During the First World War, a Welsh soldier, recently sent back from the trenches, was sent on a recruitment mission to the Scottish town of Douglas, Lanarkshire. There, he met a local girl with whom he fell in love, and married. They lived together in Douglas for some years and had four children together, including, in 1920, a daughter called Jane Ann. She would later become mother to two children, grandmother to five, and, in her last years, she would see the birth of hre first great-grandchild. I write this article as the fourth of the five grandchildren.

Early Life

Douglas, in 1920, was a poor miners' town, and Jane Ann (or 'Nanna', as I knew her) went without most of life's luxuries in her early years. She would later tell of her desire to write in those days that led her to call up her cimney one Christmas Eve: "Kantie Klaus, a pennig" - in her Lallans dialect, she was asking Father Christmas for a pencil.

The promise of better paid work led the Jones family to move to London in 1927. This must have been a shock for the little Scots girl, whose accent was wholely unlike the cockney of her new classmates. She would later tell of how shocked her mother was when she first said "ain't", still in her native voice.