Eleanor | Howick
“Yes, I suppose I can. I think I once felt love, was when I was a wee girl.
I come from a family of seven, and the baby, the seventh baby was a little boy called Charles, and he ended up in the hospital, and he was very ill. We didn’t, I didn’t know what, they didn’t know what was wrong with him. My mother had been knitting him clothes, and she said one day, she said, I’m going to get Charles from the hospital. She brought him home, and he was dressed in a lemon suit with a wee lemon hat, and it was wintertime in Glasgow, and it was, it was just so wonderful. We were a poor family, and it was just wonderful, and that’s when I think I just loved him to bits, and I still do. He’s in Glasgow. He’s 74 now, he was the baby of the family.
Well, I think when you experience love, you just feel so good, and so happy, and you feel well, and it’s just lovely. I just love that feeling. It’s a lovely, lovely feeling. I’m sorry, that’s all I can tell you.
What I value in life is my family, but I’ve always been family, because I come from a family of seven children, and a mammy and a daddy. I was born in Glasgow, just before the war, the Second World War, and we had very hard times. We were bombed out, but we were all healthy and happy, poor, sometimes hungry. That’s fine.
I met my husband at school, and we got married eventually and had two children, and we came to New Zealand, and that was wonderful for a while, but sadly we parted, but that was fine, too and then I re-married.
Now, that was another great experience of love. I married a Dutchman who had never been married before. I was 40 years of age, and I was one day older than him. At first, I thought he was having me on, but he was. He was one day younger, and we had a wonderful life, and I’m afraid he’s gone now, but I love those memories, and I loved my first husband very, very much, but my second husband, I loved just as much. That’s all I can tell you now, and I’m very happy. I’ve got a wonderful family, and I have a wonderful, wonderful daughter.
Well, I was diagnosed with, I’d never heard of it, I was working at the time, and I came home and I said, I have to go to the optician – I think I need spectacles. And my husband said, oh okay. I think I was not quite 60, and when I went to the optician, actually it was a man in Howick, and he’s very good, and he said, oh I think you’ll have to go and see somebody – I don’t like the look of your eyes, at the back of your eyes, Eleanor. I went to a specialist in Parnell, and she diagnosed macular degeneration. Of course we researched and learned all about that, and we just took it on-board, because I could still drive, and that was fine, and fortunately, it’s a very slow-progressing disease of the eye. Now I have no central vision, but I still have peripheral vision, but that’s not as good as it used to be. I’m 84 now, and it used to be much better, but it does, when I want to try and see somebody, I have to sort of look ahead of them on their side. I still live alone and do most of my own cooking. I don’t have to if I don’t want to, but I do, and that’s my story.”
