Sally Gray

Sally Gray is my grandma. She lives in Wellington and she is 77 years old. Her life has been jammed with thrilling and electrifying events. She has two children named Sarah (my mum) and James (my uncle), and was married to George Gray (my grandad) who sadly passed away in 2012. Sally was born in 1945 in Glasgow, her father (my maternal great-grandfather) was from England and her mother (my maternal great-grandmother) was from Scotland. She grew up in West Sussex, South of London. She also had a younger brother and an older sister. Growing up my Granny had lots of distant family members nearby. She went to stay with them and they came to stay with her, it in many ways shaped her upbringing.

Since she was born right at the end of World War Two, people were begining a new chapter in their lives. Even though people were beginning to relax again, lots of people (mainly older people who had experienced the war times) were silent when it came to the tough and painful subject of the war, including her own father. At five years old she still remembers things being rationed, like chocolate, butter, and eggs.

Sally’s father was a doctor who had his own practice and he didn’t work with any other doctors or nurses. He also ran a surgical clinic. He was never off-duty because he was always delivering babies at midnight or attending to car accidents. Since there were no nursing homes and the nearest hospital was 20 km away he used to bring elderly people home for weeks at a time for her mother to nurse. Sally’s father was well respected in their village and old men would raise their hats to Sally and call her Miss. Even though most families did not own cars Sally’s family did because of her father’s job.

When my Granny was ten her family went on some interesting holidays. She, her brother, her father, and mother all cycled around northern France where it was very quiet and in the countryside. On a very tight budget they travelled to different towns and villages and they never booked ahead because there were no local phones to use. They would have picnics everyday. During their trip her brother caught the measles, but still they carried on cycling, which was perhaps less then sensible especially considering her father was a doctor. They encountered glorious scenes, rural roads, incredible coastal routes, and curious locals, but only her mother could speak fluently in French. One night Sally and her brother argued. He wanted to go and see the circus, and she wanted to go off to draw and paint. They went their separate ways but soon Sally got lost. She was a bit scared but she kept wandering around trying to find her way back. Looking lost and afraid she befriended an old English speaking man who kindly reunited her with her family. While her brother was enjoying the circus, she was feeling very embarrassed while being told off for getting lost. After the long holiday (when she was back in England) her father made her write a thank you letter addressed to “the gentleman who speaks English” (it must have been a very little town).

When Sally was 10 she was encouraged to spend a lot of her time outdoors. She was free to roam wherever she was willing to. Sometimes she explored alone, sometimes with a sibling. She often went horseback riding with her sister at dawn, and went sailing down the nearby river in a small inflatable boat, or they walked to a swimhole in the river taking their big dog with them. They messed about well out of their depth despite not being able to swim. Once they were skating and sliding across their neighbours’ frozen-over pond (with their permission but without their supervision), when all of a sudden the ice cracked. That was a very frightening event, especially because none of them could swim. Frequently they cycled the lanes and roads 22 km to visit their lovely Granny. Often Sally would go for long walks alone to visit an old lady (who was a war widow) who would spoil her with biscuits and fruit from the garden, or she would just sit with the saddler Mr Langham and watch him make saddles with leather (she can still smell the leather after many years). She loved picking mushrooms, blackberries, and wild flowers which she would take back home and later paint and draw.

In 1956 she was enrolled in a boarding school. Although it may sound boring or grim it was actually a thrilling adventure (for the most part). She would escape through windows a lot (and never did she once get caught), and there would be sneaky midnight feasts. Sally developed life long interests in music, natural history, and art. In 1960 (when she was 14 years old) she got into a nasty car accident that caused lifelong dental problems on her front two teeth and had to wear agonizing braces throughout her early teenage years. A while later she resolved to become a teacher.

From early adulthood Sally has almost always belonged to a faith community, more for the companionship of mixing with like-minded people than for religious reasons. She loves the music and its background. She likes the church music classics and singing along to the familiar hymns. She is drawn to church as they have rules guiding projects that the church undertakes to help people. At boarding school there were many girls who came from less wealthy backgrounds, and they opened her eyes to getting involved in ways to help others throughout her life.

The “Great London Smog” was a thick smoke and fog combination that covered the city of London for five days in 1952, caused by a combination of industrial pollution and high-pressure weather conditions. This brought the city to a near standstill and resulted in thousands of deaths. Ten years later, my Granny was studying in London and she witnessed the thick foggy smoke that filled the streets and city. The air was so thick that if you held your arms out in front of you your fingertips would disappear into the gloomy air, and all of the students would have to go home halfway through the day for health reasons. One day Sally was walking to the bus stop to catch the bus to town, but halfway there she realised she had forgotten her mask and had to walk all the way back home again. The worst part was she was carrying an extremely heavy bag on her shoulders so she wished she could have just left it at the bus stop for ten minutes instead of lugging it with her. This thought reminded Sally of a memory at the end of her boarding school times when she would heave her huge suitcase around busy Victoria Station in London. There was a left luggage office, but her mother thought that paying to leave your luggage somewhere was silly, so they left the suitcase near a bench and came back to fetch it after a couple of hours. Even though her suitcase was never taken she always hoped it would have been stolen so she didn't have to return to her faraway school.

Besides witnessing the London smog my Granny has accomplished a lot of interesting things like volunteering to be a teacher in Ghana (West Africia), being a primary teacher, an English teacher, and a special needs and behavioural needs teacher. Her first full time job as a teacher was in a primary school in Stoke Newington, North East London when she was just 21. Another school she worked at was in Cyprus, a small, delightful island where you could climb a mountain and swim in the sea in one day. It had the perfect climate with colourful flowers, intriguing history, and scrumptious Greek food. Unfortunately over the years the island community had developed a taste for tiny wild birds. They managed to catch the birds by covering sticks with glue and then attaching the sticks to trees. The birds would be stuck there until they died or until they were collected by a hunter. They were then plucked and cooked as a delicacy, which meant hundreds of them were killed every year. Sally found this very cruel and disturbing. In addition you could buy ‘song birds’ at the market which had been captured and put into a tiny cage to sing, like people do with canaries (but they are specially bred). She shared her thoughts on this with her students, and they then decided to buy a heap of birds from the markets and set them free. In August 2022 Sally plans to revisit the island and hopes to see that the small birds have been taken off the menu.

Once when she was completing her teaching degree she had to sit in and watch a teacher teach his class. The children were mostly well behaved but once in a while they started misbehaving and whenever they did so the teacher got out a meter-long ruler and whacked it on his desk. At some point in the day the teacher had a phone call and he had to leave the room, and he asked Miss Pepper (Sally’s maiden name) to teach for a little while. It was not a little while, and soon enough they were misbehaving again. The first thing she thought to do was get out the ruler and whip it on the table so that's what she did, and she did it so incredibly fiercely that the ruler snapped in two. She was very embarrassed and afraid that the teacher would be annoyed but all of the young students were very sweet and started saying things like “it's okay Miss Pepper” and “we’ll hide the ruler” and “I bet he'll forget all about it”. It was hilarious.

She knows she was very privileged growing up, as she was able to explore the world and she had a lot of freedom, especially outdoors.

My Granny is living an extraordinary life and I wish I could say more about her and I think she would love to say more too. She has done so many things in her life and she has taught me many things. One of the things I think I have learnt from this is that you should always just go for it, because life is short and you never know what is going to happen next, so you should make the most of the time you have on this beautiful changing earth. I hope that whomever may read this learns something new and just goes for it.