A Real Life Feminist Hero.

I don't have five children or a dead bigamist husband. I have never experienced my deceased husband's other family, bereft and betrayed and fuelled by scorn, coming into my home to claim it as theirs. Never have I had to fight for survival in a world of severe patriarchal and pious judgement where social security was a ration book and feminism a blasphemous enterprise.

But you did Great Grandma. Like Boudica in a storm.

The forceful eviction and the hateful dispossession of everything you owned by this other family was really the least of everything. You became, overnight, a social pariah. Your scandal carried a stink which threatened to infect and undermine the delicate security of those around you. Your friends, even your family, turned against you. From respectable, virtuous, housewife to unmarried mother of five. You were conned, then condemned, and your children considered bastards.

But none of this... NONE OF THIS... would define you.

You would have been forgiven for crumbling. The headwinds of some of life's most destructive forces had tried to batter you into submission. Death, betrayal, judgement, condemnation, and then poverty. Each of them had taken a turn, sometimes teaming up, to make you their victim. But they lost. In truth, they never even touched the sides.

For you, Great Grandma, there were more important things.

Your circumstances were merely the chronology of your story. Events that had happened. Unfortunate? Sure. Difficult? Absolutely. But did they really matter? To you, no. What mattered was not what others had done to you. What mattered was not what others thought of you. What mattered was not where you were. What mattered was who you were, who you were with, why you were with them and how you made each other feel.

Regrets were for those with too much time on their hands.

In a two up, two down, back-to-back terrace in the roughest outskirts of Manchester, all six of you made a new home. With no extended family to call on to help, it was just you and your brood carving your way through the world. You worked three jobs to make ends meet. Everyone got fed. Everyone was clothed. Everyone went to school. Just as they should. You may have fallen from grace, but you still had standards.

Life, though, was not just about standards.

Life was for living, not just existing. However hard you had to work to make ends meet you were never going to sacrifice the passion in your soul and the laughter in your heart to the daily grind. Free from the expectations of marriage and social standing you set about really living. You had always wanted to be an entertainer. You were sharp, witty, and you could carry a hell of a tune. You filled your home with song, getting a piano from who knows where. Then, piano in situ, you taught your family a full music hall repertoire, writing your own lyrics when you knew you could do it better. When word started to spread about how much fun it was round at yours, you started entertaining the neighbours too. It wasn't long before the local pubs and clubs heard how good you were and enlisted you to play for them. You were in your element. You had found your calling by doing what made you and your family happy.

Great Grandma you chose to sing and dance where others would have licked their wounds and wept.

There are so many stories about you Great Grandma and hardly any of them reference your betrayal or your destitution. I can only apologise for doing so here but sometimes how a person got to be needs to be called out as much as what they did when they got there. Truthfully, each of your stories are as important as the next. All of them interconnected like the weave of a tapestry building a picture of who you were and how you lived. From the little tales about the dodgy limericks that you would knock out to tease people, to shock, to make them laugh. Or, your unique and proudly demonstrated knowledge of all the bars in Manchester (and back then there were a hell of a lot). To how you would surprise people in pub quizzes and place bets in secret. So many stories of who you were told with joy by the people who loved you.

How you lived was truly authentic.

I always got the sense when listening to your stories that the person regaling me did so from a position of disbelief and wonder. Was it real this story that they knew of you? A story from a time when Victorian principles held a grip on the British public like stiff, hard setting, glue. Had this beautiful and charismatic lady, their mother, their Grandma, really behaved as you had? Surely not! Yet, you surely did. You took no prisoners. You would be taken as you were found or, frankly, you would not be taken at all! Your words.

You were fearless.

I love the story of you sat awake all night, air raid sirens screaming around you, pleading with you to get shelter. You ignored all the drama and sat, stoic, holding your seriously ill friend’s hand, the room shaking as the bombs landed around you. You simply looked at her and said, "let them fall." Then there is the story of the time you held a mock wedding at the betting shop because people were gossiping about how improper it was for a single lady to gamble. You grabbed a net curtain for a veil and plucked a bunch of daffs for a bouquet. Let's give them something to properly talk about you declared as you trotted down your makeshift aisle. Whole heartedly audacious and fearless of opinion.

Who would have thought that, in the face of so much judgement, a person could find freedom?

