Ancestral Routes

I spent a brief part of today walking in the footsteps of my Grandma, who as a small girl, a little over a hundred years ago, was living on this road in Perry Barr, Birmingham. We know that thanks to her memoir, which has a couple of pages devoted to Perry Barr.

Amongst her adventures while here, she talks about being very naughty for eating raspberries straight from a neighbour's garden without asking (tsk!), being knocked down by a cyclist after crossing the road behind a tram, having a first ride in a motor car with the parents of a boy who lived opposite and almost losing the end of a finger in a incident with a deck chair (it was sewn back on.) I expect it was this adventurous childhood that set her up nicely for driving an ambulance at the age of seventeeen during WW1.

Davey Road was just a five minute walk from a meeting that I had, so I managed to fit in a quick walk up and down. We don't know what number she lived at, but I got some sense of the neighbourhood. Villa Park loomed over the houses, and while it won't have been as grand a stadium then, I expect it will have still had an atmosphere on match days.

The street will have been quite new when she lived here in the first decade of the twentieth century. It was nice to find the original street signs, a tangible reminder of that time.