20/05/2025
This is a photo of my impossibly stylish late granny Anna, (looking like a Hollywood actress from the Golden Age) sitting with my mum aged around 7 or 8 years old.
It’s the late 1940s. Post war.
And the place is Lucknow, India.
A politically tense time as it’s the time of partition. The ramifications of which are still rippling now of course.
I think of what an adventure it must have been to leave their life in Glasgow, Scotland and travel by boat (from Liverpool I think) to India where my grandfather worked for the petrol company, Burma Shell.
It would have been a long voyage with a young child (my mum was 3 when they left) to what must have felt a very different culture at a precarious political time.
A reminder, not that I need it, that my maternal blood line is made of strong women.
I thought I was doing something new, different and brave when I sold my flat in Chiswick to move to Morocco in the early 2000s.
But it had been done before in the family. At the time, 60 years earlier.
So this beautiful photo reminds me that the strength I draw on didn’t begin with me.
It was lived and carried by the women who came before. In fact, my mum is probably the strongest person I know.
We draw strength from the past, from the people who lived with and before us, whether we realise it or not.
From the beauty and the pain.
All of it shapes us.
And somehow all that strength is sitting there quietly in that photo taken in India.
What have you taken from your parents or grandparents that’s shaped who you are today?
