What would my great grandparents and grandparents have thought about The Gables?  Grandpa Charles was my mother’s father and his parents were born in Vilna and emigrated to London. They lived in Cable Street and cut the hair of the sailors as they disembarked from long voyages in their small barber shop in that rough and tumble neighbourhood.   Great Grandma Cohen loved the opera and in particular the Great Caruso and here she is dressed for such an outing.

Grandma Anne, my mother’s mother, had parents who were born in Poland and emigrated to London.  They worked hard selling tailors’ trimmings, opened a shop, had 13 children of which only 8 survived and prospered in a land with an alien tongue.  The epitome of hard working immigrants.

My mother’s parents had a wedding with all the trimmings.

My lovely grandparents, Anne and Charles, were not good at managing their own business and they both ended their working lives running a wholesale hairdressing suppliers for another member of their family.  What would they have thought of their granddaughter, brought up in central London in a flat, now surrounded by chickens and ducks and sheep and cows in rural Bedfordshire?  I hope that they would have been pleased. And I think of them often especially when the family get together, as today,   and I look at my grandson and granddaughter and think of what traits they have inherited from the generations who went before them.