It is my aim to make my ancestors come alive as people, but my mother’s paternal side eluded me for many years. The information was there but it remained just facts and figures and I had no feeling for the Milners as people.
The picture I had of the Milners was gloomy, almost macabre. My grandparents, Walter and Eliza, had three daughters widely spaced. The first died of teething problems as a baby, and the second of diabetes at the age of 13. Eliza reputably died at an early age riddled with cancer. Walter was said to be a rigid and authoritarian man whose life revolved around the temperance movement and the Ragged School.
I lived for the first nine years of my life in what had been their house. Cramped and dark premises above and behind a cobbler’s shop, with an outside toilet, no hot water system and a lighting-only electrical circuit. The kitchen was lit by a solitary gas lamp. Bath time for we children was on a Saturday night in a tin bath in the living room.