My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story Read Online Free PDF

something out there. Something special. It wasn’t something I felt in our house, but down the street I belonged. Especially with Grandma.
    A real matriarch, Grandma was, despite her diminutive size. When she was married, very young, she had an eighteen-inch waist, but that was before she had ten babies. My grandfather was Deputy Overman at the pit and worked shifts. He was a tall man, over six foot, and stern but fair.
    Whenever the children squabbled, Grandma would say to him, ‘James, will you please speak to these bairns?’
    ‘You’re managing very well!’ he would say to her. Then he’d turn to the children and raise his index finger. Apparently there was never another sound after that.
    Grandma used to get up at three every morning and put an oil-lamp in the window to light his way home. He arrived to a cooked breakfast every day, while she boiled some hot water on the range to fill the tin bath in front of the fire. She washed the coal dust out of his hair and scrubbed his back as he rested his aching muscles. All this before the children woke.
    One morning my grandfather came home with blood running down his face. ‘I cracked my head on a beam,’ he said. He was suffering from concussion, so a couple of his workmates had brought him home. Apart from a headache, he soon felt better and went back to work as usual.
    Six weeks later, Grandma was woken early by a loud banging on the door. Her husband, who was only in his forties, had collapsed down the mine and died. He’d had a brain haemorrhage, caused by his head injury. Grandma screamed when they told her, a great piercing shriek. Devoted to her man, she never got over his death and wore mourning clothes for the rest of her days. The whole village turned out for his funeral and walked behind the hearse along the two-mile route to the church where he was buried.
    It was 1932. There was no social security then, but the colliery provided a small pension to Grandma, and free coal for life. Somehow she managed to bring up her ten children, and her orphaned little brother too, keeping them all warm and fed. She was a great one for making do. Nothing was ever wasted. Clothes were hand-me-downs, with a lot of mending and alteration.
    Once, when George needed some special shorts for a school boxing match the next day, Grandma sat up all night and hand-stitched him a brand new pair from one of her satin petticoats, bless her. She was always sewing. Old jumpers would be unpicked and the wool rewound to be used again. When the bed-sheets were threadbare from wear, she would cut them down the middle and stitch together the outside edges to make them last longer. Every old button and fastener went into the button jar for reuse. Leftover meals were fried up as pies. Old rags were made into clippy mats. Grandma threw nothing away.
    When you think about it, she had a hard life, my Grandma. They all had a hard life in those days, didn’t they? They had a lot of babies. I remember her telling me that she used to buy two stone of flour every week. Two stone! That would have taken some carrying. All that baking and cooking and doing all the laundry by hand. Every day she scrubbed the kitchen table white and blacked the grate.
    Grandma carried on her thrifty ways all her life, but she adored her family and found a way to give us treats now and then.
    Whenever I called round, if I hadn’t seen her for a few days, she’d sweep me up in her arms and hug me tight. ‘Ee, haaway hinny, it’s been a long time since I’ve seen you.’ Each of us cousins thought we were her favourite, but she was the same with everyone. She loved us dearly and spoiled us all in turn. She was the only adult who really loved me.
    I stayed with her a few times when I was little, and enjoyed those sleepovers, except that she wouldn’t let me eat the top of my boiled egg. She always took it.
    ‘Let me have that.’ She loved the top of a boiled egg.
    ‘Grandma! I wanted to eat that.’
    ‘There’s one