Have You Got Yer Vest On?

Description

This is the story of a woman who carried her gallstones

in her handbag, bathed her canary with a watering can,

and could leave me seventeen kinds of mortified every

time we left the house.

She believed almost everything could be improved by putting

a long vest on, eating something sensible, or putting t’kettle on.

She was four feet ten inches of certainty, practicality and fierce love.

Born in Austria in 1922, she arrived in Yorkshire, England after the

Second World War with little English, three children to raise, and

a determination that never seemed to question whether she would

succeed. She worked the fields, built a life from almost nothing, and

then spent the rest of it making sure everyone else was fed, warm

and standing up straight.

She also informed me with astonishing regularity that I was ‘like her

arse‘, but there was no fire behind her words.

Somehow, despite all of that – or perhaps because of it – she became

the safest place I ever knew.

I still hear her voice twenty times a day.

Have You Got Yer Vest On? is a memoir about family, belonging,

resilience, and the practical language of love. It’s about the woman

who shaped me, the stories that shaped her, and why some people

never really leave us at all.