Sally

Sally

Sally. Oh my goodness Sally. Now theres a name to conjure with. Sally
Lowther would
not be to most peoples taste . A real "Salt of the earth" type woman,
and usually looking
as though most of the earth is clinging to her.

I have heard our Sally described as "Dog rough" Well. She's no
Princess Diana that's for
sure.

Sally is proud of her heritage. She's from traveling stock and will
tell anyone who'll
stand long enough at her front gate to listen, all about her days in
the trailer. She was the "
Hook a Duck Lady" in the traveling fair. These days the local kids
would shout "Hook a
Duck Silly Sally" or something vaguely similar beginning with F.

Sally stands at all of four foot eight and a half. Almost as round as
she is tall, with two
tone hair. Half grey, half black. She religiously dyes her hair jet
black once a year on New
Years Eve. On this momentous occasion she is also known to take a bath
too (Whether
she needs it or not!) She is somewhere in the region of fifty years
old. Though is not too
sure of her exact age herself. She has led a hard life, and no mistake.
The years have not
been kind to her. You could be forgiven for estimating her age to be
about one hundred
and three. Deep crevices ingrained with muck line her face. The focal
point of said face are
little piggy black eyes, that gleam with an evil merriment when she's
in the act of
imparting a juicy bit of gossip to some passer by. The Poor sod furious
that he never took
the long way round, knowing that he would not be quick enough to cross
the road and
escape when Sally's front door opened.

Sally has no teeth. Well that is to say, she has teeth, but they are
not usually kept where
they should be. The lucky teeth are usually to be found in her knicker
draw being kept
warm by Sally's long legged, once white, thermal bloomers.

This woman has a natural aptitude for guerning, while in the process
of telling one of her
"you'll never believe this..." stories, her face contorts to the most
horrifically frightening
gargoyle like countenances ever witnessed. Her lips peel back,
Latex-like from her mouth,
and her huge gums with the little button bit at the front seem to jump
out at you.

Sally has never worn a Bra. Her ample bussom, rolls pendulously, as
she sticks them over
the front gate to ...GOSSIP. So there they hang. Looking rather like
two amputated leg
stumps, jiggling animatedly as she tells some tale. Her old and rather
washed out, long
suffering Jumper straining at the seams to keep those monstrous
breasts, to some degree
contained.

She is often to be seen with her work overall (blue check, very
serviceable), on over her
jumper and aged skirt, and on the rare occasion that she bothers to
actually flick her fag
ash, she lifts out her overall pocket and flicks it into that.

Her podgy feet are encased in brown ankle boots. The kind that very
old ladies and
Gypsies wear. Sally fits snugly into either category, despite her not
yet having eight
decades behind her. The boots zip up the front and are fur lined with a
sort of brown fur
collar round the top.

Sally has a rare and oft practiced talent. She can stand at her front
gate talking with a
fag hanging out of her slack mouth, and can smoke almost an entire
cigarette before the
offending ash falls unfettered down her front. Sally doesn't halt in
her tirade of words,
and her poor captive listener jolts suddenly out of mesmerization, as
the ash falls to sit in
a grey smudge on Sally's fat breasts. How many pairs of eyes have been
held captive over
the years by Sally's ever growing stem of fag ash? Well that's
anybody's guess.

Sally only goes out socializing in the evening once a year. Yes you've
guessed it on New
Years eve. That evening she becomes the queen of the silver dollar. She
dyes her hair, and
brushes out all the matted knots and tatters. Then she attaches a
large, plastic flowered
comb to each side of her head. Her face is scrubbed, well if not
exactly clean, then
scrubbed with vigor, and painted with garish reds. Much as a child
would paint her face,
too much, too thick, too RED.

Then the piece-de-resistance. Her teeth. Now Sally with teeth is a
sight to behold.
Suddenly her personality changes. Her posture straightens. Her accent
takes on the
clipped hopefully upper-class tones that she tries desperately to
adopt. Unfortunately Sally
and the Queen of England would differ on the correct pronunciation of
much of what
comes out of that offensive mouth.. "Aaarold Daahling 'ow is your good
lady wife
t'day.'as she come out of the 'ospital yet?" Still not quite the
perfect Lady she realizes,
but she's trying. Bless her she is TRYING.

I'm sorry to harp on about those teeth but they really are a something
to witness. They
were made I'm sure, for a large cart horse, for they are certainly far
too big for Sally's
mouth. Sizable and stretched though it is. They are like brilliant
white tombstones. Apart
from the huge front left incisor which is sparkling yellow gold,
polished until it glints in the
light, and dazzles everyone within a three mile radius. If they stood
Sally on Hoad
monument, she could guide the ships safely into harbor, especially as
she has the dulcet
tones of a fog horn to match.

Our heroine only drinks once a year, but boy does she get her years
worth. The night
usually ends with her being escorted manually from some pub or other
after she's hauled
her four foot eight and a half frame up onto one of the tables, fists
thrust menacingly
before her, and threatening to fight "anybody man enough" to take her
on. Her little legs
dangle marionette ish in the air, boots flailing, mouth Cursing, and
there she dangles, hung
between two doormen as they drop her onto the pavement outside. She
lurches
unsteadily to her feet then wobbles, weeble like into the gutter to
throw up. Her teeth
leaving her mouth with the velocity of a bullet. At some point
throughout this elegance
she pees herself. Rivers of urine leaving the tracks of their muddy
banks down her chubby
legs. "It was a good night weren't it?" she leers at her husband,as she
wipes the residues
of vomit from her mouth with the back of her sleeve. After loosing that
which, she worked
very hard to consume. She is content to stagger homeward. Happy, purged
and toothless.
Only to send her poor little husband out to find and retrieve said
teeth from some
coagulating pool of vomit the next morning. One year he wasn't so
lucky. One of the
neighbourhood mongrels had got to the teeth before he did.

