Elsie Blakeley’s Shoes

Appearances are deceptive.

Everyone knows Elsie Blakeley. Born in the pretty village of Winfield Cabot she’s been here all her life, for most of the time with her mother. Elsie puts on her grey cloche hat and views it in the hall mirror on a Sunday, picks up her gloves, rarely wears them but carries them as she goes off to church.

Elsie lives in the old Post Office, which she ran with her mother until the old woman took a fall off a ladder. Her mother, at the top of the ladder, announced ‘Your days out will have to stop, Elsie, I’m too old to look after the shop on my own’. Then she was shouting out in agony, her mouth a jagged O as her scream reverberated around the square, shelf-lined room; she never recovered. Elsie turned the ‘Closed’ sign over for the final time at the Post Office with what was said to be indecent haste, by the village gossip, Mrs Doobey.

Elsie goes off once a week on the bus. No-one knows where. She always carries a green shopping bag swinging it lightly as she progresses towards the bus stop, serene and graceful. Her regular journey arouses but idle curiosity, she has become elderly in the mind of the village since her mother died, so folk don’t bother much.
“Nice trip, Elsie?” they ask and the reply is always the same, a nod of the neat white head and a gentle smile, no more.

Elsie arranges flowers for the Winfield Cabot church each Saturday in time for Sunday services. She puts lilies and gardenia, maidenhair and leatherleaf ferns on her mother’s grave breathing the evocative white scents and touching, stroking the rough leaves of the ferns, then she spends a few minutes tidying; she trims the grass and lovingly wipes the grey headstone. On Radio 4 Elsie likes The Archers, she detests Lynda Snell’s character as an interferer; Elsie says Mrs Doobey is the spit of her.

One day Mrs Doobey says she’s seen Elsie with a man in the city, ”You’d barely know it was her all done up in a blonde wig, cheeks flushed; she pretended she hadn’t seen me!” says a quivering Mrs Doobey, “and the shoes! How she can walk in them I don’t know!”

Elsie is not doing a lot of walking in those shoes. Elsie teaches dance, Jive and Argentine Tango, Zumba, just like she’s taught dance for the past thirty-five years. She loves it. She’s good at it. The villagers have no idea that amongst them lives a renowned dancer and choreographer, sometimes referred to as the best in the UK; they don’t know that she’s an OBE; they don’t know that she shoved the ladder. To Winfield Cabot she is just sweet old-fashioned, elderly Elsie.