Matilde, my grandmother ate at a soup kitchen and hid in the basement during the bombings, by Nerea Martínez

My name is Nerea and I´m 16 years old. I interviewed my great-grandmother.

Her name is Matilde and she´s  83 years old. She was born in 1930 in La Unión and she spent her childhood there.

She had got a sister and a brother but eleven years ago her sister died and her brother is still alive. Her father was tinsmith and her mother was a housewife.

When she was a child she remembers that  she played with a doll that her father gave to her. This doll was called "pichi".

She left school when she was 8 and she was at school only for two months because she had to work to get some money. She worked at a country house cleaning and picking crops.

she remembers that in the Civil War they went hungry and they hadn´t got any cinemas or any shops and sometimes she and her siblings had to go to a neighbour´s house and stay there to sleep because her mother had to go to the field to work for two days.

During the civil war she ate at a soup kitchen.

her only dream at that time was the war ended because when the bombing started they had to hide in the basement.

She never had the opportunity to travel because her parents didn´t have much money.

She met her husband long after the war and she was married for many years. Her husband worked in the field.

They had good relationships with their neighbours but they had few.

  the best memories that she has is when she married and she had her children

she thinks that there are many differences between  young people nowadays and young people at that time because then there wasn´t so much freedom and so many places to shop.