Day 3,343 in the Nanny June Care Home

The one with the battle of the furniture and a man with a van called Jerry, (The man is called Jerry, not the van. The van is borrowed we don't know if it has a name or not).

Nanny June has (finally) been moved to a palliative care room. Avid readers of my blog may remember that when she first arrived at the care home Nanny June insisted on taking this massive great, desk style, glass fronted, dresser thing with her that comes with a back story.

The Back Story:

Nanny June was around 9 years old and at home alone with her two little sisters one day in August during WWII. Moved from central London to the supposedly safer outskirts and suburbs of the city, she was moved by the government approximately ten miles away to West London. Next to an airport. Which in hindsight possibly wasn't a great idea...

Anyway, she heard planes overhead and the sounds of a bomb called a Doodlebug falling... she said you knew if it was going to hit you because the bomb itself went silent just before it landed.

Hearing the planes overhead she sheltered her and her sisters under a bed, although as Nanny June tackled dementia this story changes as to where she hid.

But she hid.

And the bombs fell into onto the airport and as collateral damage - into their garden. Close enough to disintegrate half of the house. The house that remained intact quite literally remained that - save some shrapnel damage, intact. The furniture still standing against the wall. The mirror hanging without a scratch.

One of these pieces of furniture stayed with Nanny June wherever she went. Even to the care home where it did indeed stay until her last days; this time fighting the war with dementia rather than the Nazi's.

The Fact Checking...

"The Luftwaffe bombed the airfield in August 1940 as part of a concentrated effort against the RAF. A total of 4,000 bombs were recorded as falling within two miles of the airfield over a 15-month period, although only two were recorded as hitting the airfield itself."

www.aroundealing.com

"A bloody poor shot" as my grandfather would no doubt have said. But maybe using more fruity language. Especially as they had just bombed his house.

Anyway.

Back to the here and now...

This massive Nazi bomb defying piece of furniture sits obstinately in the corner of the abandoned room that Nanny June has vacated and because the palliative room is smaller. It sits there in the corner silent testimony to its own life, a wooden obelisk marking defiance and survival.

Until me and a man called Jerry turn up with a van to take it back to mine.

I gently ruffle Nanny June's hair each time as I to and fro past her, emptying her old room of her no longer needed belongings. She probably hates the hair ruffling and can't work out what's happening to her head but I can't help myself.

Half an hour later and I am back home with a boot full of more Nanny June stuff to sort through and a monumental piece of furniture that is at odds with my eighties build house. However, it is here that it is reunited with another piece of awkward outdated / vintage furniture. A cute, dark wood dutch dresser which sits in my living room, as can be seen in many of my childhood photos alongside some pretty impressive wallpaper from the seventies.

But as much as it tries to be, my house is not a mausoleum to my parents old furniture.

Something has to go.

The now displaced dresser has a weaker back story, so it has to go.

Like Matt Smith says in Doctor Who, The Big Bang "Well, you'll remember me a little. I'll be a story in your head. But that's OK: we're all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?"