“Watch out or I’ll bash your head in” said  my wife – when still a kid – to her stepmother. The step-mother had been bullying Merran’s brother Bill, mercilessly.

Although Bill was taller and older than Merran, she was the feisty one.

She lifted up the poker by the handle not as one normally does, but by the thin narrow end for poking in the fire.

“So watch it woman, one wrong move from you and I’ll bash your head in”. She was only a little kid, but she sure was a feisty one. 

It all started a long time earlier when my mother’s mother contracted tuberculosis possibly as a result of her birth. It was a terrible way to bring up a child as my wife(as a child)  could not be in the same room as her mother. She stood at the door, not allowed nearer, in case the infant caught the mother’s TB.

My wife’s mother died when she was five without ever having held her baby(Merran), in her arms.

Merran’s father was an austere Presbyterian. A woman’s place was in the home. But he’d taken on more than he realised: my wife.

She wasn’t allowed to read so she read secretly under the bed covers with a torch, including many things she wasn’t allowed to read. It was the beginnings of a young toughie.

When Merran’s mother died, he had 2 children he didn’t know how to look after, so he married a suitably austere woman. The new stepmother had not the remotest idea how to cope with a very independently minded child.

Maybe the step-mother  was naturally a bully but soon she was relegated to silence. Bullies aren’t used to being stood up against after all.

That was the making of Merran –  my wife.