My mother is eighty-six years old. She looks full of vitality, though her health is challenged by a less than perfect heart and a recent diagnosis of dementia. She’s facing this bravely, in the same way she has always faced adversity.

Barbara Tanham, September 2016

Born in 1930, her early life was dominated by extreme poverty and the 1939-45 European war. She was, in her own words, “As thin as a rake and malnourished.” She tells of how the whole family had to live for several weeks on a large bag of rice which someone had given her father in lieu of a cash payment for a watch repair.

Her father,  my beloved Grandad, was out of work – as so many were in the Britain of the 1930s. But, she does not remember those times as painful. She remembers the camaraderie that prevailed. “Everyone was the same,” she says. “We…