JANET
Janet is 95 and has lived in Rottingdean long enough to have earned the village. She arrived to a reception that was, by her own description, less than warm — but Janet grew up in South London during the Blitz, in streets where you could go to sleep with a full row of houses opposite and 'wake up to open sky.' Cold shoulders didn't trouble her. Over the years she became woven into the fabric of the place: secretary of the Bowling Club, manager of the first charity shop in Sussex, curator of the Kipling Museum where she made the waxwork of Kipling himself, Rottingdean's most famous son.
Recently she was moved into a care home, away from the village where she had made a life for nearly a century. Nobody made a record. No one thought to. The stories will vanish. They always do. LightKeep is a permanent record — for the village, for the families, and for the future.
“I opened the door and the house opposite was gone.”
— Janet
A recent conversation with Janet, in the garden she has tended for decades — the same garden where, she confided, her late husband quietly buried unwanted metal over the years. Washing machines. Bikes. "They're all still there." We talked about her Portuguese ancestry, an arch aunt who refused to speak anything but Portuguese, and the mouse she kept during the Blitz — carried to the air raid shelter in a small perforated box. She is 95. She remembers everything.