The smartest person I know.

In my youth, I loved stories. Creative ones and fantastical ones. Fantastical not just in the sense of swords and dragons. But things that are quite literally unbelievable.

Enter the world of science, mathematics...and war.

There was a woman who lived on this planet some time ago. She was born Margaret Lily Head in a little place in Lingfield, England.

She was my grandmother, on my father's side.

I'm 30 years old, and across my entire life, across all of the people I have met, spoken to, listened to, people from the other side of the world, none have been as influential as her.

She was born 1st March, 1923. Her presence here on Earth came to an end on the 26th of January, 2019. She was almost 96 years old.

It's difficult for me to write this. To get down precisely what she means to me. Not meant. This isn't the past tense.

I don't think it's possible to truly communicate the presence she had. I start crying every few lines while I'm writing this. It's going to be harder when I read her diary.

I started writing little bits of the start of this at work. I had to stop because I felt every kind of emotion starting to come up. I'm doing it right now. I'll need to write anything about her at home. Not here.

I think about her almost every day. When I encounter a problem in my life, I wonder what she would do. What would she say? How would she make me realise that I can succeed. I just need to move forward. Just a little.

"You can't rush these things." She would say. About all sorts of things in life.

She had a thousand different things to say, and a thousand more ways to say them.

She touched the lives of people young and old. She's person who has had such a colossal impact on my life and those around me, that I think those ripples will be felt for decades to come.

She was a mathematics and physics teacher. She was a mother. A wife. I never called her by her name. She was granny. That's it. That's who she was my whole life. From baby, to toddler, to teenager, to adult.

This post marks the beginning of an extremely long journey, starting with my own comments about her.
The next will be an introduction written by someone who I don't even know. Even my dad, when he first told me about this, said "a woman I have never met is publishing mum's diary from the war."

It's not officially published, mind you. This woman has a copy of granny's diary, and had it all set onto clean paper and well-formatted for the modern day.

Many years ago however, granny had asked me about recording her talking to me about her life. One day, long into the process, I asked her what she would call a book that told her story.

She sat for a few seconds and thought about it. At the time, she said that "at this point, I will have lived almost precisely half of my life in England, and half of my life in New Zealand." Like someone with fantastic dramatic timing, she paused. Then she smiled, nodded in strong agreement with herself and said, "I would call it A Life of Two Halves."

So that's what this is. "One Woman's War" is the name of granny's diary, but I'd like my own injection of what I know granny wanted.

If you want to know the story of Margaret Maton, maiden name Head, pay attention to this tag.

A Life of Two Halves.

For now, this is her story. I'll still be telling stories about her until the day I die.

I'll do that proudly.