Oh good! I thought as I looked up the TV listings for Friday evening. BBC2 was airing an interview with acting legend Dame Sheila Hancock, this was great news for me as I knew grandma would like it. At nearly 99, she rarely relates to TV shows nowadays, and it meant I could quietly catch up on my texts I hadn’t managed to get to during another busy week working and caring.

As the interview got underway, grandma was mumbling in appreciation that ‘the man from University Challenge‘ was speaking with someone she knew of and, importantly, who was ‘married to John Thaw, you know’. As Dame Sheila was talking about her time during the Second World War, Grandma said to herself: ‘We were in Birmingham then…’

Intrigued, I asked: ‘Did you live in Birmingham? I didn’t know that.‘

‘Yes, we moved there.‘ Answered grandma, unhelpfully. Grandma has never opened up to me or answered any of my questions about her past, I chose this moment to see if she would share more of her backstory. She was relaxed and approved of what was on television so I thought I would try some gentle questioning. Astonishingly, it worked and she happily told me about her life for a little while, until Winterwatch came on and she shushed me, deciding that TV presenters examining animal droppings was more important than my questioning.

I learnt the following:

• Grandma moved to Birmingham at the beginning of WW2 from London, probably for her father’s job.
• They didn’t have a bomb shelter, but the neighbours had one so they could use that.
• When WW2 ended, they listened to the announcement on the radio (or the ‘wireless’ as she calls it) but she doesn’t remember celebrating.
• The reason she will stand in the small pantry under the stairs during storms is because that was all that was left after her favourite clothes shop was bombed. She deems that place to be the safest.
• She doesn’t know what her father did for a living but he was away a lot, was probably shell-shocked from WW1, and drank. She never asked what her dad’s job was because: ‘You didn’t ask those things in my day.’
• The family was supposed to move to Scotland but her mother refused, so they moved up to Rochdale and her father commuted to Scotland from there.
• She was a secretary/assistant at a local bronze foundry for nearly 25 years. She couldn’t tell me what her job title was but she listed off the names of most of her colleagues with ease and what they did.
• When I asked her what her job entailed, I learnt that she would type up lab reports on the quality of the metal and also worked in the foundry helping the head chemist.
• I then got a lesson on bronze casting. The moulds for the bronze castings are made out of sand. It must be dry, if it is even a little damp, things could get dangerous. She found out the hard way how dangerous, as she remembers being thrown across the room when her colleague poured molten metal into a wet cast. She wasn’t injured but when she took her overalls off afterwards, her dress was burned. No health and safety in those days.
• She seems to have got on well with her colleagues. She told me a story about how her two bosses would chase her around the lab on occasion – I feared the worst but it seemed to be innocent fun.

As grandma went back to watching the TV, I smiled to myself, happy I learnt a little bit about her life. I recognise it is a rare privilege to be able to ask her these questions and that a lot of people would love to be able to ask their grandparents those questions. I work hard as her carer for that bonus, but it was worth it for those 30 minutes.

I’ll have to wait until Amol Rajan interviews another British icon to conduct another little interview of my own.