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#868 Deolinda Macdonald Surviving and Thriving Through Hardship

Deolinda Macdonald

I will be 81 in May. I am one of five children. My mother was a single parent and my father died when I was five months old so we all had to work. We all had to scratch to make a living for ourselves. There was no welfare state to help, you had to survive. We didn’t really go to school, only a little, you had to work from being a child. Our Mum didn't have time for us because she had to work to help us eat. In my family there was two boys and three girls.

I think people get annoyed that you can’t be as active as you were. You have less strength, like when I was a child we had to work so hard, and I could easily lift a bale of hay, sacks of spuds but now lifting feels very difficult.

I don’t know how to use technology even when people teach me. even when they are patient. I just feel too tired, it’s so hard to learn it and I noticed that it’s harder to learn as I get older, I would much prefer to garden.


Precis

An 81-year-old reflects on growing up in a large family where everyone had to work hard to survive, feeling frustrated with the limitations of age, and preferring gardening to learning technology.