How we’ll miss the generation who turned extreme hardship into love - The Jewish Chronicle

Two weeks ago, my beloved Grandma Frances passed away at 96. She was my last surviving grandparent. It’s strange that we’ve got a word – “orphaned” – for when you’ve lost both parents, but there’s isn’t one for when all your grandparents are gone. There should be.

I cannot express how much the whole family will feel her absence from our lives.

She was a member of that remarkable, rapidly disappearing generation that grew up during the Second World War. Of course, when we think about that period, we often focus on the Holocaust survivors (like my Grandpa Morris). I spend a lot of time talking about the lives of those who went through the atrocities of the Shoah – it’s eternally necessary to do so – but sometimes we inadvertently overlook the other Jews, the ones who were building lives here in the UK. They were often immigrants, or the children of immigrants, already contending with real economic and social deprivation, who suddenly found themselves confronting the agonies and deprivations of a world war.

My Grandma Frances had an early life for which the word “hard” doesn’t seem to touch the sides: her mum had debilitating multiple sclerosis and her father suffered a serious stroke, which meant that at the age of 14, she was both a full-time carer and the family’s sole breadwinner, working 12-hour shifts in a factory.

Then there was the Blitz. As I came to hear her stories about that time – which she’d relate without self-importance – they were flabbergasting. Buckling in and wheeling her mother about as bombs (including the dreaded doodlebugs) arrived from overhead; long terrifying nights in shelters and evacuation to places unknown. If we heard about a life like that today, we’d be grasping for words like “superhuman” or “heroic” to try and cover it. But when it comes to the generation that went through the war, we just shrug and think, “that’s how it was”. We’ve somehow lost track of how extraordinary they were.

Through some mysterious emotional alchemy, all that adversity made them into the most passionately devoted grandparents on earth. Perhaps because they were robbed of a real childhood themselves or were unable to relax into easy relationships with their own children, when they were suddenly free later in life to love their grandchildren, they did it in this intense, uncomplicated way. After so much toil, they finally got to savour some joy.

As the late Rabbi Sacks once noted, the connection between children and grandparents can often be “untroubled” by tension or anxiety (which can overshadow interactions with parents). This means, said Sacks, that, “when a grandparent blesses a grandchild they do so with a full heart”.

Frances’ love was expressed through a loyalty for her grandkids that was unquestionable and comprehensive. She always saw us as exceptional. In some ways, she was like Maureen Lipman’s character from those 1980s BT ads – the one whose grandson tells her he’s flunked his exams apart from pottery and sociology: “He gets an ology and he says he’s failed. You get an ology and you’re a scientist.” (Anyway, she explains, it’s “the teachers who are wrong. They can’t mark.”)

Once, for example, my brother was driving Frances to visit my adored papa in hospital. As he drove, she delivered a heartfelt speech about how loathsome and villainous all bankers were. My brother, a long-time City trader, reminded her that he was, in fact, a banker. Without missing a beat, she replied, “Yes, but you’re different.” Every banker in the world, you see, except him.

Or the time I got her recipe for chicken soup. I made it and, because I am an abysmal cook (the only dish I can make is Monster Munch and scotch), it was a failure. That this soupy catastrophe could be down to my incompetence wasn’t acceptable; it had to be something else. “Take the chicken back to the butcher,” she reasoned, “they’ve sold you a bad hen.” For her, it was simple: no grandchild could do anything wrong.

So many in that unique generation went through unimaginable hardship and yet were able to transform those experiences into this very complete, very precious kind of love. Now that they are slipping beyond our fingertips, we should all remember just how lucky we are to have them – or to have had them – in our lives.

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Grandma