Florence "Flo" Smith - Now & Then

It's 1969 and a woman looks back on her life in London.

From the Boer War to The Summer of Love, Flo Smith, daughter, sister, wife, mother, widow and grandmother recalls with horror, humour, tears and joy those turbulent times at home, and, in the world beyond her front door."At the end of the sixties, I was a drama student in my final year, casting around for a subject for my dissertation I hit on the idea of interviewing and recording the reminiscences of Florence Smith, my paternal grandmother. ""Nanny"" Smith was happy to oblige and so for several days in the Spring of 1969, I sat in her cosy living room at Richie House, Hazelville Road, North London, drinking copious amounts of tea and listening avidly while Nanny Smith filled spool after spool of my tape recorder with her recollections.Florence told me of her Victorian childhood, her marriage to a young man who was later seriously wounded in the First World War (my grandfather), her struggle to put food on the table for her three hungry children in the 1930s, and her harrowing experiences of the London Blitz.

For the times, it was a common enough story and yet, for all that, a unique one too, as unique as any human being's life." - Christopher Saul