Known to her friends as "Quinnie," she wasn't a particularly gregarious lady. She wasn't prone to displays of emotion, and she rarely talked about herself. Nevertheless, the few times she did open up to me taught me everything I needed to know about her.
Growing up, her family was extremely poor. She once told me a great story about how much trouble she had got into with her mother when, after months of eyeing up a pair of patent leather shoes in a shop-window near her home in Derby, she saved up her pocket money and bought them. I had never thought of her as rebellious or adventurous before then, and it still makes me smile to think that as a young girl, she did something so simple and yet so scandalous. Although she would never have discussed, or probably even thought about it herself, I think this was what made her so generous in later life, and not just materially generous, but generous with her time, and hospitable. Even as she got older, and had trouble walking around her small flat, she insisted on cooking the whole family a meal whenever we visited her.
During the war, she worked as a bus conductress, and she sometimes told us about the people she encountered in those difficult days. She described many of them as rude, obnoxious and impatient, and it always seemed to me that these experiences gave her the unfailing patience she showed me throughout all the years I knew her, even when times were hard. Every year she, my mother and I would visit my grandfather's memorial together. I vividly remember one year her quiet and tearful confession that not a day went by that she didn't think of him or miss him, and yet despite her visible pain, she had neither a sharp word, nor a reproach for anything.
Towards the end of her life her declining health kept her in and out of hospital. Even then nothing changed. She remained the same generous, kind, and patient woman I had always known. Of course, she had some less-good traits which the years exacerbated. She repeatedly asked me how "my friend" was, without any further indication of who she meant. She absolutely could not fathom that I study Spanish and Russian, and asked me every week how the French was going, and whether I had ever considered studying German. She also had the habit of stopping suddenly in the middle of the street and pointing at things with her walking stick, sometimes even hitting them, just to make sure we knew exactly what she was talking about. If anything though, these features, that sometimes drove me up the wall, were another thing to love about her: her trademarks.
One of my favourite memories of her was a dull, grey afternoon we spent sheltering in her flat. After a couple of rainy hours, I piped up that I thought the downpour would stop soon. My grandmother looked thoughtfully out of the window for a few seconds and concluded that it wouldn't. At the time I thought she was just being pessimistic, and that she would be wrong, but she was right. It rained all day. For me, that moment summed up exactly how a lifetime of struggle and hardship had formed her. She was a wise, patient and caring woman, and I would give anything to see her again to talk about my friend, or about how surprisingly enough, I've never really wanted to learn German...
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