The new pleasure of being a grandmother

On the right of this picture is my grandmother with her cousin and best friend. They are off out for the day somewhere in Yorkshire no doubt and going to have fun. I didn't meet my grandmother until I was in my mid twenties and so it was a rather different relationship not having known her as a child. I had of course known about her since I was fourteen when my mother told me how she had one day given her a Toblerone and disappeared in a taxi from the house. So one day quite by accident I found myself in the town where she had been born and being the north of England it was too hard to discover if she was still alive and where the rest of her family lived.

An uncle lived up on the hill so knocking on his door led to me two days later walking up the path of a 1930's semi in a market town in North Yorkshire and announcing to the rather elderly lady who answered the door that I was ,in fact, her granddaughter.

Would I do it again ? I don't know. Not a Hollywood ending for sure far too much heartache for that but I did connect with my roots and family genes which was a revelation.

And now I am a grandmother myself - five weeks already. I am thinking about Edith Mary and how her life was so very different from my own. Yet at the same time we share so many interests talents and aspects of our lives.

Oh! and by the way she did have my mother's white satin baby shoes tucked away at the back of her bureau...