Author Archives: marycane

I am happy to see this Christmas cactus flowering so well. I inherited it and knew it in my childhood in Cornwall.  For a few years it was failing on this windowsill. I had to diagnose a condition chop it up and repot it.  The cheery fairy has its legs sewn on backwards and LucyContinue reading “New Year’s Grateful Journalling”

At the last moment before Christmas out by the workshops I looked at an aluminium preserving pan here at home and thought it was time to pass it on to Lucy. Chris’s mum, her grandmother, had used it for jam making in the fifties and sixties. Frank Cane, (Pop), Lucy’s grandfather didn’t have an allotment,Continue reading “Preserving Family History”

Last week after Christmas I was walking around the graveyard in Haworth with my daughter. We stopped by the gravestone of Tabitha Ackroyd, housekeeper to the Bronte children for 30 years. She was apparently much loved by the family, a great storyteller and was the source for the narrating character of Nellie Dean in WutheringContinue reading “Putting a Cat on the Fire”

A Wreath of Christmas In the run up to this Christmas season I am in Indianapolis at a soccer tournament with three wise men in my life: husband, son, and grandson. There is snow and twinkly excitement in the air because this is a showcase event where college scouts are looking for talent. The lightsContinue reading

When the charity shops were closed an old sideboard came my way and I repainted it in the style of a mother of pearly or ivory inlay. One of the most exotic but wasteful of the world resources. Using a pearlescent paint, I worked away creating a moonlit scene from our garden. The deer, hedgehog,Continue reading “Upcycling in Lockdown”

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”