A waiter once spoke in Hindi to one of the members of our book club at a dinner, while addressing Pammie in English. “I speak Hindi,” Pammie said quietly to me, seeming a tad put out that the handsome waiter had not remembered talking to her earlier in that language. I told my husband about it when I got home that night, finding it funny in the nicest way. Pammie seemed not to understand why the waiter would look at this woman with those enormous blue eyes and not automatically think “ah, yes, Hindi speaker.”
Pammie benefited enormously from her travels, giving her a brilliant, if unorthodox, perspective. I knew of Pammie’s sharp and curious mind even before I met her. She had passed onto Sue her wonderful pet theory about a potential Scottish link to the grand statues on Easter Island. This gave Sue, my sister and me another idea to ponder during our 2002 visit there, trying to see how some redhaired Picts could have possibly had a role in the reddish stone "hats" that stand atop the grand statues of the ancestors of the Easter Islanders. I think that Easter Island is one of the few fascinating places in the world that Pammie didn’t visit.
Her approach was excruciatingly correct about the important things in life, including her friends, whether they walked on two or four feet, and language. She sent handwritten notes and fussed about flowers sent as gifts. Pammie told me once that she knew that we would get on well because we both stuck with the traditional meaning of “decimate” as to reduce by a tenth, and frowned upon the modern dilution of its meaning to any old drastic reduction. She also told me that she was thrilled to find that we were both Yorkists, meaning that we shared a conviction that Richard III has been done a mean trick by history. Her interests seemed vast and varied.
Pammie possessed a rare combination of great warmth and a sharp, sharp wit. She will be missed greatly because she was, rightfully, adored so much and by so many.
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