The Secret Diaries of Two Auld Grannies

In 1956, the editor's father, John Holmes Johnson, cleared out his mother Janet's house after she died. Among her stuff, he found three old diaries, written by his maternal grandmother Marion Orr and her mother Mary Holmes (John's great-grandmother). He took the ancient notebooks home, put them in a brown manilla envelope and placed them in his filing cabinet. There they remained until he retired in the mid-1980s. For several years prior to his death in 2008, he took on the mammoth task of ...