Hello World

My Grandma Sybil was a Communist. I'm not - I'm mostly just mildly baffled in a left-of-centre way - but anyway, in 1993 she wrote down her memories from childhood to her husband's death in 1961. Since I was two in 1993, I didn't realise they existed until I found them in a box of Grandma's things in my Dad's study a few months after he died, and decided to type them up. Grandma was involved in politics from the age of sixteen, lived through wartime London, and knew how to tell a story, so they make quite interesting reading; this blog is mostly for the purposes of posting them, though other aspects of my life might creep in from time to time. 

The name of the blog comes from the memoirs themselves, which she gave occasional subtitles to. (I like "How Socialist Sybil Began" because it sounds sort of like a left-wing Just-So Story.) This is what they look like:

and there are about 18,000 words in total. I might not always post in order, but let's begin at the beginning:

Funerals Were Ignored

We did not even notice the number of hearses that passed our door, there were far too many. And this was because at the bottom of Sebert Road, Forest Gate, E7 (I lived at No. 30) was the largest cemetery in possibly all London, certainly in East London. Most – probably 90% – were horse-drawn hearses. Cars for everyday use were commonplace, albeit only a small minority of the population owned a private one. The magnificent black funeral horses were a breed apart: head-tossing, foam-flecked, very superior animals. Just occasionally, there was a funeral which captured our attention, belonging to a local big-wig (the term VIP was not yet current) or to one of the “monied” classes, and this meant four horses instead of two, large black plumes on their heads and black velvet horse blankets on their backs, with a surplus of top-hatted “ushers” in a attendance. Once, just once, came a military cortege, with a band playing a funeral march and a mounted gun pulled by horses. Without exception, all the men who happened to be walking along the road or were nearby when the funeral passed, took off or doffed their hats in respect, even the tradesmen.

I lived in the Sebert Road house for about eight years, from the age of three until twelve (1920 to 1928) and when we moved to Claremont Road to a posher establishment it was still in Forest Gate, where I had lived all my life. I was born in Forest Lane – a road opposite the railway station – and continued to live somewhere in Forest Gate until Hitler put paid to our settled existence by dropping a landmine on us in 1941.