Meena ( Meacham-526 ) was my paternal grandmother (1886 – 1973). She is “favorite” because she is the most interesting, not because she is the “nicest”.
She once said “I would rather be an example TO my grandchildren than an example FOR my grandchildren”, and she certainly was both. One of my college friends, who knew her in the late 1960s, said “Meena was the first liberated woman I ever met.”
She was the classic example of a dilletante. Among the skills she perfected, and then discarded were: pianist (2 gold medals); bookbinding; toymaking; batik; ceramics (she had a one-woman show and sold everything); sculpture (one piece was exhibited at the Victoria and Albert museum); spinning, weaving and knitting (less successful- I have a sweater she knit for my father, and the sleeves are too skinny for the body); teaching; dog breeding (she showed both Samoyeds and Pekingeses at Crufts). The only thing she stuck with was psychoanalysis. She trained with Freud in the early 1920s, and continued practicing until the early 1970s, when she was well into her 80s.
She was married three times: to Herbert Hughes, musician; Battiscombe Gunn, Egyptologist; Alex Grey-Clarke, neurologist; at a time when divorce was frowned upon.
In the early days of the 20th century she regularly entertained the Bohemian intelligentsia and member of the Fabian Society, including George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, as well as Eric Gill - sculptor, print maker, creator of the “Gill-sans” font.
She had lost her own sense of smell when she was quite young (my father remembers, when he was a child, that Meena insisted rancid butter was “perfectly good”). In the 1960s she lived with about 20 un-fixed, un-housetrained Pekingeses (she believed that fixing them or house training them would “damage their psyches”). The house had Napoleon-like layers of newspaper and dog feces. She only had a bath a few times a year. When she came to visit or stay with us, she would first have a bath, while my mother put her clothes through the washer and dryer. THEN we would all say hello. When we went to her house, my father would not set foot inside it.
