Let's talk about our grannies

[Firstbornunicorn]

I've just written a lengthy spiel on another thread about my granny.

She died a couple of years ago. I was her oldest grandchild, and we had a very special relationship.

She was clever, mischievous and funny. She never let the truth get in the way of a good story. She spoke her mind, told bad jokes, loved kids, animals, and nature.

She was never really short-tempered, but was as stubborn as a mule. She claimed not to like cats, but then totally fawned over mine. When I was a teenager, she'd ask me to help carry the tea tray on a Sunday, and use it as an excuse to slip a tenner into my pocket.

She always had Ribena and crisps in the house. She read the Mirror and believed every word of it. She was devoutly Catholic, but sometimes a but woo as well.

What was/is your granny like?

Sadly I never met either of mine. Place marking to understand it better for my DD's sake.

My gran was amazing. She was tiny but had a very old fashioned heavy mixing bowl and I remember her with it under her arm beating the life out of sponge mixture. She made the best Victoria sponges!

We always had nimble bread and home made jam at her house. She also had a ginger cat and a high bed with an eiderdown on that we used to jump on. I used to love her brushing my hair sitting in front of the fire. She also wore a cross over floral pinny. My gran died in 1991, she was 102 and was as sharp as a tack until the day she died.

My paternal Nanna is so lovely, although i think she has some form of memory loss, she has always repeated stories multiple times but has been repeating them within an hour recently😭

I get on woth her the most i guess, she was a wonderful knitter and i crochet and she compliments my work so much 😶

My maternal Nanny is so lovely too, a bit shorter than me and cuddly. We used to holiday by the beach together- my parents, siblings and grandparents until it got too much.

Whenever we used to go to their bungalow when we were little and still now they always have sports on and talk through my mums latest game of golf. I hate sport (terribly uncordinated) but love listening to them

They both have a certain lovely smell, can still smell them an hour after they leave💖like soap, flowers and warmth

Gah! I did do paragraphs😥

My paternal grandmother was great. She died about 14 years ago.

She baked like an ANGEL. She also smoked, drank, taught my brother and I to play cards at a very young age, and made the world's best coffee.

She always preferred my older brother to me - don't grandparents always like the oldest grandchild the best? - but I really rated her. She knitted me an amazing brown/camel dress when I was about 7, and I remember sitting on a swing wearing it, feeling like a model. 😆

My maternal grandmother was much more distant. But she used to let us come into her bed in the morning when we stayed there, and she'd tell us these amazing poems and stories. One was called "Papa's Letter", about a child who sticks a stamp to its forehead and asks the postman to deliver him to Heaven, where his father is. 😞 Harrowing.

She was a red head. A fiery one. Who hit her step father over the head with a frying pan when he hit my great grandmother.

She was the centre of the family, the centre of any trouble, funny, loud, distracted, impulsive and couldn't sit still if her life depended on it.

Everybody said I was her mini-me.

When I was diagnosed two years ago with ADHD and they asked if anybody in the family also had it, I had a lightbulb moment. I knew why we were so similar.

She got dementia relatively young. She faded away and was gone forever two years before she died.

At her funeral we found out she had been four months preganant with her first child when she got married at 17. The assorted aunties and uncles had a mass coughing fit. Grandad chortled. Then started crying again.

On the way home my siblings and I were listening to the radio, I'm A Believer came on, we started singing our heads off. It was a perfect moment because individually and without a word we celebrated how it epitomised what Grandad felt about her from the first moment she entered his orbit. He loved her truly, madly, deeply for his whole life.

Then we cried.

Which was worrying because my brother was crying too, behind the wheel, as we hurtled along a motorway.

The song is on my personal playlist. I belt it out when it rolls around. And tear up. I miss her. If I make half the impact she made on so many lives I'll join her in the Great Unknown satisfied. We were both factory seconds, what with the wonky neurology. But you can do a lot more than even the most "normal" person on the planet, even if you are a second.

She taught me that. Just by being.

Which is why I haven't been ashamed of my diagnosis.

I won't achieve her example, but wanting to try raises my personal standard for myself by a good few notches. The legacy she left me could never be measured in £ signs. It's beyond price. Many years after she died, when I was at one of my lowest ever ebbs, something connected us tightly again. Everything she was has been the wave I've been riding on for the last two years as I have put myself back together and felt whole and of value again.

Well fuck. Leaky face. Whose bright idea was this?

Lovely reading these. My gran died a year ago and still can’t quite believe it. Miss her so much. The impact of her death has been huge and honestly, life will never be the same without her.

My dgm worked in a toy shop!! I was the only dgc and she bought me toys in abundance! She also made jam tarts! Best Sunday dinners, let me make dens in her cupboards, shared her bed when I stayed - every week end - as I used to have bad dreams. When I had dc she adored them. She never judged when I had a dc very young, was proud she was a dggm when her friends were just becoming dgm's!
I was devastated when she died when I was 27 - sad sad time.

My maternal grandmother died in 1962, and I barely remember her. My paternal grandmother died in 1970 at the age of 97. She used to read to us and buy us Tootie Frooties. I still love them now.

