9

The number 9 features quite a lot on my maternal side and in particular to my maternal grandmother of whom I have many memories.  I have spoken about her before in blog posts.  Spot the 9's.

She was born in the 1890's and married in 1920, just two years before she moved into the new house, in 1922, where I visted her as a young child.    She had a very comfy figure; there was no way that I could put my arms around her but she remained agile enough to clamber on a chair at the big kitchen table so that she could plug her iron into the light fitting above the hanging ceiling light.  The kitchen table was also her ironing board and the centre of family life in the house.  

Family and people from the village used the kitchen door as the front door by walking round the house to the back paved are where the kitchen was on one side and the front parlour on the other.  The other two sides were the vegeatbale garden and access into a big back area of the garage where grandad had a bench and tools for mending shoes and all sorts of hand and garden tools. That paved area was a safe  playground to me and my sister and our cousins; well away from the road out the front.  We used to play ball games, skipping, hop scotch and ninesies.... Do you remember the game ninesies?

Dad would drive us for about 2 hours to get to the village where she and other members of the family lived.  We did this several times a year from Hertfordshire to Sussex.  As I grew older she seemed shorter, not surprisingly.  She never seemed less comfy though, no matter how old she was.

She stayed living in that house until the early 1970's when she could no longer manage the house and garden.  She moved to a lovely little bungalow up the road and that was closer to my aunt who used to visit everyday as she helped care for her. My husband and I visited with our family but it was a long way from Gloucestershire to Sussex for young children.  When Nan was in her mid 90's she moved into a care home down in the valley the other side of the railway line.  It was in a rural area on the outskirts of the village and there were many of her friends from the village living there too.  We visited her there and a couple of times my children took their violins and played to her which she enjoyed.  

When she was 99 she had an unfortunate tumble and she then looked much more frail and never recovered from that.  She sat in her chair with a sipping cup in front of her but drank very little.  She told us we were selfish as we all wanted her to be a hundred but she didn't want to as all her friends of her age in the home had died.  We had been so looking forward to celebrating her one hundreth birth that we hadn't stopped to think that she might not want to.  She was right, how selfish we were.

She died aged 99, just 8 months before her one hundredth birthday.