Categories: family
Date: 03 March 2010 12:02:31
Today, dear reader is a remarkable day in the life of one elderly lady to whom I am related. My Great-Auntie Barbara is celebrating her centenary.
But perhaps more remarkable than living 100 years, astonishing though that is even in these days of increasing longevity, is the fact that Great-Auntie Barbara has lived every one of those 100 years in the same house.
This day in 1910, Barbara was born in in the house where she then lived with her parents and brother (two other brothers did not survive their infanthood). When she married, WW2 had broken out and housing stock was being depleted by bombing in the area so she and her husband lived with her parents. Shortly after the war, her mother died and so Barbara and her husband stayed to look after her father. After his death, the little family (she had by this time had a son) had the place to themselves. The son grew up, moved away and married, and ten or so years later, her husband died, so by this time, Barbara must have felt to be rattling around the house on her own after so much liveliness. However, the house is not a large one (I sometimes wonder how at its peak the inhabitants did not trip over one another!) so I suppose she eventually got used to the extra space and continued to live there.
I once totted up how many places I had lived in over the years. My criteria were that I had to have lived there for longer than a month and I could not be classed as a visitor... it had to be the only place I could call home. At the same time, I totted up the number of people I had lived with. I cannot remember the exact results now but it was something like 45 addresses and over a hundred people.
To me, therefore, this aspect of Great-Auntie Barbara's life is all the more astonishing.