A profile of Edith Hall

When Edith Hall, a childhood hood chum of my grandmother, sent out Christmas cards she used the cards she had been sent, crossing out the name of the sender, obliterating it to a point that she almost tore through the paper. One would have thought she was poor, except the cards often included checks written out for anywhere from $100 to $1000, no small amount in the 40s, 50s and 60s.

Hall was an old maid when the term meant just that. She owned a two-apartment house on High Street in Reading that she crammed full of everything imaginable. There wasn’t a surface free of books or papers and sometimes even as a child I had to work to manoeuvre my way around. To my ten-year old eyes the piano bench seemed especially dangerous as books were piled higher than I was tall.

My grandmother and Edith had cooked up the idea that Edith should give me arts and crafts lessons. Unlike today when children are programmed for every lesson under the sun after school, my afternoons were free to run in the forest near the house, read, write, skate (ice or roller depending on the season) and do a 1001 things all of my own choosing. I liked it that way. Still for several Fridays dutifully I was dropped off and made my way through the thicket of things.

Edith was clever, and in retrospect I suspect she was a real artist, and she showed me how to make pink rosebuds from crepe paper. Hers looked real even close up. Mine looked unreal even from a distance.

After a number of Fridays, I rebelled. My grandmother pleaded saying how much the lessons pleased her friend. I won and I don’t know what excuse my grandmother made, but I am sure it was tactful.

Years later, freshly back from Germany with my new husband, we rented the upper story apartment as my parents had done when they were newly married. Only the paint had changed. The gas stove even in the sixties was from another the depression era, black with white oblong ceramic handles. The bathtub had claw feet. Because the rent was low we stayed there two years.

By this point Edith was convinced the previous tenant was breaking into her house and stealing things. The stacks from my childhood had grown, and both my husband and I were sure she lost things in the morass. He often helped her look, sometimes finding what was missing, more often not.

I avoided the apartment as much as I could. To save money, for I was still a university student, we used her telephone, and the passageway to reach her telephone was through a cavern of possessions. Even going in made me claustrophobic. Yet, I heard from my grandmother how pleased she was to have us (and our German Shepherd Kimm) there.

Finally, tired of her constant fears that assaulted us each time we came home, we moved. Once again, I suspect that my grandmother soothed the waters, for we did not want to hurt her feelings.

I am curious if today anyone but myself remembers this woman, a combination of eccentricities and kindness mixed with artistic talent. It is like when my brother and I are both dead no one will remember my grandfather, my Uncle Gordon. People live their lives on this planet and die, then disappear after the last person who knew them is also gone. But for a few minutes more anyone who reads this will know of a strange woman named Edith Hall who reused her Christmas cards.