A Woman of Many Talents
My Grandma died on 30th April 2021. That is the bald, undecorated fact in one sentence. She was very frail and elderly, and couldn’t keep fighting illness and dementia forever. What those sentences can’t express, however, is how much those of us she has left behind will miss her or what we have lost in losing her. I can’t speak for my whole family and all of Grandma’s friends – we all have our own memories. But I can speak about who she was to me and begin to pick out just some of the things about her that made such an impact on me. A pioneer Grandma was born in 1926, in a farmhouse without running water or electricity in the North West of England. This wasn’t that unusual at the time but it was much more unusual that she went to university in the mid-1940s to train as a doctor. Her mum had broken a few glass ceilings herself by going to agricultural college, but to train as a doctor was on another level again. Grandma didn’t finish her medical studies for various reasons bu