Another memorial candle less than 3 weeks since the one we lit one for Grandpa Charles. His wife, my Grandma Anne, lived on after him for five years. She missed him profoundly and his chair sat, empty, next to hers in their living room.

Grandma was the oldest of the five sisters and (she said) the most scholarly.

She wanted to continue her education but her parents took her into their haberdashery business where her maths and English skills helped them to run the office until she married. Anne worked all her life with her husband. They ran a small wholesaling shop (which failed) and later ran the hairdressing supplies business for a cousin for many, many years until they retired and the premises were sold.

It was a quiet life with trips to the seaside, card afternoons with their sisters and parenting their only child, my mother and then embracing being grandparents to my brother and me. In later life Grandma and Grandpa would take their car on the ferry to Belgium to visit one of the younger sisters, Minnie, who had married her Belgian husband before the War. During the Occupation – Minnie and Henri disguised themselves as peasants and lived in a rural village where a first baby was born. One day the Nazis were coming house to house. Henri hid in the woods. Minnie was afraid the baby would cry and give her away. It didn’t and they were neither found nor renounced by their neighbours. That baby did not survive but they were blessed with another child who is matriarch to a large and lovely family who all live in Israel. Minnie spent her last 10 years with all of them and died soon after receiving her telegram from the Queen on her 100th birthday. In contrast to the longevity of her sister, Grandma Anne died aged 76. I had visited her in the hospital where she was being treated for a heart attack. Just a few weeks pregnant with my son, I still regret that I did not tell her about the baby. I was superstitiously waiting until the first three months had passed.

Grandma was crippled, from an early age, with arthritis in her hips. Walking was painful but at work she could sit in the office and at home she would get as comfortable as she could in her armchair and knit and crochet, solve crossword and word puzzles and listen to Judy Garland records. She taught me to play whist and Kalooki. She took me to see Swan Lake at the Royal Opera House. She crocheted me dresses in the swinging sixties and a long “doctor who” scarf for my then boyfriend Jeremy and then a cabled cricket jumper when he became my husband. It was her opinion that mattered more to the teenaged me than that of my parents. So, when she told me that she did not like the idea of us “living together” – well, two weeks later Jeremy and I got married! It was one of the few opinions that I remember her voicing. I listened – thank you.

Grandma’s love of cards can be found in her great great grandson. Her love of words and puzzles in her great great granddaughter and her love of music in all the generations. I still miss her and cherish so many memories of her and the important role she played in my childhood, teenagehood and early married life.