Betsy Lerner (2017) The Bridge Ladies.

Betsy Lerner (2017) The Bridge Ladies.

A writer’s job is to remember. I’d a dream that I was staying in Betty Lerner’s house in New York, but it was Clydebank outside. I don’t know what she looks like. Nor does it matter. Most meetings I have are on the page. I write a blog with a handful of followers. I read one of her blogs and she asked a question about favourite books (that’s a hook so you’ll come back again). I typed in the classic, Growing up in the Gorbals and Lucy Grealy Autobiography of a Face. She replied that it took her back to the time she was Lucy’s editor and agent in New York. Wow!

I bought Lerner’s memoir to find out more. For some reason, I thought The Bridge Ladies would be about these old Jewish women having been in a concentration camp and fleeing Nazi Germany. Holocaust literature. But The Bridge Ladies is about playing cards.

It’s more than that, of course. It’s about intimate friendships and families and playing bridge. It’s about death and dying and playing bridge. It’s about being young and being old and playing bridge. My bogey man is here too, although it may be a bogey woman. You can’t play bridge with dementia.

In fact, playing bridge is like feng shui in which playing cards keep the mind open, when old bodies shut down. Betty, Jackie, Bea and her mother, Roz, show that in trumps.

I keeps a thumb-size scrap of paper, my mum has written ‘Love you,’ on it. Course she did. But there were some things she didn’t tell me. Life was different then. You muddled on. The Bridge Ladies muddle on. But they’re not for talking. They were happy to play bridge.

‘The dash on a gravestone. It’s what’s between your birth year and death year. “The dash is the way you lived your life. It’s what you do between those years that’s important’”.   

Amen.

(Next up The Forrest for the Trees, but that’s a different story.)