My grandmother was a BATTLEAXE! We called her Old Ironsides. We did not like her! She was six feet and as cold as a witch’s tit!As hard as my mother had it , she never once looked for help from her mother, not even to babysit on occasion. The woman was a brute.
Our pappa on the other hand was as gentle as all get out. He could neither read or write (not even his own name) but he played the fiddle. Hum a song and Pappa could play it. He worked inthe pit (read coale mines ) for sixty years. It was the time of the company stores . Men came out of those mines ,after working a sixty hour week and end up with a quarter because they dealt with the Company Store! Granny was way too smart for that and in the dirty thirties, they had food and money to buy necessities. They grew their own and charged nothing. The nine kids in the family worked like dogs to maintain that.
Pappa couldn’t read or write, and that was the way Granny wanted it. The kids wanted to teach him how to write his name, but granny put a stop to it!
He got the change out of his Pay packet, with which he bought peppermints, which he gave to the kids. Not only his, but all the kids in the neighbourhood. he was a sweet old man. he bought a pint of rum once and drank half of it, because all the guys in the pit talked about the wonderful time they had getting drunk on the weekend.He got soooo sick that the next morning he was seen throwing the other half of the pint against the barn door. The bottle wouldn’t break and eventually ,he gave up.
I remember him streeling molasses over crackers for me and my sister on the kitchen table. That was our treat! i hated molasses but i’d have eaten shit on a shingle if it came from Pappa’s hands! My mother loved him dearly as did we! She knew his short comings and she didn’t care.
Granny was another story.She was scary. Mamma used to make us go visit her. All i remember was how fast the trees went by as we took the taxi to her house.I remember being in her house with four foot coleous in the windows and being told to be quiet. Pappa was dying at the time of throat cancer. He’d never smoked a day in his life and had only ever had that one drink. When he died every one of his children came home to his funeral. He was sixty -nine years old and worked in the pit since he was nine, to support his mother’s family.
Granny ,on the other hand ,died fifteen years later. Mamma had to beg her brothers and sisters to come home for the funeral. Only half came! Charity was not a word in Granny’s vocabulary. She was in charge of giving out “Relief” in that small community. We’d call that welfare today.God bless those poor people who went before her to get that help!I hope God forgives her because I know the devil had a pitchfork up her arse. She was one tough broad!
But as Mamma always said,”You can pick your friends , but you can’t pick your relatives!” I am really glad that my mamma was more like her father, else we wouldn’t have survived!
Thanks again , Mamma!
