One hundred and
twenty-five years ago today, in the Lancashire cotton town of Darwen, a little
girl was born and given the unusual and pretty name of Rosetta. She was the
first child of Swain Fish and his wife Hannah and by the time her sister Mary
was born, there would be six brothers and twenty years between the two sisters.
On Rosetta’s
birth certificate her father is described as a journeyman brickmaker and over
the years the family moved many times from rented house to rented house, as
first her father, and then her brothers, looked for work in various brickworks.
 |
| Three of the Fish brothers at the brickworks |
One of these
moves took the family across the Pennines from Lancashire to Yorkshire, where
the teenaged Rosetta met a handsome young man, a year older than her, called
Tom Sutcliffe. A friendship sprang up between them, which gradually deepened
into courtship – an unusual courtship, conducted largely by postcard, after
work took Rosetta’s family back to Darwen.
Like many of the
working-class girls and women in Lancashire, Rosetta worked in the cotton
industry. In her spare time she loved to play the violin and nearly 50 years
later I began to learn on this same violin, which one of my sisters still has
today.
After their years
of long-distance courtship, Rosetta and Tom were finally married in 1915 and
their daughter Annie, my mother, was born the following year.
 |
| Rosetta and Annie |
Tom was
serving in the Army in France and Belgium and continued to keep in touch with
his wife by postcard, some severely functional and others extraordinarily pretty.
Five years later,
in 1921, their second child, Jack, was born and sadly died soon after birth.
This tragic loss precipitated a breakdown in Rosetta’s health severe enough to
require hospitalisation.
Annie’s childhood was overshadowed by her mother’s
continuing ill-health, as can be seen from the high number of absences noted on
her school report not long before she left school.
Indeed my many
memories of my beloved grandmother, the only one I ever knew, are of a woman
whose health was never robust and I think this shows in the photos of her.
 |
| My grandparents, my big sister and me |
Despite her fragile
health Rosetta was devoted to her family and my sisters and I had many happy
seaside holidays with Grandma and Granddad. Other memories are of Grandma
teaching me to knit and to play cards (she was a demon at rummy!) and of her
delicious baking, especially her incomparable parkin.
 |
| Oh, we did like to be beside the seaside... |
Living next-door
as they did for most of my childhood, she and Granddad were an essential part
of life for me, always there, ready to listen, when I came home from school
with things to share. I also used to love to listen to her in turn, especially
when she talked to her siblings and cousins, because then she would lapse into broad Lancashire dialect, which I sometimes struggled to follow.
Early in 1960
Grandma began to show signs of her final illness and she died at home, nursed
devotedly by her husband and daughter, in December that year. I
was fourteen when she died and part of my childhood died with her, but
thankfully my memories of her are still strong and vivid.
 |
| The last photo of Grandma |
One of the most
cherished of these dates from her last birthday. I sat beside her on the bed to which
she was already increasingly confined and asked her what it felt like to be 70.
She turned to me and smiled and told me she didn’t feel 70, because somehow,
when we reach adulthood, we age faster on the outside than on the inside. She
thought she’d stopped ageing on the inside a long time ago. As a still-new
teenager, for whom every birthday was hugely significant, this made no sense to me and I said so. “It will one day,” she replied. “Just wait and see.”
Fifty-four years
after her death and a little over a year short of my own 70th birthday, I now
know just what she meant. Wise words, Grandma, wise words…
 |
| Grandma and Granddad as I love to remember them |
.jpg)
