I've been thinking a lot about the things I'll
remember about Gran: her flapjack and bread and butter pudding; how – as a
child – I loved to help her preparing dinner on our regular Wednesday evening
visits; the armies of Father Christmas' and snowmen she knitted for the Women’s
Institute; her pride in her garden and the way she'd occasionally come out with
a little gem of a fact that she'd picked up somewhere (on the radio or in Readers’ Digest probably) - I'll always
remember where I was at lunchtime on 7 August 1990 because she and Grampy had
taken me and my brother for a picnic at Meldon Reservoir and as we ate lunch,
Gran announced that it was 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 - 12.34 and 56 seconds on 7/8/90
- a once-in-a-century moment!
Fifteen years ago, I interviewed Gran
for one of my University assignments. We
talked quite a lot about her childhood, family and about school in Chudleigh
Knighton and Mamhead. She recalled living in a farm cottage where she had
to go out to the well to get water and how it was the children's job to chop up
the kindling for the fire. It was important, she remembered, because you
couldn't have a cup of tea until you'd got the fire going. At school, she
remembered being good at needlework and enjoying oral arithmetic.
She told me about her time in
domestic service, firstly at the Manor House in Torquay for Sir Francis
Layland-Barrett. She remembered her
first Christmas there when there was a big Christmas party attended by the
Emperor Haille Selassi, which must have been when he was in exile after the
Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Gran missed the party though - she was
sent home with Housemaid's Knee! She also remembered the arrival of refugees
from Austria. From there, she went to be a cooks-mate in a house at
Haytor, before being called up during the Second World War to work in a factory
in Salisbury making piston-rings for aircraft.
The move on her own to Salisbury was
hard after living in close-knit communities, whether at home on the farm and in
small villages or in the households in which she worked. Somewhat
remarkably, she described her good fortune in being protected from the worst of
the war at the same time as recalling an air-raid in Salisbury and returning
from the shelters to find shrapnel that had fallen through the factory roof on
to the bench beside where she had been sitting and German aircraft
machine-gunning the seafront in Torquay as she and her sister met for a drink
on one of the occasions she returned to Devon.
I've reflected many times over the
years on my interview with Gran. During the course of the interview, she
referred to one thing or another as being good preparation or good training -
domestic service, for example - so toward the end of the interview I asked her
what it had been preparation and training for. She answered that it was
good training for housekeeping and running your own home, looking after
yourself and looking after other people.
Growing up in a different era when
the role of women in society had changed utterly, it was hard to understand -
as a child - the role that someone like Gran had played. Moreover, she
was always a small, frail, reserved lady and it was too easy to see her as
quite insignificant. Interviewing her as
I did shone a whole new light on the real significance of her life. It
was all about family. She had grown up in a close-knit family and without
doubt, her own mother was a role model for her. She viewed domestic
servitude as training for her own future as a mother and grandmother and
eventually, things went full-circle and her life was completed with her own
family. She really had just one job in life, which was to care for all of
us in her family. As she said in her own words, 'That is most
important: family - more important than anything, I think, is family
togetherness.' Her devotion to all of us was very deliberate.
It was a selfless job and one in which, I know, she took great joy. I
feel very blessed to have had such a remarkable woman as a grandmother.
Gran's legacy is easy to see: it's in
all of us in her family, whether in the pride her own children take in their gardens
or in my love of cooking, which I'm sure is largely thanks to helping Gran on
Wednesday evenings. For her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, it's
in our own wonderful mothers. Above all, it's in our family-togetherness,
which was so valuable to her and, for someone like me who daily sees the
consequences of fractured families, its value is beyond measure.
We – her family – are all so
fortunate to have been so well loved by Gran. She took great pride in us
and I, for one, am very proud of her.
