DOING HER BIT: Pamela Fleming (centre with mixing bowl) has baked more than 80 cakes for charity. Also pictured, from left to right, Pauline Chrisoflaherty, Sabina Myatt, Pauline Gray and Valerie Hewlett.
Crippling arthritis, worsened by the cold weather, has not stopped one Hemel Hempstead woman from doing her bit for charity.
Pamela Fleming spent endless hours baking more than 80 cakes that she then sold to raise more than £1,000 for the Hospice of St Francis.
The 62-year-old has had several of her finger joints replaced to ease the excruciating pain she endures on a daily basis.
Regardless of this, she battles on and recently she cooked up a storm until her kitchen was overflowing with lemon meringues, raspberry and almond slices and dozens of pies!
Sometimes starting at 6am and only turning the oven off at 8pm once the grandmother-of-four had finished baking, Pamela opened her home in Lever-stock Green, Hemel Hempstead, to the public and sold the cakes.
Around 60 people filled her house and even some hungry firefighters popped in to sample some of her 20 banana and fruit cakes and 40 rock cakes.
She said: "You just can't give up, you just need to carry on. I could finish today and say I'm not going to it do it any more but what good would that do?
"I must just say that if it wasn't for my friends I wouldn't have been able to do it. I have wonderful friends and I would like to say a huge thank-you to everyone who turned up and helped me."
Pamela has been supporting charities, specifically cancer research causes, for more than 30 years.
No stranger to the disease, when she was in her 50s doctors found cancerous cervical cells and within three days she found herself on the operating table.
Both her and her husband Nell's fathers died from cancer and several of her closest friends have the life-threatening disease.
As a former carer, Pamela said she has seen at first hand what organizations like the hospice do for seriously-ill people and said she was happy that she could do her bit for the local charity.
Sarah Thompson, director of fund-raising at the hospice said: "It's so fantastic that generous people like Pamela put on coffee mornings to raise funds for the Hospice of St Francis. The hospice only receives 25 per cent of funding from the Government, and so we rely on the goodwill of the people from our community."
Pamela says she will continue to raise money for charity and last Saturday, she was also one of the 800 women take part in the 12-mile women's only walk from Hemel Hempstead to Berkhamsted and back again.
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