Grand Dads

[abu nuwas]

i think it can work when there are other family members and nannies to lend support, and it must be something else to have anchors so far back in history. but families like that are i feel a dying breed. in the upper classes we see such ties but more often than not, in the lower classes the child ends up in a kids home should some catastrophe befall the aged parents. jmo

Do you really think so, Billy? It is true that the old white working-class has shrunk, with the disappearance and mechanisation of the docks, the vanishing of dockers and stevedores, and all those bargees and watermen, the miners, the great metal-bashing industries, such as ship-building. What jobs there are, and many are created, are largely taken by immigrants from E Europe and elsewhere. I think that in many such immigrant communities, we would find that all sorts of arrangements exist for aunties and grannies to take over, in the event of the death of a parent. I would have thought that was still true of the working-class, even where it is now more accurately described as the under-class, or Giro society, especially in the North, where,despite the persistent unemployment down the generations, there still seems to be a greater cohesiveness, than there is in London, where fragmentation, geographically, is so common. But perhaps that is the subject for a different topic.