Author Archives: marycane

My grandmother’s great grandmother, Mary Treeby, signed her name with an ‘x’ on her wedding certificate in 1794. Her name is from Old English meaning a curve in the river, dating from a time when people had toponymic names. She was marrying Joseph Daw a shipwright working in Devonport dockyard. I see from the records theyContinue reading “It started with an ‘X’: How my family came to read and write.”

An American couple having enjoyed a Kit Hill moorland walk one sunny morning in the 1960s came down the footpath and into our farmyard where Dad was carrying on the business of the day and said, ‘You might want to know there’s a fawn in the gorse bushes over there?’ Dad realising they had mistakenContinue reading “‘Here was I living in Paradise and I didn’t know it’.”

I was around twelve years old and out in our cornish fields on my pony Sally. (Dad used to call her ‘Old Sallach’). I saw a sparrowhawk fluttering in the grass. I slithered down, gathered it up, and gently cradled it in my coat. I expect its wing was broken. Making my way back toContinue reading “Even close family can be surprising”

From personal experience and my interviews with grandmothers, some things in families can be hiding in plain sight. Here is the familiar visage of the Sutton Hoo helmet. It has recently been in the news because of the film ‘The Dig’.  It was only pieced together after the war and the reconstructed regal anglo-saxon helmetContinue reading “Hiding in Plain Sight”

Starch:  Most of us have not given a thought to the process of starching laundry or even using spray starch during this year of lockdown. I suggest starch has been given short shrift. No one has bothered with a shirt let alone a starched shirt.  Before wheat or potato starch, we apparently used the root ofContinue reading “Starchy Grandma”

Looking back it, that cherry stone game wasn’t much, but it pleased my grandmother.   Her hands in old age were swollen but she was quick enough to find the brown velvet bag in the cupboard by the fireplace.  We would sit facing one another, she in her rocking chair and I on a low stool, holdingContinue reading “Mantlepiece Tales”

When I approach family history writing, like many people I am phased by the enormity of the task, and the question of what will treasured after I am gone.  Developing the strategy of thinking about a little moment has been useful. It usually leads to something else, which fleshes out the tiny memory and sets itContinue reading “Grandma likes Saffron Cake”

We are all familiar with shortbread… it is eaten all over the world. It’s a simple good-natured foodstuff. Made from butter, sugar and flour it doesn’t even mind how it is mixed. The butter and flour can be delicately rubbed together with fingers before the sugar is added, it can be rudely food processed orContinue reading “SCOTTISH SHORTBREAD”

David Brooks in his essay ‘The Odyssey Years’ describes the usual four familiar life stages: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. To this he says two have been added in the last generation. I suggest that both have resonances and relevance for us the grandmother.  One is the active old age from which we areContinue reading “The Odyssey Years and an Active Old Age”

I’m looking at a brown envelope addressed to me from my mother in Cornwall. I don’t know how many hundreds of times I have seen my address written in that hand.  She has always kept up with her correspondence, dating back to strict Edwardian parents.  For more than fifty years, she has sent me letters,Continue reading “Manilla”