Alice Biography

My grandmothers large extending mahogany table was the centre of those Christmas events, with around 16-18 shoulder to shoulder around it, once in place you were there for the duration for how could you make many people get up and out of the way so that you could dismiss yourself. As children, we were better served by our smallness and would slide under, to escape or just to enjoy, the crawl slowly along between the ranks of legs trying to remember which belonged to whom. Once the meal, which to me, seemed to last for hours, was over, aunties and cousins darted around back and forth, clearing it all away, it was then time for the card games and back everyone sat, other than those few brave souls who decided to decline to the accompanying joshing of spoil-sport, and such like.

A simple glittery glass chandelier hung down over the centre of that table. This had to be lit with a match as electricity had still not entered my grandmothers world, even in the 1940's - the gas hissed casting light and shadow over the glass prisms and cast further shadows around the walls. Lighting up time arrived long after the room had been allowed to become gloomy with the only light flickering from the coal fire which, - apart from the kitchen range, black and slumbering for the most part, and the boiler in the scullery - was the only means of heating in this very cold damp house. Lighting the gas mantals was in the province of my 'live at home aunt' and was done with a certain amount of ceremony, and usually in response to calls from varied visiting family for 'lights Doll, lights' and she would bustle in - after a few shouts off stage as to where the matches were - matches in hand and with a fierce determination to refuse all offers of help and unwanted advice from siblings, should the gas dare refuse to flare, in fact the whole affair did seem to be a finely tuned manoeuvre.