London - My mum’s cavalier attitude to skincare has long been a source of wonderment to my sister Annie and me.
The other week, celebrating her 89th birthday, we were staying at a hotel in Stratford-upon-Avon. Preparing for a trip to the theatre, Mum - Jane - was looking for the soap. Unable to find it, she squeezed some shower gel into her palm and rubbed it into her face with the vigour most of us reserve for scouring a sink. Then she dried it, equally strenuously, with a towel.
This has been her cleansing routine for the best part of nine decades: a squirt of the first cleaning agent that comes to hand, a splash of water and a jolly good scrub.
She ought to have a face that looks like a grated turnip. Actually, and unaccountably, her skin looks youthful. In fact, on a good day and in a kind light, she could pass for a well-preserved 70.
Yet Mum wouldn’t know Creme de la Mer from horse liniment. She’s never had a facial - she’d consider it a self-indulgence akin to bathing in asses’ milk. And she certainly wouldn’t know what dermabrasion was, though her twice-daily face sanding with a rough towel could count as a DIY version.
I suspect her cosmetics and make-up budget barely tops £10 (about R200) a year.
When she was 40, she briefly used Oil of Olay - until she discovered that its primary ingredient was water. There was no point, she reasoned, in moisturising your skin with something you could get free from a tap, so since then she’s never used moisturiser.
I have a theory, based on no scientific knowledge whatsoever, that if you cease to apply unguents to your skin, eventually it just gets on with the job it was doing perfectly well for millennia before cosmetics were invented, and hydrates itself. This seems to have happened with Mum.
She’s never used a cleanser and adheres to the belief that soap does a perfectly good job. And in Mum’s case, the soap is antique. It’s from a cache she accumulated in the Seventies from her Aunt Nora, who lived near the (now defunct) Castle Soap Works in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, Leicestershire.
Every birthday and Christmas, Aunt Nora - who was married to Uncle Ron, a coal miner, and therefore had great need of soap - would present Mum with a bulk consignment of Personality soap.
“There’s your Personality, Jane,” Aunt Nora would announce as she handed over a sack of perfumed tablets. Almost 50 years on, Mum is still working her way through that ancient batch.
It’s so old it may well have rarity value - even though it has lost its scent and might just as well be a lump of rendered pork fat.
If friends give her gifts of soap, they are stored away to be used in strict order of donation. At this rate, the presents Mum was given in the Eighties won’t be enjoyed until around 2026.
Her make-up bag, too, is pared down to a few essentials: a compact powder - probably bought before decimalisation - plus a single lipstick and eye shadow from the teen counter at Superdrug, and a jar of what Mum calls “rouge” and what the rest of the world refers to as “blusher”.
Mum’s one treat is a visit from her friend Lorraine, who blow-dries her hair. Despite frequent tutorials from my sister, she has never learnt to style it herself and, frankly, rarely combs it.
This amuses us, particularly because her grandfather William had owned a prospering hairdressing and wig-making business in the Midlands.
And yet despite this flagrant inattention to grooming or appearance, Mum - when she isn’t gardening in high winds wearing an oversized anorak - looks lovely.
I was thinking about her beauty regime - or lack of it - when I looked at a photo of the singer Cher and her mother the other day. Cher, 69, who has admitted to extensive surgical intervention, had posed for a selfie with her mum Georgia Holt, who, like my mum, is 90 next birthday.
“This is what 70 and 90 looks like in my family,” tweeted Cher, adding (her capitals): “Mom has NO MAKE-UP ON.”
Granted, Georgia looks wonderful: chiselled cheekbones; glowing skin; thick, lustrous hair.
But while I’m quite prepared to believe, as Cher insists, that there has been no photoshopping of the picture, I can’t imagine Georgia has been quite so careless about looking after her appearance over the years as my mum.
Mum’s frugality dates back to her early teens when, as a schoolgirl evacuee from London during the war, she lived in a succession of billets and often had barely enough money for toothpaste, let alone fripperies.
One kind family in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, gave her a shilling a week pocket money.
Whatever she saved, she spent on others - she still has the most endearing capacity to be generous with friends and family, while spending next to nothing on herself.
A wartime letter to her beloved mum, my grandmother Win, illustrates this.
Sending her a birthday present of a hand-made cosmetics case, a powder compact and cold cream, my mum wrote: “The powder looks ever so dark, but it was the nearest the shop assistant had to the colour you like and she says it’s a good make.
“I couldn’t get a tube of cold cream, so I had to get a tin.”
Even as a teenager, Mum would rather buy make-up for her mother than herself, and the habit of self-denial has persisted.
But the question remains: how does Mum manage to look good when she has so resolutely flouted every rule in the beauty book?
I suppose the simple answer is genes. When my grandmother died in her 80s, she had virtually unlined skin. Mum inherited that fabulous complexion, just as she inherited her adored dad Frank’s thick, dark auburn hair. When she was young, it was her crowing glory: she looked like a Pre- Raphaelite painter’s muse.
Unfortunately, I haven’t inherited Mum’s lucky genes - I wish I had her good jawline and swan-like neck.
But my beauty regime, like hers, is resolutely minimalist. Being pampered in a salon feels like a flagrant waste of time - I’d rather go for a brisk walk by the sea.
Though I have Mum’s thick hair, it’s usually home-dyed and in need of a styling - my erratic work hours do not allow for regular appointments at the hairdresser’s.
Mum’s hair is now white and she wears it in a gamine crop. She has always avoided ‘old lady’ perms - a sure-fire way of adding years to your appearance.
And she defiantly refuses to dress age-appropriately, balking at beige hand-knits and slacks and preferring jeans, boots, boho smock tops and bright jackets.
It doubtless helps, too, that when her contemporaries were being bullied and cajoled by their dentists in the Forties into having all their teeth removed and replaced by dentures at the first hint of decay - the rationale was that it would save the bother and expense of drilling and filling later - Mum refused.
Her natural, warm smile is her own. She has never smoked, doesn’t drink, and she has an unerring capacity for joy. She always sees the cloud’s silver lining.
When we were children trudging through a deluge, she would scan the leaden sky for a patch of blue big enough to make a pair of sailor’s trousers. Once she’d found it, she’d assure us that sunshine was on the way.
Mum spent her working life as a schoolteacher, but after our dad died in 1988, she decamped from Hertfordshire, where we grew up, to a remote corner of Wales, where we’d spent our holidays.
She lives there on a farm, with her dogs, cat and flock of mountain sheep. She remains interested in other people and always has a project: a reason to get out of bed, a scheme she is bringing to fruition, whether it be overseeing the re-roofing of a barn or planting summer flowers in her bright, sunny garden.
Her default setting is contented, her optimism hardwired, and I’m convinced these qualities keep her youthful. So, doubtless, does the soft water that springs from the mountain she lives on and the fresh air she breathes daily.
Mum is the kindest person I know and I wonder: can goodness be reflected in our faces? I always maintain that it can.
People who have spent a lifetime being sour, mean-spirited and bitter tend to look like the old bags they are once they’ve reached pensionable age.
While Mum has endured more than her share of hardship, privation and sadness, she is convinced that the world is a wonderful place, that people are inherently good and that life is worth living.
When I ask her “What’s the best thing about being nearly 90?” she says: “That I’m still here.
Youthfulness is an attitude of mind. I suppose that’s the truth of it.
Daily Mail