In Good Company: Lookalike
...then, after a close look, she grinned an apology and it dawned on both of us she had mistaken me for someone else who apparently worked in a nearby mill. ‘She’s your living image, luv,’ was enough to set my curiosity on fire...
Enid Blackburn was intrigued when she heard she had a lookalike.
When I popped into the chippy last Friday for my favourite dinner of the week the proprietress was overwhelmingly sociable.
‘Have you some better work in this week, luv?’ she beamed. I gave her my plastic smile and asked her what she meant. She tried again.
‘Have you finished that load of bobbins you were on about?’ I was baffled. Then, after a close look, she grinned an apology and it dawned on both of us she had mistaken me for someone else who apparently worked in a nearby mill. ‘She’s your living image, luv,’ was enough to set my curiosity on fire.
So that’s why people are always asking me if I have just finished work. Here I am thinking it’s my clothes. To see ourselves as others see us is dangerously tempting. So, not immediately recognising the unfamiliar name of my double, I dashed home to quiz my daughters.
When I repeated the name, oh yes, they all knew her, a small woman, yes, a small woman. Not much satisfaction yet. Dark hair perhaps. No, they didn’t think so, but it was difficult to say as she always wore a woolly cap pulled over her ears. ‘She has funny little eyes and a grey moustache,’ one daughter added helpfully. ‘You know her surely.’ No I’m sure I would remember.
Anyway, my eyes could not be described as little, and I certainly do not have a grey moustache – it’s black.
Still, I suppose it’s inevitable with all the faces in the world that one or two must look similar. Every time I see Annie Walker pull a pint in the Rover’s Return I always confuse her with her look alike Barbara Cartland. The resemblance between these two doyens is incredible.
When Kate Bush was performing the other night I kept getting her face mixed up with the image of young Egyptian King Tutankhamen – or was it his mummy Nephatites?
Barry Manilow always reminds me of a chap who comes to our bowling club. Barry Manilow is younger, his hair is blonde (not the colour of soiled string like this bloke, and my friend's arms are six inches longer) probably something to do with his stooping gait. But his face is Barry’s. We also have a Charlie Drake, minus the curls, but with a wig he could fool anybody.
Often it’s the voice that hits a memory chord. Margaret Thatcher’s phonetics are exactly like an infants teacher I know who always addresses parents in a hushed monotone, as if they are geriatrics with only a month to live.
In my youth, when Liz Taylor was wasting her charms on ‘Lassie,’ I tried to look like her. Getting ready for dances took hours.
With little to start on, but armed hopefully with my Woolworth’s make-up, two ounces of mascara on each eyebrow, vivid tangee lips, plus the tightest waistband my heartbeat could stand – I joined the happy band of other Liz Taylors at the Town Hall.
Now when I see my own daughters leaving for dates, with grotesque purple eyelids and greasy lips, I marvel how my mother kept silent. But she just kept on knitting silently even when she caught my full frontal, and probably spent the rest of the night picking up dropped stitches.
A midwife told me once she never noticed faces. ‘Bums and faces look alike to me, dear,’ she laughed, only she didn’t use the word ‘bum!’
