Tomorrow my late Grandma, Janet Base, would have been 109. She was born on December 20th 1899. She died in 1991.
As time goes by I become more and more pleased that I met, and had a good relationship, with someone born in the nineteenth century. A Victorian.
Towards the end of their lives my sons, born in 1980 and 1982, will still have memories of the nine and eleven years respectively that they crossed with that woman, their great grandma. They called her Grandjan.
As time goes by we forget, or fail to notice, the pieces of social history that pass before our very eyes. The onset of blogs and social networking means that we have never had a generation so permanently chronicled. For those who have not even kept diaries, let alone updated their Facebook status, all their lives we need to remember to be their witnesses.
Learn something good from an older person today. Find someone you can ask, 'What's the earliest December 20th you can remember?
2 comments:
Hurrah!
These links are wonderful.
My father was a Victorian, born 17 December 1900, just a few weeks before the death of the Queen Empress.
My two great-aunts lived with us when I was a child, born 1874 and 1882. Both vividly remembered having to wear deepest mourning as young women for the death of the Queen.
And I remember sitting waiting for a haircut at the start of the big freeze of January 1962. An old gentleman was in the chair, recalling the hard winter of 1897, which is the winter depicted so vividly in Tom's Midnight Garden.
I used to visit an old gentleman when I lived in Southampton in the 1970s. He was a survivor of the Titanic.
Time travel is easier than one imagines!
20th December 1969 - Wedding!
39 years now..............
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