My grandmother has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages

My grandmother  has always lived in small Yorkshire towns or villages. Her maiden name was Sawdon and she came from a place of that name near the moors inland from Whitby; it is a purely Scandinavian part of England - and she was the youngest, prettiest and most exacting of three daughters of a tailor in Kirbymoorside, in the godly Pickering valley near by. My fatherwas born there and spoke of seeing the old man sitting crosslegged and sewing on the table on the window of his shop. Grandma was vain of her clothes and her figure. She usually wore a dark blue-and-white spotted dress. She had pale blue eyes deeply insent, a babyish and avid look,  and the drooping little mouth of a spoiled child. Her passion for her husband and her two sons was absolute; she thought of nothing else and me she pampered. With outsiders she was permanent 'right vexed' or 'disgusted'
Her 'Willyum', my grandfather, was let out of her sight as little as possible. The minister had the hard northern vanity also, but differed from hers. He was a shortish, stout, hard-bellied, and muscular man with a strong frightening face, iron-grey hair and looked like a sergeant major who did not drink. He was a man of authority with a deep, sarcastic voice used to command. When I was a child I had the impression that e was God and the Ten Commandments bound together by his dog-collar. He was proud of his life story..
 Gradually I learned that he was the youngest son of a fishing family in Hull _ his father was a trawler seaman - and that all his brothers had been drowned between Hul and Dogger Bank. His mother had picked him up and taken him inland to Bradford , away from ships, and had brought him up there in great poverty. He had known what it was to 'clem'. He grew up and worked  on the roads for a time; the ran off and joined the army, (this would had been in the sixties) and since only the hungry or the riff raff did this, he must been in a poor way. he chose the artillery. This lead to an event of which he boasted.
One day when his battery was stationed outside some seaside place, I believe on the Mersey. They were at artillery target practice, firing out to sea, and the safety of passing vessels was regulated by a flag signal. It is quite in my grandfather's character that he fired his gun when the flag was up and contrary to orders and sent what he used to tell me was a 'cannon ball' through the mainsail of a passng pleasure yacht. The yacht, of course, belonged to a rich man who made a fuss and my grandfather was arrested and court-martialled. He was dismissed from the Army
Extract from the book “A cab in the door” by V.S. Pritchett