My grandmother

I've been thinking about my grandmother, Dorothy Wight, a lot recently. She died a couple of years ago, and I miss her very much. She was really fucking cool.

She was seriously English working class. She grew up in the Potteries in the north of England. Her father marched in the miners' strike during the first world war. What was very nice at her funeral was that a whole lot of the workers from the rest home came along, which I believe is unusual. Apparently, she was on their side right till the end, urging them to organise and not take any shit. They liked that.

I remember her talking about growing up just after the first world war, and living in these terrace houses with an alleyway out the back, and how all these working class veterans who were mutilated by the war and didn't have any support from the government would come knocking on the back doors wanting to do some odd jobs so they could eat. The fucking establishment sent them off to war and left them to fend for themselves from scraps from the other people who had nothing. Good eh?

Not so long ago, I made some offhand remark about the 'hoi polloi' and Nana smacked me on the back of the head. Quite fucking right.

Nana had a scholarship to go to secondary school but couldn't afford it. Her daughter, my mother, had to get bonded to the libraries to afford university. I fucked around and dropped out of varsity my first time around. That's how the years turn.