Mango Shade

The pretty woman on the left of the group at the back behind her two girls of her four children is my mother. I am the younger child and heftier than my sister by some distance who is seven years my senior.  In these years as our ages hurtle towards 'old', we look like each other as we never did when we were young children.

My father is the flash chap on right back of the group and isn't he beaming. The three people in the middle of the back row are relatives of my mother's and the three adults in the front row. 

The people of real interest following on my blip yesterday are in the front row, Ellen Johns age 92 and her brother-law, my grandfather William Francis Edwards age 83, John Henry's brother. 

Grandad's demeanour is as handsome as John Henry's in yesterday's blip. Born in 1873 in  Gulval, he was as was John Henry a family man. 

My favourite memory of him is derived from looking down from where I am sitting on his knee and he in his pyjamas sitting on the edge of his stretcher bed on the verandah of my parents, siblings and my bungalow home, which was for a period his home. 

He is reading 'Peter Rabbit' to me.

I can see his slippers squarely placed on his wallaby skin rug he carried as a small roll wherever he went and I feel the sheer wonder at how beautiful the image is and he was of himself and loving. William Francis who was "Bill" fathered 13 children of whom 12 survived and included a set of identical twin girls. He married in 1899 and his marriage was for 62 years until the death of my grandmother.

Grandad was 25 and my grandmother, Jane Johnstone Elliott was 16 when they married.  William outlived Jane by five years.