For the occasion of creating a homage to Constance for the Artists Hunt in October 2022, I found out the following details about Constance.

Manda as Constance, Artists Hunt October 2022

Constance lived in The Park for twenty years. She did an orientation programme in 1981. She retired to The Park with her great friend Doris and they were both lucky enough to purchase two of the original cedar wood bungalows. Constance purchased ‘Treetops’ and Doris purchased ‘Doris’ . Their friendship spanned the whole time they were living there. They used to have secret codes using their curtain positions, for example there is a cuppa waiting for you might show half opened curtains. Both Constance and Doris used their time well and applied what skills they had to contributing to the community.

Constance loved reading and before long she decided to start a community library which with her book-keeping skills was run very efficiently.

Before Constance arrived at the community she had lead a full life. She was brought up in a Salvation Army home. Every weekend she and her sister would be in the pubs trying to sell the magazine from the ‘Sally Army’ . During the war she worked for the railways and worked up to a position of station master. When the men returned from the war the authorities wanted to demote her so as a protest she left the organisation.

Constance had a fiancé named Ted. They had even purchased a house together and three days before the wedding she received the dreaded telegram that he was lost and missing in action. This lead her to attending spiritualist churches in and around Lytham St Anns in Lancashire. She couldn’t accept that he had died. It was at one of these churches that she met Doris.

Whilst she and Doris were living in Findhorn community they carried on occasionally attending a spiritualist church in Nairn. One day she got message from a medium at that church which said ‘Don’t forget the Liquorice Allsorts’. These were Ted’s favourite sweets so Constance then knew that Ted had been killed in action.

Constance loved rambling and this lead her to volunteer with Alan Watson Featherstone for Trees For Life.

Constance on an outing with a friend

She was also a good baker and was famous for her scones. She baked scones as fundraisers and to feed the workers.

Constance’s handwritten scone recipe

When her best friend Doris died she was adamant that the community took care of her body without the use of an undertaker. They transported Doris’s body to the crematorium in David Hammond’s car and gave her a good send off. She was a great friend till the very end.

Constance passed several years later in 2002 and her ashes were scattered on the west coast by another good friend of hers, Veronica.

There are echoes of Constance still in Treetops garden with the two bird baths she left and a plaque on a lilac bush that was dedicated to Constance and put there by Cornelia who was her close neighbour.

Constance and Cornelia at Osprey Centre in Boat of Garten