This very day, the first of October my granny, Bridget Bett-Hickey passed away in 1969 when she was 64 years old. I was 7. Yesterday I messaged my cousins Jo in London, Denise in Melbourne and Jacqui in Auckland to ask them about their memories of her. Scattered across the world now, but in the 60s we all lived in Auckland. After I’d messaged them, I went to the kitchen to clear the dish washer, Stanford’s The Blue Bird came on the radio and I was gobsmacked.
The Blue Bird
How poignant! The poem was published by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge in 1907 and goes:
The lake lay blue below the hill,
O’er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.
The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue,
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.
The Irish Charles Villiers Stanford composed it in 1910. In 1909 my great-grandfather drowned when he tried to save my grandmother who had fallen in the Royal Canal in Leixlip, near Dublin. My grandmother who was four at the time never knew he drowned trying to save her. I am exploring all this in my series Searching for Granny. Of course, he didn’t compose it for my grandmother, but how fitting it was to hear it at that very moment.
Even though I lost my granny at such a young age, I have always felt she was close by, protecting me, guiding me. But there is so much I still don’t know about her. Finding out that she was the little girl who was saved is something neither my cousins nor I ever knew. To me that shows how enormously loved she must have been. In the end, it was my great-grandmother, Bridget Hickey-Cummins, who saved my granny. How terrible it must have been for her to watch her husband go down while she was rescuing their daughter…
Fabulous seamstress
It was on the 22nd of March and the colour of the Royal Canal would have been murky rather than blue, but my granny has always been an unseen but not unnoticed presence to me. She was staying with her son Gerry in Melbourne when she passed away. I was chatting to his daughter, my cousin Denise yesterday, she told me that my grandmother had been a fabulous seamstress. Later, my cousin Jo in London texted me the exact same thing. She made the outfit in the above photo herself.
Denise describes it, “Auntie Marie told me the coat was blue. She had made that herself as well as the hat and the dress and I think she was wearing white tights. Very stylish!” I agree, don’t you?
She was always sewing us clothes. Many dresses! But also shorts and tops. We all loved her dresses, often in polka dots or stripes:
My cousins shared some great memories with me, which I will blog about in future posts in which I will talk about:
- what I have found out about my great-grandfather’s drowning
- how that influenced the life of my great-grandmother who was left a widow with three young children
- where she met my Scottish grampy and how they all moved to New Zealand in the fifties
- what my grandmother was like and how much of an influence she still is on me and my cousins.
Do you too have special memories of your grandparents? How have they influenced you? Do you think of them as often as I do? Let me know in the comments below, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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