Edith Allen, our downstairs tenant, was the grandmother we never had. She was a widow and kept strange hours, sleeping most of the day and being awake for much of the night. Edie was a character who could often be seen standing at the front gate, waving and shouting out at passers-by and greeting them with bursts of infectious laughter.

I regularly went downstairs to her flat for a chat and to listen to the fascinating stories of her childhood and her experiences as a young and attractive woman in the early part of the 20th Century. Edie and I would pour over scores of faded sepia photographs and she would talk of her many suitors and numerous proposals of marriage. She had been married to Tom Allen but they never had children. She would often talk about him with affection and respect but also mention his shortcomings. I remember him as a balding shy man with a pale complexion and bags under his eyes. He worked for London Transport at Parsons Green Underground Station. One day he went to bed after returning from his night shift to never wake again.

I recall Edie was partial to a pint of Mackeson and a smoke and she often asked me to go to the Co-op in Wandsworth Bridge Road for her blue rizzlas and four ounces of 'Pirate Shag' tobacco. She was adept at  “rolling her own” though the site of a soggy cigarette paper stuck to her bottom lip wasn't very flattering.

She also had an old wind up gramaphone and an extensive 78 inch record collection. I often listened to those old crackly records with her and witnessed the pleasure she got singing along to her old music hall favourites. 'The Good Old Days', a BBC entertainment show of the 60s modelled on the old music hall, was her favourite TV programme. She would crease up with laughter as the compere Leonard Sachs introduced his acts by slamming down his little hammer and shouting out long made up adjectives.

Edie was  fiercely Labour and once frog marched a canvassing Conservative up to her front window and showed him a full size portrait of her hero Labour leader Harold Wilson. Though only in my early teens, I stayed up with her on General Election nights hoping for a Labour victory. Her beautiful black Labrador was called Bess and she often addressed her as Bessie Braddock after the rather large Liverpool Labour member of parliament. 

Edie's father was William Dann. The family originally lived in Gilstead Road.  When I was a child William Dann lived a few doors away at number 62a Broughton Road. Edie looked after her housebound father in his final years. I can still picture him sitting in his favourite armchair with a blanket over his knee, with snow white hair and moustache. 

Though well into her 70s, Edie attended my wedding to Sue in Cambridge in 1977.  She died during the mid 1980s. - Francis Czucha.