Times have changed.

I was looking in the bathroom mirror as I cleaned my teeth last night, and pondering on what I saw. My 88 year old face with a weeks growth of stubble on the cheeks, a sweater that probably needs a wash, making a sharp contrast to what I remembered of my paternal grand father, George Walter Andrew, when he was approximately the same , age. He came to live with us after his wife died in 1950 when he was 85 years old. Every morning he got up and got halfway dressed, before going into the bathroom to shave with his cut throat razor and lavishly brushed on shaving cream. When he had finished shaving he woluld attempt the feat of assembling his stiff collar and its studs and applying them to his shirt and round his neck, while ultimately he achieved success, it was to a running commentary of “damn the thing!” or “blast the thing!”, and he would then tie his neck tie with further exclamation. I stopped wearing a tie and shaving at the age of 60.

In his youth he was reported to be a fairly wild character, fleeing Birmingham Warwickshire for the USA when he was in his teens to avoid some form of retribution. He did return ultimately to his home city where he went to temperance meeting to harass the speaker, who subsequently trained and married him. So the dissolute son of a coachman married the school teacher daughter of a sexton, and they lived happily together for more than fifty years. It is an interesting reflection of the times that the sexton as able to give a house in Nuneaton to the bridal couple at the end of the 19th century.

My other grandfather is quite a contrast, of his origins or parentage we know nothing. He married the respectable daughter of a respectable family in about1906, and then took her away to California, where he planned to make his fortune as a builder after the earthquake. Shortly after my mother was born he went out and vanished, together with his wife’s money, and was never heard from again!