The shoes I've loved and lost (Part 1)

Writing this blog has made me ask questions of myself on a number of occasions. Why am I so addicted to shoes?
I’ve taken myself back to those moments when my feet and their coverings were important to me and I’ve pinpointed three things in my life that have made me the way I am. Or if I wuz a rapper, the way I is. Like. Innit.

I’ve taken myself back to a pair of shoes that fall in to the category of ‘the shoes I’ve loved and lost’; there will be many of these on this literary journey but these particular shoes stand out in my memory as one of the first pairs I remember in my life.

Funnily enough, they didn’t belong to me, they were Lilian’s; she was a lady I spent many hours with as a child, she was my grandmother and even now almost twenty years after her death I sometimes catch a smell of something that evokes memories of her, of her house and the times we shared. I spent a lot of time with all of my grandparents but I spent most weekends with Lil, sometimes I resented spending time with her rather than my parents and wondered why they didn’t want me at the weekend, but now as an adult I really value the close relationship I had with her. She taught me to bake cakes, tend to the garden and the value of loyalty and love having spent thirty or so years alone after the death of her beloved George, the grandfather I never had a chance to meet. To see her break down in the last few years of her life to become a shadow of her former self also taught me about the fragility of life and her passing on my then fiancé, now husband’s 21st birthday gave us sadness and an opportunity to joke that she would never be upstaged. Birthday or no birthday she was going to make sure we’d always remember her. She was a complex woman, with many foibles who sometimes wrapped herself in a mantle of jealousy but I can forgive her that, after all she’d seen a lot in her time, born the same year that the Titanic slipped beneath the waves, and living to a good age of 90.

So let me tell you about the shoes. They were deepest navy suede with a leather trim on the cross over toe, they had a kitten heel but felt incredibly high and somewhat roomy at the time to a small child like myself. Nothing has changed, I’m still small. In fact if I still had these shoes today they wouldn’t fit me. They were a size 5.5 and no matter how carefully I could have looked after them I would never have grown into them being a paltry size 3. They were definitely from the 1950s and I never saw Lil wear them, they were just my ‘dressing up’ shoes along with a lot of her wardrobe that she no longer felt the need or the love of life to wear. I remember they were a French made shoe, my heart wants to believe they were a pair of Charles Jourdan shoes but my head tells me that I should think something completely different, especially as there are vintage pairs going on ebay for between $80 and $150 right now.

When Lil died, we had about a week to clear her entire house and people who could recycle anything of any worth and landfill those items no one except her would have wanted, took her clothes, furniture, shoes and memories away. We could only keep so much, and as at her passing, my feet had reached the adult size they are today, the shoes slipped from my clutches and became one of the pairs of shoes I’ve loved and lost.

I still wear her gloves in the winter, black outer and tan wool lined from St Michaels, better known now as M&S and I sometimes wear a navy chiffon scarf, which was one of the last Christmas gifts I ever bought her. Those shoes tell part of my story and allow me to commit to the Internet, the lasting memory of a woman who died before she ever knew of its existence.

My nannan, she's the one in the middle. Another one I've loved and lost.