Women were only just getting the vote. It was late 1920's and times were roaring. Whether you were aware of it or not you gave your voice to the cause. You danced, you sang, and you gambled... like a man. Whilst your peers were fighting with their petticoats you were out entertaining the troops, providing for your family, holding your own in a man’s world. You were often derided, told off for being wayward, your actions improper for a lady. The term 'unbecoming' I think was the common parlance of the day. Truthfully, even your children sometimes thought you could go too far, after all, you were a woman who could make a sailor blush. But, irrespective of anybody's opinion, you were never going to be tempered. A man could do exactly as you did and he would merely be a cad...perhaps a bit of a player... a card maybe. Why should the world be any different to you because of your gender? You worked hard, you played hard, and you cared like a boss. Equality was not just a ballot sheet, it was a way of life.

The spirit of feminism in the back streets of Britain.

The problem with ideological reform... it can be rather, well, academic. Feminism is something that is studied and spoken about by awfully clever people. A concept that presents itself, typically, in words, articulated and expressed by educated people and understood by equally educated others, peers of above aforementioned clever people (ha!). You, Great Grandma, presented the spirit of feminism with action. You connected the dots; your spirit transcending the rhetoric. I doubt you even knew what academic feminism was. It didn't matter one jot because your soul was its absolute epitome. Brave. Unapologetic. Honest to its core.

Great Grandma, your energy was liberating.

Yours was a world where poverty hung about like a dripping tap. Draining away resilience with each drip. To this tortured world you brought humour, the ability to laugh at yourself and the circumstances you found yourself in. You lightened the load of drudgery. To have you within a brow beaten community cracking jokes, singing, dancing and laughing must have felt heaven sent. Is there anything more empowering or liberating to any human than to be around somebody who can make them laugh? Laughter digs right into us and reminds us of possibility. Good times bring in good vibes. When the world goes upside-down one big, belly shaking, rasping, laugh can get it on its way to being right way up again. Laughter is, after all, a symptom of happiness. It is the sound our souls emit when they are healing, when they are alive. Great Grandma, wherever you were you brought the laughter with you and with each glorious guffaw and chuckle, with each heaven-sent, rib tickling, belly aching laugh your perceived sin was shaken away until it meant nothing to anyone. Drowned by the joy you created around you.

Great Grandma in how you lived you created the gift of perspective.

Your stories endure. Your way of life and personality are a legacy that still creates laughter to this day. During those times when life starts to close in, when I feel I fall short of so many expectations. Milestones like marriage and having a baby not met in timely ways. Ambitions flattened before they even start because I didn't have the right qualification or experience. Whatever the expectation that claws at me, in whatever guise it arrives, keen and ready, hungry to measure, to judge, I think of the stories about you. How you found happiness with nothing. How you stayed strong no matter what was said about you. How you followed your heart despite being told that you were unladylike and unrighteous.

Great Grandma, my mental wellbeing prospers because of how you lived.

Expectations can play a huge part in mental health. Letting people down a base fear eager to be magnified and exacerbated by the opinion and subjective values of others. I should have done better. I should have been better. I should have been stronger. I should have been fitter. A vicious spiral can descend on the landscape of your mind and eat away at it, eroding your determination, your resilience, and ultimately, your dreams. To know a story like yours, told by those who loved you, to call on in times of need, has helped me through some of the really difficult times in my life. Cancer... infertility...bring it on!

Great Grandma... even professionally... I am a better leader because of you.

Because of what you went through I know to trust myself even when the world around me seems to have lost their way. To have faith that even in the darkest times you can find the best of times. Because of how you lived, and the stories that you created, my team have a boss that tries exceptionally hard to remain optimistic in the face of any and all adversity. You help me drive performance through empathy and not judgement, because there is always a way if there is a will. You help me keep calm in a crisis because unnecessary worry never solved any problem ever. You help me keep a level head when making tough decisions because even if I were to lose everything, I will never lose myself.

Yours is a priceless legacy.

You never left your children a vault load of cash or a portfolio of property. What you left was far more valuable than that. You left your wit, your humour in adversity, the security of knowing that when life turned against you, you could still win. You gave your children, and their children, license to be themselves. Freedom to roar. You gave them pride in who they were, not what they were. Great Grandma your legacy is invaluable, and your descendants are still benefitting from how you lived generations down the line.

So, thank you, Great Grandma, for the stories.

Thank you for the laughter.

Thank you for the fearlessness.

Thank you for the resilience and most of all…

…. Thank you for the happiness....

Thank you, Great Grandma, for being you.