A few weeks ago I posted a photo of my grandfather on Alyce’s Saturday Snapshot. Today I’m posting a photo of his older sister Sarah, known to my grandfather as ‘Our Sal’ and to me as Aunty Sally. She didn’t live near me and my family when I was growing up but came to stay with us for a week each year. I used to love her visits.
This is how she looked when I knew her:
and this is her taken when she was a young woman:
and also:
Aunty Sally was born on 26 August 1878 in Mold, Flintshire, Wales. She died on 15 April 1967 aged 88. For many years she had been Matron and Housekeeper at Wellingborough School, a private school in Northamptonshire. She had worked until she was 78 and until she became ill she had visited the school chapel each week to arrange the flowers.
She had trained as a nurse in a London Hospital and had worked for a while in Chile as a children’s nurse. She first went to Wellingborough in 1940 as a member of the staff of Weymouth College which was evacuated to Wellingborough School.
By the time that I knew her she was an old lady or at least she seemed so to me, but she was great fun with loads of energy and interested in everything we were doing. She and my father used to sit up late at night, talking and sharing cigarettes, long after we’d all gone to bed. She bought us lovely presents, which were always different – not just an Easter Egg but a large Easter Chick, probably made of papier-mâché and decorated with glitter, containing small chocolate eggs. I’d never seen anything like it before and after I’d eaten the eggs I kept the chick for years afterwards until it fell to pieces. I wish I knew more about her.
The Black Hill is not one of the Black Hills of Dakota – known to me only from the song, sung by Doris Day, but it is one of the Black Mountains on the border of England and Wales, although fictionalised in this book. The book was first published in 1982 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize that same year. It’s also been 
BooksPlease 
