26 April

Had a shouty phone conversation with my Grandmother yesterday. Not shouty in an aggressive sense, I hasten to add, but because she’s a little hard of hearing, which is only to be expected, I guess, at the age of 94. Still full of vigour, her days still filled with living, she is missing having her family around her.

To me, her life has been a series of triumphs; hugely bright, but limited by being born into a large family of few means in the North-East, she has lived a full and enterprising life. She set up her own dressmaking business while raising a family, taught herself to both swim and drive in her fifties, travelled alone to Australia in her sixties. I worry that sometimes, in what must be the last slow years of her life, a life now constricted and narrowed by age, that she may see her life as series of losses – she has after all outlived three husbands, three younger siblings, and one son. Such an influential and dominant figure in my life, in recent years I think she has secretly dwelt with the long departed, despite her mental acuity. Her memories quite naturally grope back towards those people in their sepia tints and strange hats, posing unsmilingly for the camera. Those people who flitted vaguely in and out of my childhood, shadowy forms called Bobby and Billy and Jackie, Doris and Evie and Elsie, are more real to her now perhaps than me. How ironic it is, that we have such little interest in family history when we’re growing up; I could never think what to say to these people at the edge of my family circle when I was growing up, teenage awkwardness and constraint robbing me of my voice – now I yearn for the chance to sit them down and chat.

My parents and I tend to laugh when she says she’s lonely – it’s a family joke that she still has a better social life than any of us, a constant stream of people in and out of the house where she still lives independently – but of course she is. Our extended family has been fractured, like so many families, by distance and opportunity. I read some chatroom comments recently (you know where) about second homes, and, without wishing to relive the whole debate, there was one comment which really stood out for me. You have no birthright to live in the place you were brought up, said this commentator (a second home owner, natch), you have to earn the right to live there. I instinctively disagreed with that, as soon as I read it. No, perhaps you don’t have a right over and above anyone else; but you should at least expect a level playing field, the opportunity to stay put, if you so wish. Family disintegration doesn’t do society much good. My own family is no different to millions of others, our history a tale of small-scale emigration and disruption. My parents left the north-east for the south-east and better opportunities, which they found. Much further back, my ancestors came over from Ireland to Newcastle as a result of the potato famine. R and I, whilst suffering no deprivation and thinking that we had the world at our feet, were still priced out of the south-east where we’d grown up (admittedly, we moved for other reasons too, but who knows, if the large family house in Hampstead had been affordable ….!). No doubt my children will have to leave Suffolk, if house prices – from which we’ve benefited, perhaps to the detriment of some local family - continue to rise. Always moving on, in search of the promised land; sometimes we find it, sometimes we don’t. But how we still mourn for our roots, for that sense of belonging, for our history, for our local land. My grandmother is proud of all her family, those still close to home and those scattered across the globe. But I bet there are days when she wishes we were all living 100 years ago, all in the same street.

I just had a thought; my Grandad wore a flat cap and had a funny accent. How marvellous – I could dash off an amusing little piece about a quaint country character like him; I’m sure he even knew what to do about moles. I might even win something! (Sorry, couldn’t resist).