Memoir May 18, 2021

Grandma and Mrs. Biggs

This painting brings back so many memories.  It hangs in our upstairs bathroom.  My sister doesn’t think it is appropriate to sit knee to knee with my Grandma and her friend Hattie Biggs  but I just love to see this painting each and everyday.  This painting was in my 1989 exhibition at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.  I remember the curator of my exhibition didn’t want my paintings of people in the show as she felt they weren’t good enough.  I persisted perhaps because I was used to a husband not liking what I was painting.  I have always felt that artists have to be completely pigheaded.  What we paint and how we do it is the essence of art and it is really all we have to give.

This is my Grandparent’s living room at 196 Roger’s Road, Hamilton Ontario. I love to see their “modern” sofa and the little cushions that helped make it comfortable.  The only thing I left out was the large painting done by my Grandmother’s brother that hung on the wall behind as I felt it made the painting stronger and more harmonious

My Grandma didn’t whistle or tell stories or play the harmonic.  She didn’t grow giant tomatoes and she didn’t drive. She wasn’t interested in learning stuff.  She did love playing games with me and even though she was deaf, she loved to sing with us on the family car rides.  My Grandmother loved.  That is exactly what she did best.  She loved everyone. 

 She loved my Grandfather. Just before the first world war, her family moved from England to Hamilton Ontario. My grandmother was thirteen and her sister Martha was fifteen and they went to work in a knitting factory.  When she was twenty the war was over and after church one Sunday, Jack, my grandfather, who had been a Canadian foot soldier in France,  asked her father if he could walk Lily home from church. 

 “No” my Grandmother’s father said.  

“You can walk Martha (her unmarried older sister) home from church”. 

“But it is Lily that I want to walk home” replied my Grandfather.

My Grandmother told me about my Grandfather getting down on his knees to help her her boots.  They walked home from church together.  A few months later they were married  My Grandmother wore a beautiful new suit and a hat trimmed with flowers. After the church service,  they had a small family luncheon at her parents home to celebrate and then Lily and Jack went together to buy stove pipe for their new apartment.

“ I had to marry him, my Grandmother always said

”or I would never have gotten to see him.” 

 My Grandfather worked sixty hours a week at Westinghouse as draftsman and took night school courses, five nights a week!