Thinking about my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother yesterday sent me hunting for old family photos.
There's a particular one of my grandmother I wanted to show you that I couldn't find, but I managed to turn up these.
Here's my grandmother as a little girl, with her brother. His personality comes across very clearly in this picture — he was such a gentle person.
In her old age, my great-grandmother lived in a bungalow built just behind my great-uncle's house, and he kept an eye on her. She called the bungalow Cot-in-Lea, a reminder of Cottingley where she grew up and where her children were born. Her family (Thorntons) owned the mill there.
Here's my grandmother about the same age as the previous picture, this time in a school photo scowling ferociously because she didn't want to sit with the boys.
She was at school with the girl who took photos of the fairies at Cottingley, of whom my grandmother said (scathingly), "She was no scholar, either!"
But though that was a hoax, my mother really did see a fairy when she was a little girl, and some of my children have seen fairies, too. And in the last couple of years of her life, my mother spent a lot of her time going on astral walkabouts, telling me what she was seeing as she sat in her beautiful living room but wandered in spirit along mountain paths and across the North York Moors, accompanied by a spirit dog called Lou, who kept her safe (she said).
Village fêtes with pram races and fancy dress parades were a big things when my mother and grandmother were children. Here's my grandmother dressed up for one such occasion, as a teenager.
And here she is aged 22. There's a lot of mental illness in my family. All the women on my mother's side suffered from anxiety and depression, nervous breakdowns of one kind or another, some more severely than others. My great-grandmother was robust and vigorous, energetic and cheerful, and so was her husband, but they also loved poetry and spirituality, they were thinkers and dreamers, one foot in the unseen world. That strand in them must have been what came out more clearly in their children, who were both gentle and retiring people — as were my mother and her sisters and brother. Capable, but quiet and and highly sensitive, with courageous but easily bruised souls. My mother was under treatment for psychiatric illness all her adult life.
In the 1920s and 30s, bad teeth were (rightly) understood to be often a source of systemic infection. Unfortunately this lead to inappropriate dentistry as an attempt to solve unrelated problems. This photo was taken the day before all my grandmother's teeth were removed in an effort to address her agoraphobia and highly sensitive tendencies.
But she battled on. Here she is with my mother as a baby.
And my mother as a child, probably in 1930, in the poultry yard of their farm.
This photo of my mother with her sister must have been taken about 1940 or 1941, I think.
Well, that was very patient of you, indulging my family reminiscences. At least I spared you photos of my grandchildren! It was thinking about vintage clothing styles on YouTube that jogged my memory.
So, leaving my house today — some Allen keys and that curly thing which I suppose must be a keyring, perhaps (?)
These hardware bits and bobs will all go into my DIY box for Freegle.
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