All families on St. Helena love Christmas. Most people on the island ate fish that the men would catch. Some of the fish we would sell and some of the fish we would keep for ourselves.
We didn’t have a fridge when I was little and my grandmother would have us salt the fish and meat to keep it fresh. We even would have a pigs head and this would be a treat and preserved in salt. It wasn’t like today with all of this health and safety. I don’t remember anyone ever dying or becoming ill through food poisoning.
I have heard stories of extreme poverty but I have never known extreme poverty. When I was very young my grandmothers sons were all working on the Ascension Islands and they would send money home enclosed in beautiful letters to my grandmother. The letters would start with: To My Ever loving mother and signed From your ever loving son.
My grandmother had a total of eight children. She had three left from when her first husband died. He was only 25 when he died. Her two older sons Mitchel and Joe were brought up by family members. Joe was brought up by his late fathers family. Lilly was brought up my Grandmother and her husband Freddy. My grandfather Frederick didn’t treat Lily very well. He often beat her and would tell my grandmother to put Lilly in a glass coffin. Lilly did end up in a coffin. When she was just 13 years old she had died in a mysterious circumstance.
My grandmother had told me that my grandfather would beat Lilly with a large stick. My grandmother never would come to terms with losing her daughter and seemed to grieve forever. She would describe Lilly to me to the point that I thought I knew her. I would go to the graveyard at Halleymount to dress Lilly’s grave.
She kept Lilly’s clothes in a box under her bed. They were pretty little dresses that my grandmother had made by sewing yellow dusters together. Some of the dresses were patch work sewn together. I though that they were neat and beautifully sewn by my grandmother. My grandmother and her new husband Frederick had 5 children together. My grandmother would tell me stories of how spiteful, vile and cruel my grandfather had been to four of his children, while the youngest of his children a daughter had escaped his cruel vile behaviour perhaps because he had contracted cataracts and couldn’t see her to hit her.
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