@CesiraAndEnrico I'm not crying, it's just raining... On my face 😭😭😭😭😭

@CesiraAndEnrico although I do also have suspected ADHD so maybe that's why your post hit me doubly hard

I never knew either of mine. Both died several years before I was born, as did both my Grandpa's.

I feel I have truly missed out in life not having grandparents. Apart from my brothers I don't know anyone else who never had any.

My paternal Granny was daft as a brush. She was kind and generous and just loved having kids round about her. The problem was stuff like going to school got in the way of that so if we ever stayed over on a school night I had to fight to be allowed to go to school.

I remember her being a dreadful, hopeless cook. And I remember her sighing deeply one day and declaring that she could “just do with a good tumble in bed”

@LeonoraFlorence bless you. I'm sure she was a wonderful lady. Big hugs.

My granny is 92. She is completely awesome and formidable. Totally bulletproof. I love her so much.

Cesira, beautifully written.
lovely thread

This is a lovely thread! It’s great to read about the special relationships you’ve all had with grandparents. All too often on mn we read threads where mums want to limit (or completely cut) contact between their kids and the grandparents. Usually because they don’t get on with the Mil. But for kids I think it’s so important to know their extended family, and they should be allowed to develop a good relationship with their grandparents.

And I say that as someone who doesn’t really like my Mil!

although I do also have suspected ADHD so maybe that's why your post hit me doubly hard

She's proof it's not all over and we're not doomed because we got some letters attached to us. 😘😘

She wore a thick, knitted, cream bobble hat that made her look like an ice cream cone. She used to set fire to the tea towels she pinned to her waist when she cooked sunday dinner and then hide them and flatly deny it when they were found with holes seared through them.

I stayed at her flat every weekend from the age of three through to fifteen and let me share her bed, and when I ‘ran away’ I only got as far as her.

I’m always telling my children about her- she would have adored And spoilt then both rotten.

My mum has been talking about missing the fruit mince slice she always made at Christmas. I found her recipe book, so this year I’m going to attempt to make it for the first time since she died 11 years ago.

I miss her terribly.

I lost my maternal Nanny in February to dementia. She was a wonderful lady, with a wicked sense of humour, very intelligent, and I have lots of lovely memories of trawling charity shops for hidden gems with her. She was one in a million and I'll always miss her and her cheeky smile.

My paternal Nanny is currently very poorly with bowel cancer and living in a care home quite a long way away from where I now live. She is a tough old fashioned Londoner, with the blitz spirit in bag loads. She has been through a tonne of crap in her life, but is the strongest most amazing woman I have ever known. I love her to bits.

My nana was amazing, the absolute matriarch of the family.

I stayed at her house every Friday night from when I was about 7 and watched Rosanna and the golden girls while drinking Horlicks and eating chocolate.

On a Saturday morning we'd go to presto for the shopping, apart from the bread which had to be from co-op for some reason! We would bake every Saturday afternoon for the family tea on Sunday, loads of cakes and pies and sausage rolls.

You couldn't get out of her house without eating half a dozen biscuits, a sandwich and your body weight in tea. All while she told you how you did not suit your hair or had put on weight.

She and my grandad were devoted to each other, even though she referred to him as that bloody man for as long as I could remember.

Every Christmas and New year she'd let us have a very small brandy and lemonade then make us very small snowballs (advakar and lemonade) the would pretend she didn't know my grandad was replacing them with advakar and babysham.

She died 5 years ago and I miss her desperately.

I can only remember my paternal GM. It's a long story but we came from a circus family.when they sold up and retired She kept Sultan the lion in a tiny terraced house. Like a big cat. She loved him and he loved her. I can remember him laid in front of the range on his rag rug and stroking him. He was entirely tame. The animals were bought from zoos. They would have been destroyed otherwise.

I can remember the last days of the circus. Sultan was brought into the big top in a cage and my uncle was the ringmaster. He cracked his whip and Sultan would raise a paw . Just up and down.
We can say things with hindsight but he had a better life than being hunted. He wasn't in the zoo that didn't care for him. And he started an urban myth that wasn't.
Sultan was taken for walks all around our town in the night. It was a real lion ! We got his food from the meat market. But he would have lived on caramacs if he could.
I loved him very much.

My grandma has been dead for many years. Despite falling out temporarily with my mum when she became pregnant (not married), once I was born I became the apple of her eye. My mum attributes my being able to read before I went to school to my grandma who used to read to me for hours on end.

When my brother and I stayed at her house overnight (yes to the high bed with an eiderdown on, and a chamber pot underneath because they had an outside toilet!) she used to take us to bingo and say “don’t tell your mum”.

My granny was crazy. She was my dads mum. She said things you weren't meant to say, drank a sherry every Sunday despite having had half her stomach removed and died a death each Monday as a result. She died when I was five but I remember her and that about her.

My nana was the greatest person ever. She's dead nearly twenty years now and I still miss her terribly. She would have loved my girls and would have spoilt them rotten.

Oh sultan! I hope he and your grandma have an abundance of caramacs wherever they are now 💙💙