My Grannies K..? 25 2 14 (10) 13 8 14

Well to begin with it just so happened I had two Granny K's since each of their surnames began with the letter K, and I was a very fortunate young man because I knew both.. But the one my father's mother had lived in the house in Manchester into which I was delivered at birth, whilst the other moved away from Manchester during the blitz and moved to the small Lancashire town of Bury just 12 miles to the north, to escape.

And when my father volunteered to join the armed services and left his job at the aircraft builders of AVROES a job incidentally which exempted him from war service, my mother decided it was time for her to join her own mother in Bury.

I was born just as the war was getting underway and don't remember our move to Bury but something my mother said as I was growing up stuck in my mind to put the year as 1941 during its summer. And the thing she told me was that when we vacated our house to go into the Anderson Air Raid shelter in our nearby garden the only way to keep me quiet was to give me her breast, something she said lasted 1 1/2 years. So I imagine it stopped when our night time sleep ceased to be interrupted.

Well AA as I shall call her, to distinguish her from A my mother who was given the first of AA's names, was quite a frail old lady as I recall growing up in in the 1940s: hard of hearing because of the bombing she'd been subject to in the district of Stretford near Trafford Park where that part of the family lived, somewhat overweight though she had brought up her family of 6 boys and girls born alternately until A's younger sister A arrived to be followed by the youngest boy G, all the boys serving in HM forces, and spending her last years keeping up as best she could with visits to married children and grandchildren and occasionally once a fortnight being visited by her husband my Grandfather R.

But the thing I most like to remember about her was her wonderful collection of saying, a different saying for every occasion.."No use crying over spilt milk"..."You can change your mind when you can't change your shirt"..."No point flogging a dead horse"..."You can take a horse to water but you can't make it drink"..and so on ad infinitum..?

My mother at this time was number 1 in my affections of course with her long flowing wavy black hair trim body and youthful movements but she had three such charges as I and she held down a full time job as an Embroideress, working a sewing machine like her mother before her, and her elder sister M, though younger sister A was said not to be able to sew..

Well I also like to think we had a pretty good relationship with AA and I used to accompany her on many of those family visits, visiting the nearby towns on market days and staying on to keep her company during her annual holidays in Blackpool ?

She died around the time of life where I now reside so it is also nice to note her daughter A continued her life "still telling the tale" "after a lot more water had gone under the bridge" for another 18 years..

Have a good day everybody..?  
pics:
1) the house of my birth
2) Anderson Air Raid Shelter, a borrowed pic
3) the house A n AA shared in Bury

a blog to remember my Grannie K..? 13 8 14
And my other Granny K? LL as she was called, unlike AA whose father was called Teddy Hughes and with a name like that must have hailed from Wales not so many years earlier, had her father with a surname like Pinkburn, which my cousin David her first grandson who resided with her over a longer period, claimed was a compound of the Irish clans: the Pinks and the Burns. Unlike her husband JP whose father was also Irish but not a fellow Orangeman like Pinkburn, but from across the religious divide, an RC.
LL from her sole example of a written letter which came into my possession, together with my deceased father's war-time letters home, told me my limited capacity for spelling English words correctly that I'd calculated came to me as a gift from my father, had also come to him from his mother. She also, like most of the women in my family, made her living by sewing machines: taking the work from people in her neighbourhood, for she doggedly refused to take Public Assistance help it was claimed: until her old age once she had lost the help our father had provided by sharing her household expenses, when he joined the Royal Marine Engineers. Her comment about how well dressed and turned out some of the women appeared when she visited the Public Assistance Office's belied the fact she needn't have felt so guilty all those years she had struggled to make ends meet, once her husband JP had died aged 50/52 when my dad was only 8 years old, his younger sister maybe only 6? Whatever the event LL needed no longer to buy him any more beer was one epitaph pertaing to his RC father, not an uncommon trait in the Irish, and perhaps going some way to explaining also to this older cousin David, how she had admonished him never to marry a catholic.
That my other Grandfather Bob K also drank beer all his life as a Moulder retiring at 65 years of age also ensured he would reap but little praise from any of his 3 daughters of six children in total, but such were the times in the early part of the twentieth centuary...
Suffice to say like Bob K before me and who knows, maybe the Orangeman William P-b before him, each gave up alcohol in their early 80's. Unlike the earlier generations I am fortunate to have received only praise for my change of mind vis-a-vis the grape and hop...maybe building a different kind of legacy for my children grandchildren and now this last 6 months a great grandchild in young Hugo...lol