Emmie Jacobs 5

The intervening years had been quite kind and uneventful really. David had continued in the tailoring and became a senior cutter in an establishment, not quite  Saville Row but rather more discreetly situated in an arcade near Southampton Row just round the corner from the British Museum. Emmie had a part time job in an accountant's office and as they had a small terraced house in Camden Town all was very conveniently placed. Mary Louise went to the Rosary Primary School and then to the Maria Fidelis Convent so all was quite neatly contained. 

Mary was a nurse in Florida now and there was a grandchild she had not yet seen. They were coming over in the summer.  Emmie's younger sister had moved to Australia in the fifties and there was little contact now. When Emmie' s mother died, the house up north had been left to her and her savings had gone to sister Catherine. Emmie and David both decided to sell up and move north to the little market town in the north west, just south of the Lake District.

The house in Chapel Walk was a small, Edwardian, three bedroom terrace. They were both happy there and the sale of the terrace in Camden had left them quite comfortably off and there was no real need to go into full time employment. David had installed their sewing machine in the small back room together with Emmie's typewriter, the small,back garden was partly given over to vegetables and the front was roses, roses all the way. The ones with a strong fragrance always had pride of place. David joked that visitors in the summer always came up smelling of roses.

David was a lucky man. Things always fell into place. When he had been retired a little while he made a journey into town and enquired in a local tailor if there was any alteration work available. It seemed that they had sufficient out workers so he,  not be discouraged, put a small ad in the local paper.

Recently retired tailor available 
for alteration work and 
small tailoring jobs.
Local 693748.

The offer was taken up by a few dry cleaning shops in the area and the work flowed in quite steadily when they had seen the quality of the work. All went well till one afternoon she came home from shopping in the village to find him asleep with the local paper over his face. He did not respond to her enquiry of whether he would like a cup of tea or coffee and when she took the paper away she was stunned to find him frozen with a slight smile on his face. 

She sat and looked at him for a long time with her tears steadily dropping onto her apron. Eventually, shrugging her shoulders she made her way into the hall slowly took out the telephone book and looking up the surgery, phoned for the doctor. The undertaker came later in the day and she was taken up with all the arrangements. There was no time to think at all. He was buried in the local graveyard in the catholic section. The priest asked no embarrassing questions as Emmie was a regular. David did go to church with her on the odd occasion especially Christmas and Easter. In his words he was sailing under a flag of convenience. " Same port, similar cargo different flag."  It was his old testament thing and she had never had any intention of it being anything else. What she knew she would hold in her heart. No one else had any call on the information and that is how it would remain. There  were so many questions when you came into the world and yet very few when you were leaving it.

It was at this time that she got a part time job in the local catholic secondary school. Father Kavanagh had put her name forward soon after the funeral. He was delivering the brocade bag that had been left in the sacristy when she was helping with the flowers. " Give you something positive to think about," he said. It was certainly that.

David had died in the June and she began just before the term started in September. Her first job was the typing of the newsletter. It was through this small task that she began to know far more about what was going on in the community which gave a whole new aspect to her life.


JL July 14. 12:02