Grandad

Before I came to Australia my favourite memories are of spending time with my grandfather in his shed. I remember one time I had picked up a hammer and he took a hold of it in his big miner's hands and pushed my grip down to the end. He said "You hold a bottle by the neck, a woman by the waist and a hammer by the base. Every time I reach for a hammer, those words come back to me.

Grandad was a very brave man. His brother was killed on the Somme in WWI and when WWII came around he sent two sons and a son in law to war. Then he watched his daughters go to work building spitfires. Knowing full well that the factory would be a target for Nazi bombers.
His wife, Grandma, was the local midwife, and if a baby came in the middle of an air raid, she went. If he wasn't at work, he would drive her. But if he was, she put her bag in her bike's basket and cycle to the soon to be mother's house.

His house was bombed twice* and yet every working day he went down the mine and worked all of his shift not knowing if his family was being killed above ground. My reciting this phrase is my attempt at honouring him and passing on some of what he was to the future.

Edit: I have since learned that it was only bombed once. The entire front wall of his and his neighbour's, was ripped off the building. The rubble and many of their possessions were dumped in both front yards. The neighbour was his daughter, my Aunt Letty. Her husband Charlie was already in the Army and in Jamaica when war broke out. They rushed them home and he was in the fighting war from that moment. He was a parachutist, but would never speak about it. He went 'On raids', was all we ever discovered about his service...