U3A Writing: My Granny - Mary Ann Irons 1864-1967
Philip H Hayworth remembers his beloved granny who lived to celebrate her 103rd birthday. As she grew older she was not able to read as much as she would have wished, but took this as a sign that she should spend more time in prayer with her Lord and Master.
My first memory of Gran was when as a four-year-old I used to spend Tuesday afternoons with her and Grandad at their house in Goodmayes in what is now the London Borough of Redbridge. This was while the aunt who brought me up from three-and-a-half was attending her Women’s Meeting at Becontree Avenue Baptist Church.
Grandad used to take me on a walk on the iron footbridge over a main line from Liverpool Street to the East Anglia towns, and I used to love watching the trains hurtle underneath. Auntie Connie used to join us for tea, and often Granny used to spoil me, opening little tins of fruit for my tea.
She was a wonderful woman who had a spiritual conversion when she was working as a housemaid in a doctor’s household in London. She was in her twenties and heard a definite voice saying to her, “Accept the beloved.” She was a very godly woman, but suffered most of her life with an open abscess on her leg.
Not long after I came to live with my aunt and uncle, another aunt, Gertrude, died of a very strange blood disease and left a widower and two daughters, one of whom had only just started going to a grammar school. Granny took these girls under her wing and helped them quite a bit, and they always had a soft spot for her.
I can remember how Granny took quite a keen interest in all that I was doing throughout my whole life, and I will always remember how at 77 she rolled me in the hay in Stourport Park. She would always maintain a positive outlook and was full of fun.
She and Grandad endured the bombings in the War, and they had their windows blown out three times. They did spend some time with my other aunt and uncle when they lived at Heswall on the Wirral. Grandad was disappointed that he could not come down with Granny in 1941 to visit us at Stourport where we had just gone to live. He was not very well and, in fact, was very poorly until he died in 1946. I know he would have loved the countryside round Stourport.
We used to go up to Goodmayes during the war to see Granny and Grandad, and then after Grandad died Granny used to come to stay with us in Worcestershire quite a lot.
During the time when Grandad had to be taken out in an invalid chair he wrote a lovely letter to Auntie telling her about how Granny, aged 81, had taken him in the wheelchair a lovely walk down by the bowling green in Goodmayes Park, which was a fair way from where they lived and he said, “Fancy 81 pushing 80!”
On her visits to Stourport she got to know quite a lot of our friends and the people at the Baptist Church and took an active interest in everything that was going on. I remember Auntie telling me of how, when Uncle had taken her to Worcester Shrub Hill Railway Station for her train, he was approached by two porters who asked him if he was Sir Thomas Lee.
On another occasion my Uncle Ern went with his minister to hear a professor speak on Old Testament History, and when they arrived folk asked Uncle Ern whether he was the professor. In a letter to us Granny said, “What distinguished sons-in-law I have: Professor Henton Davis and Sir Thomas Lee!”
She went down with us to visit my sister and brother-in-law in a place called Gorsley on the borders of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. It was the centenary services of the Baptist Church there. In the morning service there was a chap who had a magnificent beard, and one of my nephews was describing it to his mother in the broad Herefordshire dialect: “Mum, it came all up ther and all around yer and all down yer.” Granny was amused at it all.
Granny lived to be 103. Although she couldn’t manage the journey to Stourport after the age of 92,she was quite alert in mind until about a month before she died. On one occasion she told me she could not read as much as she used to but that it was a sign that she should spend more time in prayer with her Lord and Master.
In her middle nineties my cousins, whom she had taken under her wing when Auntie Gert died, took her into their home and looked after her until she died. When she was well enough, they used to take her to the local Baptist Church which she had attended for many years. Later on she wasn’t strong enough to go, and ladies from the church used to visit her.
About this time there was trouble in the church because the minister had run off with another woman. On hearing this Granny suggested to the women that they needed to pray about the whole matter, and so she organised a prayer meeting in her bedroom. Tremendous blessing came from it, and there was a real transformation in the church. Whenever I read about Anna the prophetess in St. Luke Chapter 2, I always think of Granny.
My own mother died before Granny, and when she heard of it she was organising everyone up in London about going down to Worthing for the funeral. The will had to be adjusted, but the solicitor doubted whether Granny would understand what was going on. Anyway, when he entered her bedroom, she knew more about the will than he did.
Even a couple of months before she died I visited her, and she said how folk down the road were asking the cousins whether their Gran could still speak. Granny was ever so amused about it.
She managed to celebrate her 103rd birthday and then went into a coma from which she didn’t awake until she passed over the River of Death and entered the Celestial City, where I will meet her one day.
