Memories of Grandma

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