At my Grandmother’s funeral over two years ago, my father paid her this tribute: She was a great lady.  It was a very fitting description of her, although I had never really appreciated just how great, or how much of a lady she was when I was a child.  It was only as I grew to adulthood myself that I began to understand the full richness of a life nearly a century long.

When I was born, my Grandmother was already 60 – in my eyes, an old, old person.  She lived, it seemed to me, on the other side of the world and represented a lifestyle that seemed alien and magical from my childish viewpoint.  In those days, the trip from our home near Manchester to hers near London was not undertaken lightly, and so it was only when she moved north to live with us that she stopped being a fairy story fantasy and became a real-life person to me.

She brought her antique furniture with her – brocade-covered armchairs; a heavy oak table with scroll-carved legs; a hand-crafted bookcase filled with beautiful leather-bound classics; a kidney-shaped dressing table with three jointed mirrors and embroidered fabric draped under a glass cover.  I was fascinated with it all.  The rooms she inhabited in our home became a microcosm of a different age, and I felt transformed even as I stepped through her door.

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Once a month, she would invite me to her part of the house for afternoon tea.  We ate delicate sandwiches with the crusts cut off, little marzipan sweets she created herself and scones liberally spread with jam and clotted cream.  The milky tea was poured into delicate, floral china teacups from a silver service.  The sugar was served with intricately carved tongs from a silver dish.  Cleaning her silver tea set became my special job.

And so we would share our special times.  She would ask me about my childish intrigues and then share her lifetime of memories with me.  It was during these times that I learned that this aristocratic, rather stern elderly lady had lived a life of more variety than anyone else I have ever known.