Our great grans
Every issue, Yours writer Marion Clarke will be reliving the best bits of our lives. This fortnight she celebrates our remarkable grandmothers
Here I am, aged nine months, sitting on the lap of my Welsh grandmother, Mamgu. Soon after this, my mother became ill with TB so Mamgu brought me up. An indomitable woman, she started a bakery, ran the village shop and was a pillar of the church. I have an abiding memory of her dressed in her Sunday best, complete with gloves and an impressive hat, sailing up the aisle to what she considered her rightful place in a front pew. Doreen Parker’s gran was also a stylish dresser: “She was a grand old lady, tall, sophisticated and impeccably dressed. We were in awe of her. She lived with us after she was bombed out of her London home. I fondly remember sitting on the floor between her knees while she brushed my hair a hundred times before putting it into two plaits tied with white satin ribbons.” Joy Blackmur has fond memories of her industrious grandmother: “She was a wonderful lady who always wore an apron over her long black skirt. My sisters and I loved to hear her stories of how she met Granddad. He was a very handsome man and she knew she would marry him as soon as she clapped eyes on him. They wed in 1901 and were married for 52 years. “Grandma earned money by making dresses and suits and she was an expert machinist. While she sat and sewed, she told us that her grandmother was one of 19 children and that one of her cousins was the Archbishop of Canterbury. Fancy that! What tales she had to tell.” Priscilla Odell’s Gran Curtis used her apron pockets to keep the yarn in when she was crocheting or knitting. “Crochet mats were given to us all. She never wasted time. During the war she taught me to knit and embroider while we were in the bomb shelter.” Like many women of her generation, Rosemary Keeble’s gran was handy with a needle as well as being a keen card player: “She had 17 grandchildren and knitted socks and gloves for the boys and embroidered handkerchiefs for the girls. She embroidered tablecloths which were given to each of us girls when we reached 21. “She used to attend whist drives where she won prizes that were put away for Christmas. She taught us to play and became quite annoyed when we lost concentration and forgot which cards had already been played!” “My inspirational grandma, Norah, loved to read horoscopes in the newspaper,” writes Janet
‘Grandma earned money by making dresses and suits – she was an expert machinist’
Dandy, “but would tear out any pictures of seminude women which she disapproved of. She was a very generous person who did a lot of work collecting funds for the church. “Her house was nicknamed Hotel de Sleepio because she often took in people who needed a place to stay even though the toilet was out in the yard and there were stone steps up to the bedrooms. She worked into her 70s caring for people in a care home and walked miles to get there when the buses were on strike.”
Hazel Anderson
had an equally doughty grandmother: “In her 70s she would walk two miles to the next village to work in the butcher’s shop. She used to follow the horses and used a magnifying glass to make her selections. Most days she would put sixpence each way on the horses she chose (often based on the names of people in her family). I never knew her to be ill. When she died on the eve of her 94th birthday, the doctor said her body had just worn out.” Like my Mamgu, Betty Knibbs’ grandmother was an enterprising woman: “After her divorce in the Twenties, she started a secondhand business, selling the sheets from her bed to pay the first week’s rent. After a few years she was able to buy her own car, an Austin Seven. “During the war the business really took off and made good money. Afterwards, she was able to take a trip to America, travelling out on the Queen Mary.”
Margaret Rymer’s
grandmother also crossed the Atlantic, but was not impressed by that country’s free and easy ways. “My grandmother, who used to put on a posh accent when she answered the phone or went on holiday, was a real prude. She never got over being told by the taxi driver who picked her up from the airport in New York, ‘Get your fanny on the back seat, ma’am’ – no matter how many times we told her that in America the word fanny means bottom.”
Jennifer Lunn’s
eccentric Granny Stirling once embarrassed her family while they were travelling on a funicular railway in Switzerland. “It was a warm day and to the amusement of the other passengers she decided to strip. Off came her coat, then the jumper, then the stockings and dress, revealing a pair of men’s khaki shorts and socks with army boots. She didn’t think her outfit was at all unusual and said, ‘These foreign people DO stare!’ as we walked several paces behind her.”