Grandma P's Ramblings Through Life

I am not really intending to turn this blog into a collection of memories.
But that is where we are going today.
My intention is to use an episode of the day to focus on an idea and extend it.
Sometimes that will be memories and sometimes opinions; other times it will be a diary and it could go who knows where.

Yesterday would have been Bill's parents 70th wedding anniversary.
Sadly there is not a single picture of their wedding. Maybe it was all done in rather a rush, so as to be respectable.
So I have found a picture from their 25th anniversary party, held in The Red Cross hut in West Green Drive. This was in 1964. Maybe I took the photo.
It shows Bill's parents with their 10 children - in order of age we have Bill, Julie, Jane, Sheila, Pam, Rosalynn, Andrew, Michael, Lesley and Ian.
Today we took a few flowers to their grave.
I know it is wasteful to spend money on graveside flowers, but somehow it is important to Bill.




I have a very painful neck and shoulder and down my right arm.
I don't know where it came from.
But I will blame the ironing.
I do ironing (or Bill does it) when we get round to it. We certainly don't iron anything that we don't feel is necessary - but some things look better for being pressed.

I recall that ironing night was Monday night when I was a girl.
I can't believe that everything had been washed that day. It was all done by hand of course.
The ironing pile grew each week.

Dad must have had Monday evenings out.
Mum and I listened to Wilfred Pickles "Have a Go" on the wireless.
Dad wouldn't have been a fan of Have a Go.
This must have been one of the first shows with the participation of "ordinary" people.
I loved it. I loved to hear the tales of the people, particularly when Wilfred asked the young ones "Are you Courting?" And the answers to "Have you had any embarrassing moments?" were often slightly risque.
That was on at half past seven.
At 8 o'clock we listened to Monday Night at Home - when Radio 4 was called the Home service.
This was a magazine style programme with a miscellany of ideas and features.
I loved Ivor Cutler.
This programme was his first dabblings in the media.
He was a weird Scottish poet. I can't believe I understood his poetry.
I guess that at 9 o'clock I went to bed, leaving Mum to finish the ironing and listen to the Monday Play.

This morning I was ironing at an ironing board - standing up.
I always wanted an ironing board - like other peoples' mothers!
Mum was different.
Maybe it was just because they were so poor at that time - but she had no ironing board. She did it on the dining room table - sitting down.
I can remember the folded bundle of old blankets with a sheet on top that was used to cover the table.
I was allowed to iron handkerchiefs.
Of course there is no photo of Mum sitting at the table doing the ironing.
So I found one of the table being used at Christmas for a game of cards.


Mum would sit, for ironing, roughly where she is in this picture - under the tropical fish tank.
The tank contained guppies and sword fish mostly.
It sits on a box shelf unit that Dad made.
In the corner is a smaller shelf unit with the big old wireless on - the sort with strip showing all the places that could be reached by our radio. Hilversum..... some sort of magic word I thought!
I am sitting between my brothers, with my posh dancing shoes on my feet.
Granny and Grandad - Dad's parents are in the foreground.

So my stint of ironing today has taken me (and now you) back about 55 years.
And the flowers on the grave were to celebrate that Bill's parents were married in 1939.