Today would have been my granny’s hundredth birthday. She died in 2009. I remember her as a loving grandmother who spoiled my brother, sister and I. But I also recall fragments of an incredible twentieth-century life. She spoke to my grandad in Ukrainian, their first language.

My granny was born outside Lviv in what’s now Ukraine and was then Poland. She was a pious Catholic. The German invasion led to forced labour in Germany, being cut off from her family, becoming a displaced person at war’s end, and then a European Volunteer Worker in Britain.

Her and my grandad first worked on farms in Perthshire but later settled in Dundee where they found jobs in the city’s jute mills. Later my granny became a hospital cleaner. They lived in Menzieshill for a long time but my memories are of visits to Lochee where they moved later.

My granny’s family thought she had died during the war and she had no contact with them. It was only after the Soviet Union collapsed that she restored contact with them. Her and my grandad made a return visit soon after. I’ve still got a decorative box they brought me back.

When I look back on them, I see elements of a familiar postwar working-class Scottish experience in my grandparents. They worked manual jobs, enjoyed football, eventually bought their council house and played the lottery. But their language, religion and food were different.

I didn’t know the world of Ukrainian clubs and dancing and language classes that my mum grew up in and my granny’s generation built and lived in. I do remember the Ukrainian Christmas and Easter celebrations that happened a couple of weeks later and the food I enjoyed at them.

As the twentieth century becomes distant I wonder if we’re starting to lose comprehension of how it was experienced by people like my granny, an ordinary woman who lived through extraordinary upheavals but who I remember giving out more cakes and sweets than my mum thought wise.