These people are very special ‘Mums’ – the one on the right is my Mum and the one on the left is her Mum!

We’ve had a ‘visitation’ from the family tonight – my parents, grandmother and my sister’s little boys have all been over for a cup of tea and a chat. My Nan is staying with my folks but goes home tomorrow and I’ve been so busy this is the first opportunity I’ve had to see her during her stay.

Nan is eighty six and was born in 1918, at the end of the first World War. My Mum was born in 1941, during the second World War. My Nan despises violence and wants the troops out of Iraq. She says she’s seen enough bloodshed in her lifetime without this at her time of life.

She is a woman with a past alright. I have nothing but admiration for her. She had five children (my Mum is number two) and was the wife of a coalminer (which I’ve said before). Her husband (my grandfather) was trapped and injured in a mining accident. He was underground for some time, buried in a rock fall. His injuries caused a brain tumour and he spent four and a half years in a wheelchair, unable to work, dying at the tender age of thirty four, leaving my Nan to bring up five children alone.

Nan is a fighter and she wasn’t going to let that little(!) hindrance get in her way and she raised the children alone, living in a miner’s cottage in Aylesham in Kent. She’s as stubborn as a mule (that’s where Jan and I get it from!) and would never have let a little difficulty like no breadwinner in the home cause her family to starve. Nan did the same work as my Mum did as a young woman when she was raising us – she picked fruit and hops in the fields of Kent. Backbreaking work with no shelter and no excuses for ‘slacking’ – it was all ‘piecework’ so if she had nothing to give in to the counters, she got no pay – simple.

Life was hard, the family had little or no money and precious little space or privacy. Eventually, my Mum left home at the age of seventeen to marry my Dad and went to live in Cyprus (where I was conceived and born). The family are close but of course have the occasional spat as all families do. I have dozens of cousins.

Nan smoked sixty cigarettes a day until she was well into her seventies then she gave up…….just like that! Cold Turkey! She’s a determined woman alright.

These days she needs a stick to get around and is a bit slow to move but she’s ‘all there’ as folks might say and is the Yahtzee queen of the world, thrashing my parents hollow every time she’s staying with them. Nan lives with my Mum’s youngest sibling (uncle David) in Northamptonshire these days and she visits my parents three or four times each year.

It’s been a strange old evening – I have told of my ‘difficulties’ with children and tonight I had a hug off this tiny boy that was all at once terrifying, wonderful and sadness invoking. My family are very special to me and the youngsters are its future. My Nan is its heritage. I think myself lucky to have such a past and such a future.