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The New Zealand Railways Magazine, Volume 11, Issue 11 (February 1, 1937)

Reflections On Grandmothers

Reflections On Grandmothers.

I don't know what sort of life my grandmother lived when she was a girl. She was not the sort of woman who reminisced interminably and presented me, gratis, with a freely touched-up picture of hen youth. Victorian childhoods, are known to me only by the reading of a few novels and plays, and, more, by a study of the outlook of those times and by a realisation of how ideas on social and individual behaviour must have influenced the development of youth.

I know she helped a great deal in the house. There seems never to have been a time when she was not capable of scrubbing, patching, dusting, preserving. She led then, an “active” life. In other words, she was continually bustling, except of an afternoon or evening when the mending basket was emptied and she sat, “tidied,” in her stiff corsets and best dress, hair neatly swept back from forehead and ears, and read (but not too often or with too catholic a taste) or sewed (often and beautifully). Crochet work of hers, lacy-fine, yards and yards of it, gives me a full feeling at the heart when I remember how her eyes, faded-blue, strained to read in her last days, or rested, lids lying quietly over them, while her hands, work-gnarled, clicked the bright knitting-needles forever busy for sons and grandsons.

I think she sometimes went for picnics with a merry crowd, all piling into a horse-drawn vehicle or two, more or less grand according to the occasion. The venue would be some shady spot by lake or river, where the girls would busy themselves with the setting out of a grand luncheon, baked in hot kitchens the day before by themselves, while the men boiled water for tea or swam.

After the clearing away, of lunch there would be desultory chat and a walk, in groups dwindling sometimes into pairs, along some well-marked path, or to the top of some neighbouring small hill to admire the view. The girls' hats were shady and swathed, in the “brake,” by veils which protected white skins from sun and dust.

There would be fun on this picnic, perhaps a little horse-play, but altogether it would be a very genteel affair. So were all my grandmother's outings—genteel affairs. She certainly was always busy, but she never knew the joy of perfect physical exertion, the glow that comes as one's body cleaves its way against the smack of small waves, the feeling of poise and “rightness” as, evening approaching, the tennis court takes on a glory wherein one dances, moving perfectly across and across, weaving curves of motion to and from the ball which plops and pings as one feels it always should.

Did grandmamma know these joys we know? Or did tight-lacing and an enforced frigidity rob her of physical happiness? She certainly seems to have been a strong woman, rearing her large family one-handed, while the other hand dealt with a large house, a garden and a husband who required a little managing. Perhaps she lived almost entirely outside herself—enviable perhaps when one considers the ups and downs of one's own personal existence, but somehow machinelike. She was adjusted to her immediate duties, but never to the self of which she was probably but rarely and dimly aware.

A fine woman, my grandmother. Despite my strivings I shall, at every age, feel immature in comparison with her.

page 58
Margaret Kelly and Dawn Wareing, of the Railway Settlement, New Plymouth.

Margaret Kelly and Dawn Wareing, of the Railway Settlement, New Plymouth.