Gran

Gran summoned me to Hastings for a day.

A diminutive lady, her eyes still twinkle with intelligence. There’s almost sixty years between us, several lifetimes as far as I’m concerned, yet she remains spritely and alive. She talks and talks, and with ninety four years of memories I listen.

We sit in her lounge. She lives on the second floor of a block of flats by the sea. The Victorian chairs mix awkwardly with the wooden Rhodesian etchings of lions and elephants, but it seems to suit her awkward history of English and African.

In a month she has an appointment with the ophthalmologist. Or so she tells me. She has a distain for the medical profession. “Ave never been in a hospital, not once!” She tells me, and tells me again, and yet again throughout the afternoon. “Ah had all me kids at home. Even had ma teeth removed at home. The dentist gave me a wiff of chloroform and when ah woke me teeth were gone!”

Still, I can tell she is nervous about her visit. “The doctors tell me me right aye is dead, and me left is almost dead. I don’t think they know what they’re doing I tell ya, because I can still see from me right eye. Still, if I suppose if they can make them see better...”

This time we don’t go for a walk, but she pushes me out of the house after a few hours and tells me to have some fresh air. I’m grateful for the offer; four hours of conversation has left my head full of her memories, and I need some room for my own.

She won’t be put into a home, despite her daughter-in-law’s persistence. She speaks of Yvonne often. “I tell ya, she’d make a good Prime Minister. Every man would have ta do what she tells them.” More I should not say, other than it’s a clash of wills between a powerful and well-meaning woman of wealth and class, and a proud, stubborn, and slightly mad Geordie pensioner.

“It’s just that I canne read me books.” She returns to her eyes. “It’s an awful thing, getting old. I used to read but I always need me glasses and I now need a magnifying glass.”

Gran has an opinion on everything, and with a captive audience she tells me about her family, neighbours, and television (“The world’s gone mad! Mad I tell ya. I wouldn’t be surprised if it just ended!”). She talks of all “these foreigners” that have come to England, then tells me she prefers them to the English. “They’re ever so polite, not like English people.” Most of our conversations are about how disturbingly awful the world is becoming. I cannot argue with her.

I perk up when she tells me about Rhodesia. It was around 1956. Gran tells me about the adverts on the radio about a new colony, how the Government was telling people how beautiful the new country was, and how her and her husband decided to emigrate. “Fourteen days and fourteen nights on the Duke of Edinburgh. But we had muney then. We had a house by the seaside in Brighton. Six floors.” I press for her memories of Rhodesia and for a while she is lost in a better place. A two week journey down the west coast of Africa, and a three day ride on the coal train from Cape Town to Bulawayo. “Everybody was just so nice. It was so much better than England. Warm, you know.” I wonder what it must have been like, after the war, to travel through Imperial-controlled Africa with four kids in tow to start a new life.

She lost everything there. A son to madness, following a car crash; her fortune to bad debtors; and eventually when they returned to England, a husband to depression. She doesn’t dwell on it long, but the thoughts linger in the air. Her reverie snaps. Fifty years have since passed by. She is left with a one bedroom flat in St Leonards by the sea, a handful of relatives scattered around the world, and ninety-four years of memories with which to retreat within.