put a few recordings that she’d made to send to her mother and sister when we lived in HK in the 70s and 80s. Beautiful in their own right, these recordings, made by mum, were examples to us of the work needed to make things right, for family to care for and love each other: how you do the work of caring and loving.
One of mum’s favourite stories to tell is about the outing she planned for my 6th birthday. I loved to ride the green rickety trams in HK, sitting upstairs, pretending to steer between the frantic hustle and bustle on the island’s busy roads. For my birthday she and I, then, took the two front seats atop a tram. Equipped with a box liquorice Allsorts, we rode from one end of the line to the other. What a truly glorious plan that was. So Frankie! For my son’s 4th birthday this year, I planned something similar. He and I rode the 55 bus from Hackney Road to Oxford Circus, Bertie with his bag of nuts in hand.
Mum also showed us her attention to care with all her many friends. In Hong Kong, she met and nurtured friendships with Jane Crawley, Pat Wong, Helen, Fung, Anita Farrell, Peter Sherwood, Brian Catton, Elaine and George Wells, Ena and Jerry Marlow, Naomi and Ken Grant, Joanna and Len Sang, Ken and Ruth Letcher, Colin and Maria Holdenby to name just a few of the Hong Kong establishment and her tennis partners. And as Elaine has put it, these weren’t just nurtured friendships, they were fun. In Elaine’s words:
And friends in France, well, many here will know how she touched people with her vigour and energy.
So it’s mum, and her caring plans, that have taught me how cherish my friendships and, most importantly, how to do my best for my children, and how to love them. Fortunately, she had the chance to help me, firsthand, with the latter. Frances adored Bertie and Marianne, and in the more testing moments that all parents face, I hear her calls for calm and patience.
I’m so glad she met my beloved partner Caroline and had the time with the children she did, showering them in the latest Petit Bateau, feeding them meals they’d gobble up unlike anything I’d make them, and, yes, making plans with and for them: to go riding in Bize, to go to the London transport museum, to swim in Roquebrun — or “Rockroom” as my daughter prefers to call it.
I don’t know if mum ever had a larger plan in life. Her amazing life was so full: her glamorous days as a stewardess; her incredible accomplishments on the tennis court; her full life with Geoff in HK, the UK and France, and the many friends she continued to stay close to; her bread sauce at xmas… All of this would certainly suggest she knew what she was doing.
But plans go awry. We didn’t plan for this. How could we? It snuck up on us.
I’m not sure mum ever accepted this, but plans have to be ‘lived in’ as well as ‘lived by’. Plans are like walking, like the beautiful walks we took in the hills of our cherished village in Spain, La Herradura. The pleasure is in knowing where one is going but not knowing the precise path followed to get there, where every step is shaped by the last and the one to come.
I don’t know what we’ll do without your plans mum. I think it’ll be one step at a time… always looking to you and our loving memories of you for guidance.