My grandmother was special in a way that most grandparents are not. Some grandparents offer you sweets every week, as you slowly trudge along to meet them with the expectation of a great sloppy kiss and the smell of urine, planted in your nostrils for seemingly an eternity. Other grandparents are less kind, offering you a visit at Christmas and treating you as if you are their most favourite grandchild, afterwards being put aside until the next gratuitous visit a year on. My grandmother was a creative lady who was for too short a period a part of my life. She filled my childhood with stories of adventure, love and loss, painting pictures of life that have stayed with me throughout these years. Such an imagination that I always aspire to, without of which I would not be in the position I am now. This sweet old lady, so dear, was a master conjurer of another world.

To say that she had simply died would not be enough, never would one word do when it could be put so eloquently. She would rather I say that she had moved to a land where the sun always shines a golden light and where the fruits of nature shall never turn rotten, where she can surround herself with all the beauty and peace that she has always craved. That was her idea of heaven, all that is beautiful in this world; the morning light, the birds sweet tune, her daughters newborn face, so tender, her husbands arms warm, welcoming and safe. I was part of her picture too. She said to me that the day I was born she had never seen such beauty and felt such calm since the day she was visited by her apparition. Of course, I always felt that the apparition was one of her tales that she often talked of. It is only now, with a son and daughter of my own, with a loving wife and a growing family, that I wish it may have been true.

It was 1917, my grandmother would have been nine years old, and the world was ravaged by a war that would change things forever. The pressure on people to survive was immense; the struggle within families was enormous, too much for some. My grandmother’s father had not been heard from for over two years whilst doing his duty on the front line as a soldier.