If Grace were living today, she would be about 111 years old. She was one of my neighbors a long time ago in a town in Hampshire. My little family adopted her and she adopted us, as our own grandmothers were far away, or had passed away. The "guys" in the family would go watch the World Cup with her as she liked soccer, oops, football. I would make American like snacks for them all to eat.
She and I would talk about England before WWII and even, before WWI. When she was very little, Grace would accompany her dad to Covent Garden.
He dad grew and sold watercress, something for which Hampshire is still famous. Her dad grew the cress in a field of soaked land. He would pick it, and then take it by horse and wagon to London to sell.
Grace told me that as a very little girl, her dad would pick her up and set her on top of the crates of cress. Sitting in the back of the wagon, Grace would go all the way to London with her dad. She told me it took hours to get there, and they would arrive in the dark, about four o'clock, at Covent Garden.
Grace said in the summer she would sit in the wagon without stockings or shoes, wearing just a little chemise type dress.
I can imagine her in my mind's eye, with her bright blue eyes and long, blond, curly hair, wearing a little grey dress and dangling her long, thin legs over the edge of the wagon.
Grace died a long time ago. Today, as I listen to Ralph Vaughan Williams A London Symphony, I think of Grace. She did not want to go to the rest home near us. She wanted to stay in the two-up, two-down house she had lived in with her husband and children.
But, she got to the stage where she could not go up the steep stairs without taking her cane and wrapping it around the barrister, pulling herself up.
We saw her once or twice in the rest home, but then, we moved away from that immediate area, and in a short time, we heard she had passed away.
Grace, cress, Covent Garden, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Hampshire, Surrey fill my thoughts today.
