Old Girls Behaving Badlyย by Kate Galley is out today! Get your copy here ๐ต๐ป๐งก
My job as a mobile hairdresser brings me into daily contact with the older generation.
There are those who like the convenience of having a home visit and avoiding the bother of parking in town. Some look after spouses with debilitating illnesses and find it impossible to have too long to themselves. Others are ill and housebound. But they havenโt always been the age they are now, of course not, neither have I. Yet, often they tell me about being overlooked or ignored, that people assume who they might be based purely on their age. Despite being vital, intelligent and interesting people, it might still be the younger person they are with who is asked if they take sugar in their tea.
What they all have in common is the varied and interesting lives they have lead and I love listening to their stories: Working in the WAAF during the Second World War. A chance meeting with a future husband on a station platform after a missed train in 1943. A promise to an ex wife to scatter her ashes in a favourite local spot despite a forty year absence and a three thousand mile flight to fulfil the wish. Taking in evacuees during the war to her farm in Somerset โ this woman was one hundred and two when she relayed this story to me. Getting married, winning awards, falling in love and out of love.
People sometimes ask me where I get my inspiration for my books. I always say that I talk to the oldest people I know. The main characters in my book Old Girls Behaving Badly are Gina Knight and Dorothy Reed, who are seventy-one and eighty-nine. Just like the women I talk to, they both have a past and they also have plans for a full and exciting future.