Living Within Your Means

She has lived in the house since she moved in with her parents at the age of fifteen. The house was brand new then, a garden semi in a nice area, each pair of houses different to it's neighbours, each with a garden in front and a long sloping lawn down to the river behind.
Myfanwy is in her eighties now and lives alone in the house. She has never married and her parents are long gone, she still refers to them constantly, with reverence and not infrequently with tears in her eyes. Within the house time has stood still, possibly since they moved in, and certainly since her dad died thirty years ago.
Money is not an issue, we know this because we do Myfanwy's banking. She has over three hundred thousand pounds in the bank but she lives as if she is a pauper. I have tried gently to discuss this when she refuses herself the smallest of comforts but the idea of "frittering it away" horrifies her. The money is going to be left to the British Heart Foundation, because daddy died of a heart attack. This is non negotiable, Myfanwy will not listen to arguments or pleading, the lady has decided and the lady is not for turning
There is no central heating and the floors are mostly linoleum with enough rugs overlapping to give a health and safety assessment officer a heart attack. Each morning we let ourselves in, eventually, because the lock on the door is faulty. Some mornings it is colder inside the house than outside, you can see your breath in the tiled kitchen as you go in. We go upstairs and plug in the kettle in the hall - you have to boil a kettle for hot water, she wont have the boiler on. We go into the bedroom with it's uncarpeted floor and wake Myfanwy. She still sleeps in the bed she was born in. It has an original feather mattress which has to be shaken out each morning, it weighs a ton. Myfanwy is incontinent and the bed is usually wet, her breathing is awful and I am sure the feathers and the damp don't help but Myfanwy wont hear of changing it. We go into the bathroom and wash her as best we can with rapidly cooling water and cheap green soap. She wont have a shower put in because that would mean changing things and there is no chance of getting her into the high sided cast iron bath. She worked in the same office all of her working life and she believed in buying "good" skirts. I'm sure they were good thirty years ago but she is very much thinner now and the skirts are shapeless and faded to a fetching shade of mud. Getting Myfanwy dressed is comical, she wears a vest, a liberty bodice, an over vest and then a girdle that has only faded pretensions to being elasticated. There is a ready, steady, go! moment when you let go of the girdle and pull up her skirt quickly to stop it falling off again. Her big toes are sore and she wears little knitted covers on them inside her darned stockings, the little pink crocheted covers are somehow poignant on the end of her poor gnarled feet.
It's downstairs then and breakfast. She lives in the kitchen and she settles herself in her chair at the table while we prepare tea with long life milk from the pantry, she wont have a fridge. She has bran fibres with hot water so as not to waste milk and one slice of toast with margarine and it's God help you if you spread it too thickly. It is a meal without charm, merely a matter of fuel.
When I do the call she calls me "cart 'orse" because I keep tripping on the piled up rugs and laughs at me for suggesting that I might pop back with fish and chips one day as a treat. As I walk away, leaving the little figure hunched in the cold kitchen with a shawl around her shoulders I always wonder - what does she DO all day in that freezing house with no company and no television?
Jane, the Team Leader, told her for days that her leg looked sore but she refused to have a doctor, the best we could do was to persuade her to have it creamed each morning and even then Jane bought the cream from her own money. After about four days of this, on a Sunday morning, it was obvious that there was an infection in the leg and Jane insisted that she was calling the emergency doctor. She changed the bed and made Myfanwy get back in it but when she came back two hours later to check she found her on the floor where she had fallen trying to get up and go downstairs. Jane says she is still haunted by the distress on Myfanwy's face as the Ambulance crew took her out of the house, as far as we knew, the first time she had been outside for at least five years.
It turned out that she had broken her hip. She didn't respond well to physiotherapy after the operation and the decision was made that she would have to go into residential care. It is hard to describe the frustration of her carers, we all felt a degree of guilt that we had never persuaded Myfanwy to care for herself better, to get the doctor earlier, to heat the blasted house, and now the consequence was that she was losing her precious home and was going into care, the thing she dreaded most in the world.
The house is sold now. There was a raft of builders skips outside for weeks and now a new young family have moved in. The metal Venetian blinds are gone and pretty curtains hang at the windows and most mornings I see a young mum herding her children into a car on the newly tarmacked drive. I never pass without remembering Myfanwy and that freezing bathroom and that corset that fitted where it touched. I never have got the nerve up to visit her but I know she is still alive - I hope the British Heart Foundation appreciate whatever is left of that money.