Olive

For years I thought her birthday was the 8th August and sent cards, presents and flowers and phoned her on the 8th every year and I never forgot because it was the same day as a good friend's birthday and my cats were born on that day and I remembered phoning her to tell her on the day.

Then, when she was 90 she told me that actually her birthday was the 10th and this year she was having her ears pierced as a present to herself because she'd always fancied it and why not?

The past being a different country, Olive has been and is still my translator. From a time when most people knew their lot in life and made the best of it and were happy with an absence of trouble, rather than aching after lives led by other people. Working 'in service', then a hat shop, visiting disfigured soldiers in hospital during the war, raising a family, holidaying at the coast, a trip abroad to Austria in the 1980s. Everything else is details. Olive feels incredibly lucky to have had such an untroubled life and to still be enjoying every day. Of course it hasn't been untroubled, but she always had a loving husband, a home and enough money to pay bills and feed her family, who stayed close to home and had families of their own.

What more could a young working class girl ask for?

Over the past 15 years, since Arthur died, she's taken up painting and won a Commended in a regional competition; worked, until the last year or two, in the local Help The Aged shop; regularly attend concerts in Manchester city centre; won a Best Garden competition (with a little help from her weekly gardener); fostered pets; knitted jumpers for Kiwi oil-slicked penguins, and been an all-round wonderful Grandmother to me.

Next week I'm going to visit for a couple of days. Yeh! Just the two of us for two whole days and nights. I'm going to ask her everything in case it's the last time I ever see her. Although it'll be just as nice to just be together, she's that sort of person.

PS: The first time I ever Googled for people, my grandmother was the only member of my family with a virtual presence, she was listed as an official knitter for Trafford Borough Council.

Arthur

In the 1930s my grandfather played piano for passage to America. Six weeks by ship and a long, winding motorbike road trip later, he found himself living with the Coca Cola family in Atlanta. I don't know how. His history was a bit mysterious. Somthing to do with the Earl of Stafford. Something to do with a grocery shop. Something to do with nothing really factually substantial.

There are some wonderful photos of him sitting out in the gardens of the house surrounded by Southern beauties in white cotton lacy summer dresses, picnicing and laughing and looking to all the world as though he'd been born to the life.

But, after just a few years he came home. Then, things I do know - Rented a council house in Manchester, took a quiet job in accounts for a small local business, played piano in Clubs (and for Ken Dodd, no less), took the Morning Star and drove a functional Trabant-looking half van half car for the rest of his life. He was lovely. Modest, unassuming, gentle.

I wish he was here now, he died about 15 years ago. I miss him because now I'm old and unselfish enough to want to know him for the person he was. Not just the grandfather who'd slip me a few quid with every goodbye kiss or who was there to be proud of me or to maintain a full complement of family for me.

He was asked to stay with the family and join the business, but came back because he couldn't live with the social and racial inequities he saw. He could have looked the other way, could have lived the American Dream, and then some. I want to know what made him turn his back on personal gain and become such a satisfied, content person. What are all the things I didn't know about him, who was he? On the other hand, why didn't he do more to improve the world if he felt so strongly that it was full of wrongs? Not that he had a duty to do so, but why didn't he?

I haven't got a photo with me at this house, although there's one in particular I'd love to post. When I find it I'll stick it up. He's standing in the Cheddar Gorge in front of his big black motorcycle wearing an ankle length black leather riding coat. Hands on hips, shoulders back, in his little round tortoise-shell glasses and hair slick-combed back, looking every inch the 1930s intellectual superhero. Who took that photo?