Letters to Ann

Dear Ann,

I have often said to you that you have to have a reason to get up in the morning. It was my pudding pal, Pat Cox, who first made this remark. I don’t know what made her say it, but she did say it one day when we were working in the Pudding Kitchen & I thought at the time no truer word was ever spoken.

To say that I have quoted it a few times is an understatement as it is one of my favourite sayings & should be recorded in the book that my dear friend Sharon gave me when I first visited Burbank. It is titled The Quotable Woman & is a delightful book quoting favourite sayings from famous women. My friend Pat may never be famous on a global scale but to me she is worthy of a lot of accolades.

A mutual friend brought Pat into my life many years ago when I was in need of some good stalwart workers in the Pudding Kitchen & she was recommended to me. This resulted in us employing Pat &, along with Judy whom I have told you about.

I could not have had two more diligent & dedicated employees. They never looked at the clock waiting for knock off time as a lot of workers do. They gave more than one hundred percent of themselves & adapted to any task needed doing at the time it was needed. This meant that they could handle any part of the business from mixing, to weighing out, tying up puddings in their little cloths, boiling them, hanging them on the line when it was time & then decorating & despatching them.

As I have mentioned to you in my letter about our star, Judy, she very quickly became the person who was a natural at dealing with orders & getting them packed on time. Pat also very soon came to the fore with the skill of getting the puddings decorated as needed for each individual order & have them done in time for Judy to pack & despatch. The two of them worked together so well you would think they could read each others mind.

There were times when we needed staff to work back to get the orders done in time & decorating was a very important part. Each order had to be decorated as the order stipulated. This could mean different assortments of cellophane or cloths & countless colours in ribbon to cut & of course each cover & each ribbon had to be cut to the size required.

I know there were many times when Judy took material home to cut so that we would have enough to work with next day. Likewise with Pat, she would take ribbon home & bring it back in the morning all ready for use. These commodities amounted to thousands of pieces of material or cellophane & thousands of certain lengths of ribbon.

Husband Max would be out in the office cutting string for dear life to tie up thousands of puddings, plus stamping labels with ‘use by’ date & all that had to be shown. Dawn would probably be walking around a table for 8 hours a day weighing out the correct weight of puddings to be tied up & boiled next. We had to be ahead all the time so that no time was lost in waiting for anything to be done & we needed good workers.

With all that ribbon cutting it didn’t take Pat long to perfect it as she solicited her good husband, Colin, to come up with a few little devices in wood so that the correct length could be quickly wound around it & then cut in bulk. These were introduced to the kitchen.

Sometimes it would be bedlam with getting things done on time, but as I look back over those years the two people who stand out as dedicated people were Judy & Pat.

I remember one time when I was not available, nor anybody else, to do some important decorating for an urgent order. I don’t know if you are familiar with a health problem called Polio Myalgia ,which affects the limbs, but Pat was suffering with this complaint at the time. It was hard for her to even use her arms & hands. She could not even comb her hair, but because there was no one else to do the order, she came back to work one night, in pain & did the job. You can’t get much more dedication than that.

It is no wonder then that Pat, Judy & I have remained friends well after the pudding business was sold in 2003. From then on we met every Monday fortnight for lunch at Micheles Patisserie until I came out of hospital two years ago with the thought of a death sentence from cancer hanging over my head. The two girls then decided we should meet weekly instead.

I remember leaving the table one day for a few minutes & when I returned I was given the verdict! I knew they had conferred in my absence & made this decision, because I was not going to live much longer! It has been my pleasure to prove them wrong.

Ever since we meet every Monday & have spent thousands of hours together & blown out the candle on a little cup cake to celebrate a birthday more times than we care can count!

And so it was that on the 18th March, 2017 we had another cup cake candle to extinguish & Pat was to do the honours. It was her 80th Birthday & there never was a woman born that belied here age so much without cosmetic surgery.

Though there has been huge ups & downs in her life she does not look a day over sixty. This must be due to the placid nature she portrays. Although her friends have been known to get very rattled & upset at times when the going was tough, we have never heard our dear Pat raise her voice.

She is one of those gorgeous girls who finds it difficult to be hard to get along with, remaining softly spoken, say what needs to be said without anyone needing to turn over in their grave!

It has not only been the Pudding Kitchen that endears me to Pat. There have been other times as well.

When Max was taken to hospital very ill, just six months after we had moved to this villa, Pat made it her business to tell me to call her at any time, day or night if I needed someone to talk to. She also iterated this after Max passed when she & Colin came almost daily to put the jungle garden I inherited into something more attractive.

I appreciated this more than I can say. Even now that the garden has been given a big face lift the little plants that Colin studiously planted around the garden to make a hedge remains there today, proud & tall. Pat Cox made a big impact on my life.

So on the 18th March it was a privilege to celebrate Pat’s 80th birthday & she blew out her candle in one puff! Judy & I had flowers & an exceptionally lovely 80th card for an exceptionally lovely person. Plus we gave her a photo frame with 80th Birthday written on it holding a photo of the three of us taken on some previous birthday.

And as I have been writing this & reliving moments mentioned I am not ashamed to say that the memories have choked up my eyes a little!!

Friendships are a very important part of our lives, one could not imagine what life would be without friends. I am looking at my wonderful book The Quotable Woman & I have this little quotation from someone I have never heard of called Letty Cottin Pogresin is worthy of mention:

Friendships aren’t perfect & yet they are precious. For me, not expecting perfection all in one place was a great release.

How very true.

And Ann, the short friendship I had with you I have treasured & it will go with me to my grave. Like you so often said to me. “I wish I had known you twenty years earlier’.

God’s Blessings Dear Heart, Dawn X O X O

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