Sally was one of lifes workers. She had never claimed a penny in
benefits, and was out
of the house by five am, every Monday through Friday. The bent tired
little woman could
be seen, trudging a mile or more up the road to the local school
morning and evening.
Hail, rain or shine. Sally never missed a shift. She was a cleaner at
the school, and though
the brunt of all manner of practical jokes and name calling, the kids
loved her. The poor
headmaster had long since given up trying to get Sally to curb her
colourful use of the
English language in front of the little darlings, and as the school
emptied at the end of day,
oft could be heard Sally's Northern twang bellowing ..."I'll 'ave yer,
yer rotten little
buggers. I'll tek the skin of yer pink arses". The teachers would
shudder visibly, and look
around nervously to see if she was approaching. Eyes darting round the
classroom with
only one escape route, desperately searching for somewhere to hide
should the need arise.
Only when satisfied that the coast was clear would they continue with
their marking.

Sally was a quandary, for although she was always grubby, and her
house was a disaster
area, She never seemed to stop cleaning. The house was a mess! Where
did all the
cleaning go? It's a mystery easily equal to that of the Bermuda
Triangle.

Once a week Sally would pull out her old twin tub, complete with
scrubbing board and
mangle. The weekly ritual of boiling up the weeks wash would begin. It
would bubble
away for hours and yet the result was grimy grey sheets, hung out for
all the world to see
on her overstretched washing line. They looked as dirty after three
hours boiling as they
had when taken off the festering beds.

The front room of the house was her "Parlor". The Parlor was polished
and hoovered
once a week. Then it was not entered again until the following weeks
polishing and
vacuuming session. The Parlor was a shrine to "`Portant visitors" not
that she ever had
any important visitors. Still on the day they chose to come Sally was
ready for `em. The
buggers wouldn't catch her out.

The Parlor housed her huge collection of Royal Dalton fine china and
figurines, an
impressive collection indeed valued at thousands of pounds. And yet
some days Sally
couldn't afford to put food on the table to feed her family
properly.

The kitchen was the hub of the house. All life was lived either in the
kitchen, or hanging
in gravity defying stance over the front gate. The kitchen was a large
room with an open
fire, and was dominated by two enormous German Shepherds. The "lads"
Rebel and Rusty
were not the most hospitable of creatures and after a few hospital
visits by bitten
neighbors, nobody was now invited into the nether regions of the
Lowther household.

Blackened cups littered the dining table. A tarnished tablespoon is
used to sugar the tea,
the same oversized spoon has been used for some time without washing.
Filled with
heaving mounds of coffee blackened sugar and then plunged into the tea
and coffee cups,
so that the spoon has lost all shape and definition. It is now deformed
with crystallized
tumors of hardened stained sugar all over it.

The fire hearth is spilling over with ashes, and bits of old wood. The
main decoration on
the hearth is dozens of old fag butts discarded by Sally as she sits in
her comfy battered
chair pulled up close to the fire. She has never bought a twenty pack
of cigs in her life.
Yet she smokes at least sixty cigs a day. She has progressed from her
John Players
filterless, To the more Modern Embassy No 1. As she takes each
cigarette out of the ten
pack, she snaps off the filter, so that she can better taste the `bacca
, spitting occasionally
into the back of the fire to dislodge the pieces of tobacco that get
trapped in her throat.

Sally lives her life from Sunday to Saturday. Existing in her cocoon
of filth and hardship.
only for the joy of a Saturday afternoon.

Setting off two hours early ensures her a place at the front of the
queue amassing
outside the pensioners hall. Her black eyes glint with the savagery of
a hunter. Sally is
fighting fit, and gawd help anyone who dares to cross her. It is the
weekly Jumble sale.
She buys all her clothing from the weekly "rummage". "Goin' 't the
Rummage t'day
Daisy. Good stuff from them posh lot at the Queens".

As soon as the doors are opened, Sally becomes "Ma, Lowther, the
meanest, keenest
dude in old Ethererston". She will fight to the death over a child's
cardigan. She has no
little girl, but it's "Good stuff" and for no reason other than that it
can't be passed over.

She gets into a head to head with Daisy `adder, pronounced Haddow to
the rest of us.
Each woman has a sleeve, neither one is going to give way, and the
slanging match
ensues. Both ladies are in their element and have not been this happy
since the previous
week when each was fighting with someone else over another cast off
treasure. Sally
finally wins.Coming away from the "fight" victorious with heaving bags.
Some of the
booty inside which she has paid for, but the vast majority of other
peoples cast offs has
been shoved hastily into her bag as she distracted the stall holder.
This can't of course be
classed as stealing. After all its only "someone else's old junk"

On arriving home she would examine her treasures. When she pulls out
the Cardigan that
she has no use for she gives the situation some thought. Turning the
garment this way and
that in her gnarled hands. Reliving and once again savoring her victory
over Daisy. The
moment of triumph as she handed over the hot 50 pence piece which had
been clutched in
her hand in anticipation of her victory."Oh I know" she thinks "I'll
give that to Daisy
`Adder for her little girl. she'll love that".

Sally has a heart of gold. Would help out anyone in trouble. Welcomes
an endless
stream of tramps into her garden to have tea and the last plate of stew
and dumplings,
leaving her to eat jam and bread later, but that's our Sally. The Salt
of the Earth.