Spanish post-civil war. Ana, my grandmother by Ana Ros

My name is Ana and I´m 16 years old. I´ve interviewed my grandmother whose  name is Ana. She is 76 years old. She was born on the second of June in 1938.

During the post-war period she lived in Roche, a little town of Murcia. She has one brother and two sisters. Her father was a driver and her mother was a housewife. 

She told me that when she was young she used to play games like hopscotch, skipping the rope or she dressed her dolls. When she left school she was nine or ten years old.  She went to a school where only girls could go. She only had got a notebook and a book.  She has never worked but when she left school she started to help her mother in the housework.

She can´t remember anything about Spanish Civil War because she was one year old when the war ended. About the post-war period she can remember that most people went hungry and they had a card of rationing which controlled the food they ate or the oil they used in their lamps. She also told me that at that time there wasn´t too much electricity and there was  almost nothing to eat.

When she was young she used to dream of being a dressmaker and she expected the future to be better and no one  go hungry .

When she was young she never travelled because she didn´t have the opportunity to do it and she didn´t have too much money either. 

During the interview she told me the story of how she met her husband. She met him during a party in her town in the 50´s. She was with her friends in the square of the town and suddenly my grandfather and his friends went to the place where my grandmother was. When she was  coming back home he approached  and decided to woo her. From that moment they became friends and after that they got engaged.  They were engaged for six years and then they were married another sixteen years until he died.  He worked as drawer and after that he worked in a nuclear power station. In her neighbourhood the relationship with her neighbours was really good because she lived in a small town and everybody knew  each other.  Of those days she remembers that most people were unhappy because of the impacts of the war and the dictatorship. People didn´t have enough clothes or food to survive. 

One of the most beautiful memories she has is when she went to the countryside to play with her sisters and with the animals they had. She enjoyed that time a lot. Or when she went with her grandmother to visit her uncle. She remembers that her grandmother never wanted her to go with  her and my grandmother always escaped to join her.

She thinks that young people at that time, although  they didn´t have too much, enjoyed their time more than us and they didn´t need drugs or this stuff to enjoy. She thinks that they were more responsible than we are now and they valued more the things they had.