Our own grans

I remember all four of my grandparents. Dad's mum was born in 1897 she had a poor rural upbringing but obviously had happy memories of her childhood. She used to tell lots of stories of her girlhood playing in the same fields we played in, gathering berries from the hedgerows for jam cowslips and elderberries to make wine.
They never had a Christmas tree just a tree branch hanging from the ceiling and decorated. They were a very poor family. All toys were home made girls often got a family of peg dolls 'dressed' with drawn on faces. They also found an apple, orange and a new penny and best of all a sugar pig. All girls learnt to sew and knit and grandma made beautiful baby clothes with smocking. Childhood was very short at 12 she left school and worked in a local factory because she was the eldest and her wages were needed.
She was married in her teens already pregnant by her 18 year old soldier boyfriend. I didn't find out this for certain until I reserched the family tree and found records of their marriage and the babies birth and death a few months later. Grandad never saw the baby he was born while he was away in France. Grandma never told her own DC about her first born but she did tell my mum her DiL which I find quite strange.

WW1 Claimed Grandma's father and one of her brothers. This caused her mum to breakdown and Grandma had to care for her own mum and take charge of 3 school age siblings. Fortunately grandad did come back but he was crippled for life and spent many years struggling to find work so grandma had to work as well as her family duties. They had four more DC incuding my own father. She died in her 80's 6 weeks after the birth of my own first born and before she had the chance to see him. She was already a great gran because I have older cousins but I would have loved my DC to have known her she was a lovely lady.

I only ever met one of my grandparents, my maternal grandother, she was 62 when I was born which is obviously nothing now but I never knew her as a well person (40 years of smoking on her part maybe had something to do with it) She was born in London in 1900 into a hard up family (11 people in 2 rooms on the 1911 census) married at 18, lived with her husband in Germany in the early 1920s as part of the army of occupation, widowed at 39 years old and never remarried. She worked as a cleaner all her life. She died when I was 11, I spent a lot of time with her as a child, she told me the odd snippet about her life, that she bribed her sisters to come down and let her in after her dad had locked the front door before she was in at night when she was 'courting', that they had duvets and entryphones in Germany in the 1920s. I would love to have known more about her life. She is still my hero in life (ok heroine) and I would be thrilled to mean a fraction as much to my grandchild as she did to me. My first post on gransnet, there are some wonderful granny stories in this thread.

my thoughts echo thecraftymermaid, my nanna was so dear to me , and though she,s been gone for nearly fifty years i still miss her so much. she was and still is my role model.i would be proud to know that my GD could love me half as much. x

Welcome craftymermaid. I love the affection that comes through your account of your grandmother. She sounds like a wonderful woman. I hope our grandchildren will be able to say the same of us, different though our lives have been.

annodomini thankyou, and thankyou for the welcome.

Only knew one grandparent -my Mum's mum.I think she modelled herself on Queen Victoria.Always dressed all in black with white hair drawn back in a tight bun.-and not amused!She lived in London - in a wheel chair,waited on hand and foot by her unmarried daughters.When they brought her to stay with us at the start of the blitz my mum was run ragged tending to her every whim..She told me off for whistling and playing games on Sunday.
She died in 1941 when I was 10.
I'm sad that I never felt any love or affection from her.
It makes me all the more sad that so many (over 1 million) children are currently denied contact with their grandparents who want to love and care for them.

'Scuse the rant.

My granny was born in 1883, the fourteenth of nineteen children. She had a career as a painter of photographs and she was a champion at bowls. She always wore trousers and a tie. She was very deaf and had a huge home-knitted bag in her knickers for her hearing-aid batteries. This made sitting on her lap very uncomfortable. She told wonderful fairy stories which she had created for my sister during long hours in the air-raid shelter.