More of the early days
Although I have not been formally tasked to do so, I feel obliged to try and record the history of my family on behalf of my children and future grandchildren. Who else can I ask? I was born in a very small village. A dozen or so houses. We were there because my father worked at the local railway station. My father had bought a small house from someone in the village just across from the station. My mother lived in another house just across from the station in the other direction. How far? Well as a very young child I could probably have gone to visit my grandparents on foot and come back again without anyone even noticing that I had left. At the speed of the local crawl if you will. The roads were very safe because almost no one owned a car and the trains blew their horns before coming to a crossing. Safety above all. My father and mother already knew each other because they had grown up in another small village about two hours away by car. Remember none of us owned cars at that point. My father was in the village to work and my mother was there because her father and mother had moved there after coming home from Boston. But spoiler alert they also knew each other because that’s how things work around here. My two grandfathers had gone to school together. As life went on I figured out that family connections were important. You needed to know who your cousins were because they were your first line of the sport and first line of defence in case you get into a fight on the playground. When my father came to work at the train station he knew who my mother was and he used to be invited over in the evening for a cup of tea by her parents. Life in a very small village. And so they married and all of my family came along after that. Two of us lived in that small house until we moved on to bigger and better things at a very young age. I do remember the house because it had an upstairs and I learned to crawl upstairs there. You see how it works. The village was so small then we kept our own cow in a little shed at the back to provide fresh milk. No dairies in those days. As I grew older I had the chance to visit with both sets of grandparents. In fact as the first grandchild I had that awesome responsibility of giving my grandmother her name. I do not know how it was chosen but it stuck with her until she died. Now my siblings did not all meet my grandparents. A couple were gone before my sisters were born. Another reason for me to record The why and the where. I could probably find old pictures but that would take the fun out of you imagining how a tiny village worked. Yes, we knew who the neighbours were. We had a post office but no home delivery. A lot of life dependent upon the coming and going of the train. Even if we did not travel. I could have gone to visit my other grandparents by train but I do not think that ever happened. We found other ways to fulfill our familial obligations. And when I reached adulthood I moved into the house of one of my sets of grandparents for a year and a half. I can easily describe the room where my father was born. I will if you ask me nicely. All this before we started to move to other provinces which we did about the time that I reached double digits in my age. I bloomed early as they say. Before I could even write. If my siblings ask I can tell them so many stories but I think the need for that has fallen away.
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