Something my cousins and I grew to realise very quickly was that Granny had little time for our respective parents...I suppose she loved her sons...my Father was the eldest and the cousins Father was one of twins and came in the middle of the family...but she heartily disliked both their wives. Had probably not much cared for their previous wives either...
But, as children, we were unaware of previous wives and other children loitering on the fringes.
All we cared about was hoping we'd be invited for the summer holidays...
Granny and Grandpa lived on the Yorkshire Moors...they had an extraordinary cottage...ramshackle and leaky...tiny twisting stairs led to small bedrooms filled with bolts of suiting and Singer sewing machines left-over from Grandpa's days as a Tailor...there were lengths of ornate gold braid wound round spools and real gold threads in little silk packets. Grandpa had once been commissioned to make the state uniforms for the King...he used to let us look at the braids and hold the thread in our hot and grubby hands while he told us the King was very polite, even when he was standing in front of Grandpa in his underpants...
We were not impressed in the slightest...
To us, in the Fifties, the King seemed to be as remote as the moon...
The kitchen took up the whole of the ground floor...it was there that meals were cooked and hams hung in the rafters...where Granny knitted furiously in the evenings...fingerless mittens and thick socks...Grandpa knitted as well, but he made the most delicate and beautiful lacy Christening shawls...they'd sit at the table with the Jack Russell's asleep under it...needles clacking away.
Granny made stew.
She made stew out of the cheapest cuts of meat, though we didn't realise that at the time, breast of lamb would simmer away in a pot with potatoes and onions...a thick greasy scum rising to the top.
A lump of fatty bacon was treated in exactly the same way...heaps of badly mashed potatoes and a generous helping of well boiled cabbage...
Sometimes she'd make jugged hare...rich and savoury...the gravy thickened with the blood.
It was only Stephen, my eldest cousin who tucked in and ate everything...Denise, Ginny and I picked and poked and looked appealing at Grandpa hoping he'd save us...
Stephen always slept in a tent out on the field behind the cottage...us girls shared a railway carriage. It was parked at the side of the cottage...lit by flickering gas mantles that spat and hissed.
We always had hot water bottles and thick flannel sheets...patchwork quilts made from scraps of suiting fabric and feather pillows. The pillows were stuffed with the feathers from Granny's hens...she slaughtered them each year and bought in new stock. There'd always be sharp pokey bits that caught you unawares and stabbed your cheek in the middle of the night.
I've been struggling to remember how we passed the time...
There were picnics...we used to go into the little apple orchard and read under the trees...Little Women and Jo's Boys...The Coral Island and Lorna Doone...our legs went brown and we grew thinner...our long hair was knotted and we ran out of clean clothes because Granny didn't believe in wasting hot water...
We did jigsaws in the evenings...spread out at the end of the table while Grandpa cleaned his gun or took out his needles to finish a shawl for a new baby...
Those summer holidays were too good to last...my Mother had a blazing row with Granny and Auntie Helen followed soon after...
Ginny and I didn't meet again for thirty years...Stephen became a recluse...Denise 'married well'...
We were allowed the freedom to be ourselves without risk of criticism or ridicule...
The photo is of my Grandpa.
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