Grandma's Lists

How a hardback journal led Lulah Ellender to uncover the life of a woman she only knew through her wedding photograph

- Lulah Ellender

Until five years ago my grandmother Elisabeth’s story had been passed down through anecdotes, recounted memories and faded photographs.

Elisabeth died aged 42, when my mother was just nine. I had always been intrigued by the woman whose wedding photograph stood on my mother’s windowsill, but I didn’t know much about her. Even my mother felt she didn’t really know her. That all changed when my mother gave me an old hardback journal that had belonged to Elisabeth.

The journal was full of handwritten lists dating from 1939 to 1957, when Elisabeth died. Inside were inventories of household linen, lists of things to take camping, Christmas presents, to-do lists and even a list of the eggs laid by her hens over one year. I was enchanted. Who was this person who recorded these seemingly mundane items so meticulously, and kept the lists safe for all those years? Elisabeth’s lists were a unique portal into a lost world: a chance for me to peek into her kitchen store cupboards, to accompany her on shopping trips as she prepared for her first baby, to sit beside her at her desk as she noted belongings to be shipped across the ocean, to have my heart broken open by a list of her dead brother’s belongings.

Elisabeth’s father was a senior British diplomat. She grew up in a glamorous yet exhausting world of parties, movement, new beginnings and separations. She travelled on steam liners with 60 falcons owned by a Sheik, bought silks from Persian bazaars, watched passing herds of camel on the desiccated plains of Jordan and waltzed on Chinese rooftops with brandy-soaked friends.

The household management skills Elisabeth learned from observing her mother would be vital when she married a young diplomat named Gerry and made a new life as a diplomat’s wife.