Gerald Haigh on a series that bridges the generation gap
In Grandma’s Day series By Faye Gardner. School Life. Travelling. Having Fun. Home Life. Evans Pounds 8.99 each
Each of these books is based on a real grandma, who appears in pictures and tells the story, with Faye Gardner’s help.
For anyone of the right generation, the series is a cornucopia of memories - Fairy soap bars, a Morris Ten, a trolley bus, the Eagle comic, and Dick Barton - Special Agent.
Using real people makes for interesting contrasts: each grandma is from a different part of the country; one was brought up with two cars in the family, another was a miner’s daughter, a third lived on a farm.
What is also appealing about them is that there is no pretence - some books of this kind, for example, assume that all Fifties teenagers went jiving in coffee bars, like characters in a Tommy Steele film, whereas more commonly, as Faye Gardner tells us in Having Fun, “We didn’t have pop songs for disco dancing like you get today. Our dances were the waltz and the quickstep.” And she adds, “We had good times then.”
We did, too.