My Late Neighbour's Rose

 

This has been a very good year for roses. A warm dry June helped, and this old white rose has done incredibly well this summer. It's still flowering - just. 

It reminds me of my late neighbour, Mary Mackenzie, who gave it to me from her own garden. She called it the Jacobite Rose - not the small, sweet, wild rose of Scotland, but (I think) Rosa Alba which is also known as the white rose of York. Certainly a rose that has been cultivated in Europe since ancient times. 

It had grown very leggy over the years and I pruned it back quite a bit but it seems to have had a new lease of life this year.

Mary had several of these in her garden, along with masses of daffodils in early spring - she used to give me huge bunches of them to take up to the village cemetery after my mum and dad died - and then a little later on lots of crimson tulips and poppies.

She was one of the first female graduates in accountancy from Glasgow University. She was still doing accounts well into her eighties, including ours, and I vividly remember her finding an error on the self employed tax return (back when these forms were on paper) and phoning the Revenue to tell them. 'Oh no, Mrs Mackenzie,' they said. 'That couldn't happen.' But she was right. And many forms had to be recalled. 

She was formidably intelligent and formidably intrepid. Her husband, Bill, had been on the 1953 ascent of Everest, and although he wasn't with the party that got to the summit, he did reach the camp just below the peak. As a world class ski-er, he had also been involved in helping scientists to escape Nazi occupied Norway and had run training sessions for troops in the Highlands. But no shrinking violet herself, Mary had been a spy in German occupied France, had gone on many expeditions to remote parts of the world, and had survived a plane crash by crawling several miles through inhospitable terrain with a broken leg. 

When Bill died,  Mary was determined to walk up the hill with the funeral procession, but - then in her eighties - nabbed a lift in the funeral car half way up. 'I said I'd go on with him to the end,' she said to me, mischievously, 'But this might be a bridge too far!' 

I miss her and her wisdom. When, during her own memorial service, some years later, the minister alluded to her bravery during the war, we breathed a sigh of relief, because somebody had been spreading malicious rumours that this was untrue, that she was 'just an old dear, imagining things.'

Well, she was very dear to us, but she hadn't imagined or made up her extraordinary life. It's sad that sometimes, you only find out exactly what people have been and done at their funerals. 

We are all so much more than what we become. You only need to ask.