Doris Randall 1916 - 2003
Winnie Braine 1921 - 2019

Doris and Winnie were sisters who grew up in the south of England. Doris, the elder sister, was my grandma. She had passed away by the time I first traveled to the UK and met her younger sister Winnie. I was amazed by how similar Winnie was to Doris in both looks and mannerisms.
Doris was stoic and slightly pessimistic but with a great sense of humor. She was always calm except when encountering Australian cockroaches. I adored her and always hoped I could emulate some of her traits. Winnie had a lot of the same old fashioned English sayings in her repertoire but her manner was more lighthearted.

She told me about how during the war she and Doris often went out dancing with the soldiers on their last night in civilisation before they went to fight. She said that you just tried to give them all as good a time as possible because a lot of them would be going to die. Sometimes you'd get letters from some of them later - other times you wouldn't, and you'd know that was bad news.
I imagined this was like the kind of music they would have enjoyed dancing to and I sent the tune to Winnie a few months after I came back home.

War had a big impact on their lives right from birth. Doris was born during WW1 and her father was given leave because of her birth. While he was on leave the rest of his unit was gassed.
Later he got shot in France but the bullet bounced off something in his pocket and he survived. Winnie still had the bullet.

Doris and Winnie lost several dwellings during the London Blitz in WW2. During the war Winnie was a ‘Wren’ (Woman's Royal Naval Service), working on Naval tactics. Doris worked for London Telephones by day and as a fire spotter by night, spotting fires sparked by bombs. One night they told her to take the night off as there hadn't been any bombs for a while. That night the building where she would have been fire spotting from was flattened by bombing.

From my other family members I found out that Winnie's fiance was killed in action, in a sub. She never forgave the Germans for the rest of her life. After the war she eventually married someone else and had three children. Doris met my grandpa George right after the war, and Doris and Winnie had their children around the same time. The sisters and cousins were close. George wanted to move to Australia after the rest of his family had emigrated and told them how great it was. He had also met many Australians during the war and he loved the more easy-going Australian attitude.
When he first asked Doris to move to Australia she was pregnant with her first child, my Dad, and she refused adamantly.
When Doris and George's family eventually emigrated by boat they had three children: my Dad was 10. On the boat trip, heading far from her close knit family forever, Doris felt like she'd made the biggest mistake of her life. They saved up to come back to visit one day but never made it. My dad crashed the car or something in his late teens and it cost a lot. By the time they could afford it they felt too old for the trip and Doris's parents had already passed away. She never saw her sister again although I remember they had a weekly phone conversation when I lived with Doris as a teen. Winnie passed away a few years after I met her. She was in her late 90s.

That generation faced so many challenges, when I think about it I realise how easy things are for us here now with the level of technology we've attained, even in a pandemic.

Jess Randall, 2021.