Evelyn Ashford

The last day of Becky’s May squares, and I thought this photo of my aunt, Evelyn Ashford, somehow sums up the themes of renewal and moving forward. It shows such spirit, doesn’t it; a sense of hopefulness and forging ahead.

I’m guessing it was taken in tough times too, around the start of the war in 1939. Evelyn would have been seventeen. But it’s possible it was taken earlier. Her very ‘grown-up’ tweeds may be explained by the fact she was employed in the dress department of a big Guildford store. She had started her working career aged fourteen, apprenticed to the local draper in Cranleigh where the Ashfords lived.

I don’t know who the photographer was, possibly my father, but a bit of sleuthing has revealed the location as the trig point on Pitch Hill, Surrey, not far from Cranleigh. Evelyn is taking flight over the South Downs.

Evelyn Mary Ashford 1923 – 2013

You can find her story in an earlier post The Many Faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford

And more at:

Tales From The Walled Garden

Tales from the walled garden #3: when Alice met Charlie

Tales from the walled garden #4: more about Alice

Tales from the Walled Garden #2: back to the potting shed

#SquaresRenew

“These are the things that I want in life: 1. A library of my own; 2. All Rudyard Kipling’s Works; 3) lots of money so that I can make poor people happy.”

Evelyn Ashford aged 14, 1937

I don’t know who took this photograph of my aunt, Evelyn Ashford. Probably it was my father. I’ve posted it before, but now we’ve cleaned it up a little. It was taken at Pitch Hill, Surrey in around 1937 when Evelyn would have been fourteen. This was the year when she was forced to leave school to both take care of an invalid mother, and then to start work as an apprentice in the local draper’s shop in Guildford.

Given the high hopes she had for herself, leaving school before sitting her Primary School Certificate would have been a deeply wounding blow. In an English exercise of that last year at school she wrote:

“These are the things that I want in life: 1. A library of my own; 2. All Rudyard Kipling’s Works; 3) lots of money so that I can make poor people happy.” She also wanted to have lots of REAL friends and play Madame Defarge in a stage version of Tale of Two Cities. The people she most wanted to meet included Jean Batten, famous New Zealand aviator, H.G. Wells and Alfred Hitchcock.

She did not achieve these ambitions, apart from the Kipling works perhaps. All her life she struggled to make up for her lack of education. All her life she did what she could to enthuse and encourage others to make the most of themselves in whatever community she found herself. She also survived being bombed on a train, breast cancer, and accidental attempts on her life through medical negligence. But she ended her days, cut off from all of us, her mind in another place: abiding in that state they call dementia.

I have written more about her life in other posts, but I always come back to this image of her, on the trig point at Pitch Hill. She died a year ago last October at the age of 90, but still her spirit survives in this photograph: a truly independent spirit I think; one that still has the power to move and inspire.

The Many Faces of Evelyn Mary Ashford

Grand Girl, Great Prospects

Inspired by Ailsa’s challenge ‘independence’ at Where’s My Backpack Please visit her blog for more interpretations of the theme.

Tish Farrell

Writer on the Edge

Taking Off!

Independence beckons ~ Evelyn taking flight