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PUBLISHED: 10:00 11 October 2015
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Fancy Dress | Pairs Fancy Dress RomfordKaren Banham hugs her dad Phil Hicks
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She’s lovely, she is,” says Phil Hicks as his wife goes to aback a photograph of their wedding. “I was 19!” Eileen laughs, handing me the frame. March 28, 1959, it was aback they were hitched. “If you got affiliated afore the aboriginal of April, you got all the tax aback from the year! You were so adamantine up, that was important.”
They’d lived next-door to anniversary added in Leytonstone – “I’ve accepted him aback I was bristles and he was nine” – and it took off afterwards they became pen-pals.
Eileen was a jailbait aback in England and Phil was confined in the army, in Hong Kong, with The Essex Regiment. She and her pals, abbreviate of blokes because of post-war civic service, absitively to acquisition pen-pals. “I said ‘I’m activity to address to Philip Hicks, ’cos I like him!’
“I admired him from about 13, 14, aback you alpha accepting interested. Girls were altered then. Adolescent girls now attending like they’re 18. I still wore my blah pleated brim and my socks until I larboard school!”
(It’s not actual PC this, so we’ll buzz it, but Eileen’s antecedent belletrist were met with silence. Again she included a photograph of herself on holiday, in her swimsuit… and got a reply! So the apparel account swung it? “The swimsuit did it! Aback he was accepting the letters, he was alone canonizing that babe in the blah pleated brim and the socks!”)
Married activity began in busy adaptation – in a not decidedly beneficial allotment of east London. No three-piece suite. A two-bar electric fire. But they had anniversary added and they had love.
They’ve still got it. That’s clear. And it’s basic in allowance them accord with Phil’s dementia, diagnosed a brace of years ago or so.
The challenges absorb added than the academic anamnesis loss. Sometimes, Eileen admits, “It’s as if I’m affiliated to addition else, to be honest. You’ve absolutely got to go through it to apperceive it.
“I met a adult on the coffer bygone [during the photoshoot for this article]. I said ‘This is for dementia’, and mentioned it. She captivated my duke and said ‘I know.’”
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Sports day ☀ ❤ / framtic app available ible for free in App ... | Pairs Fancy Dress Romford“Everybody was the aforementioned in agreement of actuality adamantine up. You aloof adored up,” remembers Eileen of activity as a adolescent brace in the backward 1950s. “There was none of this activity to the coffer and accepting loans. Everybody was the same, so it was no big deal.”
After a while they confused out Romford way and again – about 40 years ago, aback their son was 18 months old – came to Suffolk: a canton Eileen describes as a acreage of opportunity. (“I’ve got four accouchement who founded businesses on their own.”)
It was the amplification of allowance behemothic Willis Faber & Dumas, and Phil accepting a job with the broker, that accustomed the move to happen. (In the aboriginal 1970s it put up its iconic Norman Foster-designed black-glass architecture in Ipswich.)
Later, Phil co-owned a snooker club bottomward on the Ipswich waterfront. It did well; actual able-bodied – until, Eileen says, the BBC’s accepted Pot Black programme was ditched in 1986.
“That’s how arbitrary bodies are. At the moment we’ve [the UK] done able-bodied in cycling. My son-in-law’s got a bike shop; authoritative a fortune! Everyone wants the high-standard blazon of bike. Aforementioned with snooker. They took Pot Black off the telly – this was the time of Steve Davis, Jimmy White – bodies chock-full advancing in.”
They alleged it a day aback Phil was 60 and the charter was up for renewal, affairs their abode in Ipswich, and alike their car, to tidy up all the affairs and bright the decks.
Eileen had her own ambitious zeal. A affiliate of Felixstowe Amateur Dramatic and Operatic Society, she was absent how bounded groups generally trekked to Southend to appoint costumes. Turned out the abutting places were in Essex or Norfolk. So, a gap in the market. She went for it.
“This is the actuality truth. With £6 in my purse – it was the ‘beginning’ of alms shops – I bought a brace of curtains for a fiver or whatever. I fabricated my aboriginal costume. I fabricated a plan. Every day, as if I was activity to work, I would accomplish a costume, until I had 100.”
Eileen put an advert in a sweetshop window. This was about 1990 and her home-based activity admiring so abundant absorption that, often, “the abode was full. Bedrooms, bath – consistently addition changing!”
Pretty soon, Phil said they bare to attending for a boutique with active adaptation above. They begin one in Gainsborough Road, Felixstowe, and ran Chuckles for a decade or so afore affairs up.
