Working With A Truly Remarkable Woman

It’s been a little over eight years now since?Tender Joy, the memoir of Emsworth resident Joyce Spencer was published.

I had both the pleasure and privilege of working with Joyce as her ‘ghost’ and, to this day, can’t help but smile whenever I look back at some of the sessions we had at her snugly set bungalow ?that rather lovely Hampshire coastal spot.

Joyce was approaching 90 when she finally gave in to the pleadings of both family and friends and agreeing to commit her life and memories to print, so she had a fair few to go through.

Yet we did and at quite a prodigious gallop as the recollections danced from her tongue, one after the other; rapid and always colourful stories that wore out many a pen as I frantically kept up with her via shorthand (I’m old school, no recording devices for me), the occasional squiggle on the page betraying the fact she’d made me laugh so much, my writing hand had slipped with the convulsions that followed.

I’m surprised now, looking back, that I managed to make any notes at all as, whenever I turned up at her door, she would, without fail, fill a tumbler with whisky for me, commenting that I either looked cold or that I could do with ‘…adding a bit of colour to your face’.

My usual tactic was to try to drink it as swiftly as possible so we could get on with the job in hand but Joyce could only see that as my appreciation of the vintage, so she’d rapidly refill my glass for me in response.

You have to bear in mind at this point that our sessions were always booked to start at 10am prompt as she always had a gathering of her ‘bridge ladies’ at noon on the same day, so it was important, for Joyce, to get our work out of the way before this writer wobbled his way back to the station and the cards came out.

Joyce’s professional life was spent as a Nurse, including working at St Mary’s Hospital in Portsmouth throughout the war, with, late one night, one of the many that saw Portsmouth blitzed by the Luftwaffe, a falling bomb hit the hospital, crashed its way downwards through a floor or two before lodging itself, having failed to go off, in the ground on one of the hospital corridors.

The reaction of the hospital staff? Rope it off and (keep calm and) carry on, walking around it as they got on with their work.

She also drove an ambulance in and around the city including during those air attacks on Portsmouth which were as constant and merciless than perhaps any city, other than London, suffered at the time, so much so that, one night when she and a friend were crossing a railway bridge at Havant and happened to glance southwards to where half the night sky was glowing a fierce red, her friend commented that maybe it was the sunrise?

‘No…’, said Joyce in response. ‘…it’s Portsmouth burning’.

I remember, to this day, the look in her eyes and the resultant shiver those four words provoked in me as she shared that particular memory.

As with so many of the people I work with who start out as clients, Joyce soon became a very good friend and I needed little to no excuse to look her up for a couple of hours chat (and more whisky) as often as I could and we’d proceed to chat for a couple of hours, tennis being one of the subjects she enjoyed talking about-she had a subscription to?Sky Sports?and would religiously watch the US Open whenever it was on.

‘Murray is playing later so I’ll be watching him. I hope he wins. I like Murray’.

Joyce passed away a year or so after the book was published, content, no doubt that she had not only shared her story, as promised, to her family but also that Andy Murray had won a second Wimbledon title the previous summer.

I attended her memorial service, touched to be introduced, as I was, by the members of her family as ‘…the man who wrote Mum’s life story’.

They’d even brought some copies of the book with them to the reception, all of which had disappeared by the time I’d left.

Joyce was still sharing her story with everyone, even on that saddest of days…

I didn’t know her for as long as I wanted to but remain grateful, to this day, for the fleeting time I did know her.

Cheers, Joyce.

?

?