I used to sit with my Granny (b.1889) in the evenings when I stayed with her as a young thing, while she chatted about her youth. How I wish I had written it all down, as my memory has big gaps now. Born into wealth, she had a nanny and a governess - she ratted on her governess after catching her smoking, and the poor woman was dismissed! She felt such guilt later in life about this. One of the housemaids had an illegitimate, stillborn baby, though no-one knew she was pregnant, and didn't know what to do with the body, so she cut it up and left it on the roof of the house. Poor girl, so very sad. Granny played the violin, beautifully, in an orchestra - I am lucky enough to have inherited her gorgeous, 18th century instrument, and was one of the first women in the South-West to drive a car. She used to drive her father out shooting, and I still have her linen dustcoat. She then joined the Red Cross when it looked as though war was about to be declared, and served as a VAD throughout the war, with Vera Britten in Malta for three and a half years. She met my grandfather, an English-born ANZAC, wounded at Gallipoli, and they "had an understanding". He was shipped back to NZ, suffering terrible wounds, and she joined him, sailing across the world by herself, in 1921. From the luxury of her father's Devon mansion, she went to live in a two-roomed pit-sawn shack in the mountains, on a 1500 acre sheep station, 26 miles from the nearest village, and accessible only up a stream bed and a clay road, perched 100 ft above a dangerous river. She carried her babies back from the nursing home where they were born, slung across the saddle, balanced by a sack of flour. She declared that these were the happiest years of her life. Such a romantic story, and I'm writing a book about her life. A wonderful woman, whom I loved dearly.