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The Sweet Pea Room · FICTIONAL CARE HOME
Alice Whitaker, 83
Alice Whitaker grew up in York above her father’s bicycle shop. A patient teacher encouraged her love of drawing, and she became a primary school teacher herself, staying in the classroom for thirty-seven years.
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About our characters →RESIDENT NOTES
Residential careAlice’s story
Alice Whitaker83 years · The Sweet Pea RoomWillowgate House · York
- A life of their own
- Primary school teacher · York, Yorkshire
- Life here
- Alice is observant, gently stubborn and amused by elaborate rules that solve nothing.
- People in their life
- Bernard, her husband, died nine years ago. Her daughter Lucy lives in Leeds and has one son, Ben.
- A little comfort
- school memories, birdwatching, handwritten letters, sweet peas
AliceWillowgate House · York, United Kingdom
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A LITTLE COLOUR
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Life story
Fictional character · Alice Whitaker
The shop downstairs
Alice grew up above a bicycle shop in York. Her father brought the smell of rubber and rain upstairs on his coat, and her mother kept the accounts at the kitchen table. Saturday mornings meant sorting small change into dishes. Alice liked the certainty of the coins, though she often lost count when somebody started an interesting conversation.
A customer once left a basket containing six eggs on a repaired bicycle. Alice’s father returned them before closing, cycling carefully with the basket balanced on his own handlebars. Alice remembers that journey more clearly than the shop’s busiest days. He came home with one cracked egg and a very serious account of the road surface.
The cupboard potato
At teacher training, Alice was praised for tidy lesson plans. Her first class soon corrected the idea that a plan could account for everything. A potato kept for a growing experiment disappeared behind a cupboard. Weeks later, pale shoots emerged beside the door while the children were practising their handwriting. Nobody wanted it removed.
Alice let the class draw it before moving it into daylight. One child insisted the potato had been looking for the window. Years afterwards, that boy stopped her in the market and asked about it. He remembered neither the exercise book nor the spelling test. Alice began keeping a little more space in her lessons for unexpected things.
Bernard’s clocks
Bernard met Alice at a jumble sale when they both reached for an unattractive mantel clock. She wanted it for a classroom lesson; he wanted to see why it had stopped. They settled the matter over tea. The clock was repaired, borrowed by the school and eventually placed in their kitchen, where it never quite kept time.
They married two years later. Bernard made labels for his repairs, including one that read “approximately correct”. Alice kept that label after the clock finally stopped for good. Their disagreements were mostly domestic: open windows, burnt toast and whether a small delay counted as being late. Neither of them became more punctual by winning an argument.
A garden at school
The school garden began with three tubs, some borrowed tools and a patch of ground nobody used. Alice asked the children what they wanted to grow. Their choices included strawberries, enormous pumpkins and a tree suitable for climbing immediately. She negotiated the tree down to a young apple sapling and found room for most of the rest.
A late frost spoiled the first beans. Alice was disappointed enough to hide the trays until a colleague reminded her that failed experiments still belonged in a classroom. They replanted. The garden gradually became a place for measuring, drawing and sitting quietly. Alice remains proud that children who disliked speaking in class often had plenty to say beside a plant.
The class she missed
Lucy remembers her mother collecting prospectuses for evening drawing classes. There was always a reason to wait: reports, a leaking roof, somebody needing a lift. After retirement, Alice finally bought a proper sketchbook, but she still sometimes treated an hour of drawing as time borrowed from a more useful task. She recognises the habit now.
Bernard’s death changed the shape of the house and the evenings. Alice did not immediately fill the space with activities. She learned which friends could sit without requiring her to be cheerful. Gradually, walks and drawing returned. Her pictures became less careful, and she liked some of them more. She still wishes she had begun sooner.
The sweet pea window
At Willowgate House, Alice chose a room with a view of a small courtyard. Lucy helped arrange her books, while Ben claimed the task of testing the visitor chair. Alice brought the clock label, the sketchbook and a tin that once held biscuits. It now contains pencils, seed packets and three buttons with no obvious purpose.
She joins the gardening group when the weather suits and declines when it does not. A sweet pea on her windowsill has grown in the wrong direction, which she considers its own business. Visitors can ask about the school garden or show her a drawing. She is especially interested in things people almost threw away and then decided to keep.
Other residents
George Bennett, 86
George Bennett was raised in Portsmouth and entered the dockyard as a teenage apprentice.
Nora Pritchard, 79
Nora Pritchard grew up in Cardiff with a younger brother and a mother who could turn a small kitchen into the busiest room in the street.
Thomas Penrose, 88
Thomas Penrose grew up near Penzance and became a marine electrician, maintaining wiring and equipment rather than sailing for a living.
Beatrice Okafor, 81
Beatrice Okafor moved from Lagos to Birmingham as a young adult and trained further in dressmaking while working in a clothing workshop.
Raj Mehta, 77
Raj Mehta grew up in Leicester, the eldest of three children, and became a community pharmacist.
Jean McAllister, 90
Jean McAllister grew up in Dundee and became a bookbinder after starting work in a print shop.
Malcolm Fraser, 85
Malcolm Fraser grew up outside Stirling and spent most of his working life as a railway signaller.
Evelyn Price, 74
Evelyn Price grew up in Bath and worked in office administration before discovering pottery in an evening class.
Daniel Osei, 80
Daniel Osei moved from Accra to London as a young man and trained as a vehicle mechanic.