A little bit of butter to my bread *

My grandmother was born in 1892. I don't know much about her early life, but I know she came from the sort of farming family that meant hard work and early mornings. I also know from photograps taken in her 20s that she was very beautiful and that - a life in farming notwithstanding - she retained perfect, clear skin until her death in her 80s. She used to joke that she first 'stepped out' with a man called 'Lot', but broke it off when she read in Genesis 19 what became of Lot's wife

She married my grandfather in her mid twenties, their first child - my mother - was born during WWI. My grandfather was wounded (a 'blighty') on the Somme and came home after treatment and recuperation in Southampton and Newcastle. Together, they climbed 'the farming ladder' and became very innovative and successful family-farmers

At some point during all this - before 1914, probably,
 - my grandmother completed a formal qualification in dairy-maidship - using milk to produce saleable or edible foods such as cream, cottage cheese, harder cheeses and milk-based puddings and pastries. I know this because somewhere in our attic is her neatly-written lesson note book, and her certificate from an agricultural college in Coventry. I think this must have been quite an educational achievement for a woman of her class at that time

By the time I was born, she made butter for the family table, but didn't really use any of the other skills she had learned. By then she had reared six children, and lost two more to flu - she had done her share. However, a half-cellar in an abandoned part of our old farmhouse still had a lot of bits of equipment in it: mysterious toys for an inquisitive grandson. One of the pieces was a wooden butter-churn, similar to this but much larger (in my memory, anyway!) I know that during WWII, when farmers were too crucial to the war effort to be sent to fight, grandma's skills with dairy products, chickens and bartering helped keep the family better fed than many who had to tough it out on rations in cities

* a silly rhyme, but it sticks in my head. An Alderney is an extinct breed of channel island dairy cattle