Chapter Twenty-Three
The Scrapbook
Scratching an itch doesn’t make it go away.
When the Bag Lady first handed me the scrapbook I was bemused, especially when she told me to ‘add Beryl and others will follow’. But I knew it was something special and so I put the scrapbook in the safest place possible, my underwear drawer. At first I wrapped it in plastic. Then as I began to appreciate the uniqueness of such a book, I gave it a more attractive box.
It was a massive book, full of scraps of paper and photographs.
Reading the scrapbook had become part of our sitting by the fire ritual, and it had opened our eyes to another woman; it was full of stories and letters from Deirdre McConical, an agony aunt and columnist in a ’70s magazine called Fabulous You.
Her stories were of heartache, sad
