Lived: Berrynarbor, Kentisbury, Combe Martin
Recording made: 2002
Length of recording: 4 hrs 20 mins
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ALVINA IRWIN
Born:
Combe Martin,
Devon, 1918
Lived:
Berrynarbor,
Kentisbury, Combe Martin
Recording made: 2002
Length of recording:
4 hrs 20 mins
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Alvina Irwin is the second of five children. She spent the first ten years of her life with her grandparents in Berrynarbor, keeping her grandmother company. She read books and poetry, went out with her grandmother on social calls, and hardly saw her own family. By the time she rejoined them, her father had swapped market gardening for farming and moved to Kentisbury. Adjusting wasn't easy.
After school she went waitressing in Combe Martin before going to Luton, where she spent the war years at Vauxhall testing tank engines and then working in the office. She came home in 1949 and married Maurice, a haulage contractor, thinking she had kept him waiting long enough. He taught her to swim and to cook, and to play bridge and chess. On Sundays, weather permitting, they went walking in the countryside.
She's now bought herself a computer and emails relatives in America and Australia, delighting, at her age, in learning a different way of communicating.