When I asked about her school life my Nanna said that she had been a ‘very good girl’ and had only ever been punished once, for hading in her homework late. She attended St Mary’s Primary School and then moved onto Noel baker Community College. Apparently she was very lucky to go to a higher education as many girls of the day did not. She said that her best friend was a girl called ‘Josie Parker’ and that they did everything together. She said that her favorite subject was ‘home economics’ which is apparently their equivalent of food and design technology. This was taught by a teacher called Mrs. Harris who by coincidence apparently lived next to my Nanna for nine years during her school years. I am generally not as ‘good’ as my Nanna at school as I regularly hand in homework late but we both she and I go/went to a nice, secondary school and liked school a lot.
I then asked my Nanna about her free-time. She said that marbles was a very popular way to pass the time and that many people played hop-scotch and skipping on the fields behind their house. Apparently her parents always made my Nanna do her homework before anything else and she had chores to do everyday before playing including, washing the clothes, collecting firewood from the garden and doing shopping with her mother on weekends. My Nanna’s favorite thing to do was to go into the local village with Josie and look for all the toys that they wanted, even though they very rarely actually got to own them. My Nanna’s favorite toy was a doll called Mary. She had long, dark hair and wore a beautiful pink dress. Apparently my Nanna used to dream she was real and would treat her as her own baby. She still has Mary next to her bed and hopes that she can pass her down in her will and she can become a family air loom. I spend most of my free-time with my friends at the park or I go shopping or to the cinema on weekends. I and my Nanna both love shopping and that is a big similarity between us.
When asked about fashion, my Nanna said that she generally wore long, pleated skirts with a buttoned, white shirt. Apparently this was ‘the fashion’ of her day and she was not the only one who dressed like this. Also, hats were ‘all the rage’ in the 1920’s and 30’s and my Nanna showed me one of her old hats that she wore. It was plain white but with a very large bow on the front. I think that all the clothes that they generally wore then were very plain and bland. Personally I would never wear any of them in public and probably never at home either. Generally I wear more ‘up to date’ clothes but I am sure that if I was a teenager in the 1930’s I would wear their fashions.
My Nanna lived through world war two. She was thirteen when war broke out and was eighteen when it all ended. When asked about this she said that her ‘roles and responsibility in the family’ were greatly increased as her mother now had to work in a shop so my Nanna helped with the housework. Her elder brother, Keith, went to train to be a fighter pilot in the war so she was left alone while her mother was at work. In this time she said that she did washing, cooking, cleaning, and much more and she insists that is why she is such a good mother, and grandmother, now. She never had a TV in the house in her childhood but regularly listened to the radio and heard about people dying everyday. It was the most ‘devastating thing’ she ever heard when news came that her brothers plane had been shot down and he was dead. Being sixteen at the time, my Nanna took it hard as Keith was her only sibling. She now had to adapt to life as an only child. Unfortunately more bad news arrived just six months later that her father, had also been killed in conflict. This left just her and her mother to rebuild family life. Apart from these devastating blows, my Nanna says that the worst part of the war was the rationing. As their was only two members of the family now at home, my Nanna’s family could only claim half the vouchers they should have got. They came in a ‘small printed booklet, with brown pages’ saying exactly how much of each thing you could have ‘down to the finest detail.’ My Nanna says her favorite wartime food was ‘vinegar cake’ which her mother would save her vouchers to make about once every two months. My Nanna ‘always looked forward to coming home and smelling that cake baking’ in the oven. I cannot really relate to this as I never lived through world war two so can only imagine how life would have been at that time. I imagine it would be very scary that you would never know what was going to happen next.
My Nanna and I don’t really have many similarities. We both love to be with friends and both like to go shopping a lot. In a way, we have both lost parents in childhood as my parents are now divorced, but my Nanna experienced this in a much more extreme case. We have a lot of differences though. Whereas she was a very ‘good girl’ at school who always got her homework in on time but I however am not so good and regularly forget my homework. One big difference is that I have not seen the devastating effects of war first hand and can only wonder what it was like to live through that terror, ‘not knowing whether your father and brother would come home’ and in my Nanna’s case, they did not.
It has been really interesting and fun doing this coursework as it has made me and my Nanna feel much closer and has improved our relationship with each other.
