Birthdays and unbirthdays

[shewhomust]

samarcand's birthday is not until next week, but it falls on a working day so the party is tonight. Hooray! Party!

Today is (was) Grandma's birthday. Grandma was my mother's mother, and for much of her life she did not know when her real birthday was. Her mother died when she was a small child, and she was brought up by her stepfather and stepmother. When she started school, her stepmother claimed to know her age, but not her birthday, and the headmaster said, well, never mind, she can share mine.

It was not until her children were grown and married that she told them this story, and my father pointed out that there would be a record of her birth (in those days, at Somerset House). So he and my uncle went and looked it up, and not only found the true birthday, they discovered that Grandma was a year younger than she had thought.

That's how my mother told the story, anyway. She always put in that the wicked stepmother had deliberately made Grandma a year older, so that she could leave school a year earlier - but my mother was a great myth-maker.

Anyway, July 25th: Grandma's birthday and the beginning of the school holidays, a day worth celebrating.