That accomplishments in fancy-dress and apparel appoint is now proving handy, with Eileen staging a catwalk-style fund-raising accident for dementia and Alzheimer’s research. There’ll be fashion, music and memories from the 1930s, ’40s, ’50s and ’60s.
It’s a big, local, Felixstowe effort. FADOS is lending apparel chargeless of charge, as is the avant-garde apotheosis of Chuckles (based in Aerial Road West). Town centre business Pierrot Stationers has produced some admirable tickets, gratis.
The accident has absolutely captured the imagination. Word of aperture created drive alike afore posters went up about a anniversary ago. On Monday, Eileen had already awash £1,200 of tickets. “So I’m about center there already! The allowance can bench 250. I’m absolutely airy now!”
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TOWIE look: Transforming into an Essex Girl involves 8 hours of ... | Pairs Fancy Dress RomfordTo top it all, she says Barclays coffer will bout the bulk raised, batter for pound, up to £1,000.
It was a allotment in the cardboard that spurred Eileen into activity – aboriginal suggestions that the biologic solanezumab ability be able to apathetic the clip of academician abatement for patients with early-stage Alzheimer’s.
If she could stop added bodies adversity in future, she was activity to help.
“The country is in a state; the NHS is in a accompaniment – the money’s got to go to children, the adolescent ones – so I anticipation ‘What can I do?’
“I was never a whizz-kid at school, but what I can do is costumes. What about not absolutely a appearance appearance but article different: apparel through the ages?”
As able-bodied as putting money into dementia and Alzheimer’s research, association needs to allocution abundant added about the aftereffect the altitude accept on both sufferers and their carers, she says.
The affection run abundant added than forgetfulness. “Believe me, if it was alone that... It’s a lot more.”
Eileen knows what it’s like. The dead alive in the night, insisting he or she has to be about else. Wandering about in the baby hours. Accepting bedeviled on a accurate thought. Forgetting their children’s names. Thinking his or her apron is adolescent than is the case.
It’s not accessible for those amenable for circadian care.
The accident should aftermost added than 90 minutes, and accommodate a raffle.
There will be six “fantastic” singers, says Eileen, and a ambit of songs to arm-twist the atmosphere of anniversary era – including the toe-tapping complete of The Andrews Sisters.
The 1960s afterpiece – anticipate mini-skirts, aerial boots and colourful hippie beat – will end with a able number: Rhythm of Life, from the agreeable Sweet Charity.
Volunteers are acting as models, including accompany from the ball accumulation and Eileen and Phil’s three daughters. “They’re all daddy’s girls,” she laughs.
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ROMFORD | Getting there /Sustenance/Things to do – IT'S A LAWYERS LIFE | Pairs Fancy Dress RomfordPhil should be there, too – in the audience. He acclimated to act with FADOS. Bill Sikes in Oliver! was one, says his wife, and dustman Alfred Doolittle in My Fair Lady, “Cockney, and the abysmal tones he’s got”.
(In reality, it’s Eileen who’s the 18-carat Cockney. Phil, from Leytonstone, was built-in a little too far from Bow Bells to qualify!)
Phil, right, with his wife, dressed as a GI for our pictures; and he still enjoys actuality taken for a anatomy or two of snooker. He plays a acceptable game.
Eileen has become actual acquainted of the realities of dementia. She’d like to see added advice for carers. There’s a banking cost. (She spends £100 a anniversary on a carer to booty her bedmate for a bold of snooker, and there’s a day centre visit.) And, of course, there’s an affecting price.
She talks to others in the aforementioned boat. “It is about the carer. He lives in his little world; he forgets things, but he’s all appropriate in his world.” She adds: “He’s alone as ‘good’ as I am. I’ve been ‘terrible’ – because I didn’t accept it all [early on]. You apprentice it all...”
The action becomes the carer’s problem, effectively. “Suddenly, that being isn’t the being you married. So: depression, low, arrant all the time. But this” – organising the through-the-ages fashion, music and memories balustrade appearance – “has brought me out of my depression.
“So what I’m activity to do abutting year, I don’t know!” she laughs. “You’ve aloof got to anticipate of article abroad now, haven’t you!”
Go and abutment it
Eileen’s balustrade appearance of fashion, music and memories from the 1930s through to the 1960s is in aid of dementia and Alzheimer’s research.
It’s on Friday, October 16, at 7.30pm.
Venue: The Orwell Hotel, Hamilton Road, Felixstowe
Tickets: £10
From J&C Webb’s boutique in Orwell Road, Felixstowe, or by phoning 01394 277341
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