Her Name Was Brenda Jagger.

Her name was Brenda Jagger. It’s forty years since she roamed this earth and when she did, she wrote books and made a mean chocolate souffle. She was that famous author who’s responsible for Mick Jagger's nickname being Brenda (look it up in Time Magazine, he’s still called it today). 

I often wonder if we’d have been friends. If I’d have met her now as a 55 year old, when she was around the same age, would we have hit it off or would she have intimidated me with her words. She was good at that. But she taught me to be good at that too. 

She taught me never to say ‘nice’ as it was lazy. To always find a better way to describe a colour (olive green Alex not green) and to always find the thing inside people that makes them tick. She’d take me to big statues and make me sit there for hours because she needed to find the way people would fall in love with the man carved out of stone. She told me the stories from her past, how she’d run away to Paris, followed her dreams, fell in love, lost in love, got herself into some precarious situations but never stopped believing it would all work out. She was all about mindset before mindset was even a thing. 

She became an author after a million rejections with no support from her parents who really wanted her to get a proper job in the typing pool. She married again (to my dad) which meant she’d been divorced. She was always ashamed of that, for such a radical and forward thinking woman, she’d lie about it, making up the ages of my sisters so they could feasibly be the offspring of my dad. They weren't. He’d adopted them both when they married and had me a few years later. 

They loved a good soiree, a big bowl of far too strong punch in a crystal bowl that would usually render me incapable of movement, the ham and pineapple sticks that were sitting on every coffee table, the smoke bellowing out of every room and the sound of Simon and Garfunkel that filled the air.  Each one was often followed by tension and long post party discussions I could overhear about who thinks this or said that. My dad would get too pissed and she would always feel unbearably embarrassed. They lived fast (and both died young as it goes) and were lavish with it. Our bathroom had gold plated taps, we had a ‘best’ room with blue flock wallpaper and a powder blue Jag on the driveway. The puzzler was the fact she’d earned every penny and rather than feel great, accomplished, proud or just generally happy, she didn’t ever seem to. She was a bag of contradictions, which is funny as that’s what my husband calls me.  

So yes, I think we’d have hit it off. I loved her style (minus the gold taps), her painted eyebrows, her beauty spot drawn on with eye liner and her feathered heeled slippers. I loved how she made me feel and I can imagine meeting her in some swanky bar in Paris or London drinking a cocktail or two, sharing stories of the latest things we’d seen, read, watched or witnessed. She taught me how to read people, we’d have had a lot to say about that. She would have had her hand on my arm as she always did, I’d be able to feel her warmth through her fingertips as I always did. Her nails would be deep red and her lips would match. My nails would be chocolate brown and my outfit would match. She’d be my intellectual equal. She treated me that way when I was 15, I can only imagine how we’d have grown into that pairing even more.

She was far from perfect, even through my rose tinted glasses. She spent too much money to soothe her emotional stress and she stayed with my dad longer than their relationship warranted. I knew she wanted to leave, she’d told me, it’s just her illness got there first. She devoted her time to her books, it’s not that I don’t understand, because I do, I just wish some of that limited time had been spent with me.

But the time we did have was spent well, I only wished I’d known it was going to be short. She taught me that words are powerful but how you make people feel is everything. She owned any room she entered, just by being her. She attracted chaos as well as success but always knew how to weave her way through it as if it had been her plan all along. She built a life and a family but didn’t entirely trust all the players. I've no idea who else she told, but she’d tell me about it on our weekly Saturday shopping trips when we’d go into town. Whilst she was looking at books to buy, I’d be rearranging all her books so they were at the front of every book stand. 

She’d get frustrated at my small minded teachers who'd score me zero in French tests despite all the French right but because I’d missed the full stops, it was her sentence starter to remind me to do what I loved, always do what I love to avoid being a small minded teacher. She loved the sun on her face and she had a spiritual side she kept under wraps but that came out in full force when she was dying. She still believed everything would work out. Maybe the working out part was actually about her death, because for her, it was clearly timely. 

So, today I could get down on myself for missing out on 40 years of her. I could even hang onto the common misplaced belief so many of us get that my ‘shit’ is her fault. Or, I can celebrate the 15 years I did have with a forward thinking woman who taught me that green is better when it’s got an olive and life is more fun when it’s got a meaning no one needs to hide. I could feel proud that I fought the disease that killed her and that I get to pass all this onto her granddaughter, who she'd have adored. 

So now there’s three of us in a bar in Paris. If me and my mum had met as equals, I’d be introducing her to my other equal, Daisy. It would be glamorous. And it would be everything I picture when I’m with her in my dreams.