She lay on a big bed tucked in by altar-white sheets in an upstairs room with a ceiling high enough for the spiders to weave webs in the ornate flourishes of plaster-work, sure that no feather duster could reach them.
Her two pillows were also white and plumped to raise her weary and sad face, so that she could watch the little screen in the wooden cabinet that had appeared suddenly without invitation – with its jerky figures mysteriously hitched to voices.
Her two pillows were plumped so she could watch the little screen in the wooden cabinet that had appeared suddenly without invitation
This was a television set, the miracle of our age, though anyone could see the strings on Andy Pandy and the other puppets inside. But how did they find their way into that box at the end of her bed? Ah, that was a question for others, those brilliant scientists with their magic tricks.
The house in which she lay in repose, not quite a ghost yet, was a large red-brick semi built in the swell of Victorian pride, when the emerging middle-classes demanded their slice of Britain’s imperial grandeur. But only a few minutes’ walk away, bunched, wheezing terraces stretched down to the fog-veiled riverfront. Every afternoon when I came home from school, my Mum would take me into that room, which was to be the final home of her mother.
The floor boards creaked to our steps. That television, bought for the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, would be flickering away. But my young eyes were drawn to another object, one of shining china, a shameful pot, peeping from under the bed. It was called a jerry because it looked liked the helmets worn by the dastardly foe, who had threatened our country’s very being not long before.
Mum’s mother, my Granny, needed the jerry because she couldn’t walk anymore. “She has a very sore broken leg,” Mum said in the refined Scottish accent, which had clung to her like paint on a kirk door. In truth it was a fleeting, blushing explanation. But would Granny’s leg get better, I wondered. No answer came.
And those young eyes of mine didn’t notice that Granny was so thin that she made only the slightest bumps and lumps under the counterpane, as her grey hair rested on the pillow. But for reasons I didn’t understand then, she was fond of her five-year-old grandson and looked forward to his visits. We exchanged smiles rather than words.
One day I came home and she wasn’t there. Mum said she had been taken to hospital. Weeks went by. “When’s Granny coming home, isn‘t her leg better?” I asked Mum, whose eyes filled with tears. “Has she died?” I asked. Nothing more needed to be said. Years later I learnt that inoperable cancer had advanced through her body. She had left her home in Glasgow, aged 79, to die in Birkenhead. I had only known her for a few months. Death was different then.
And then in 2002, Mum died, aged 95. Among her possessions, I found a little brown book called The Girl’s Book of Piety. It had been presented to Granny on February 8th, 1896, by the Sisters of Mercy at a convent in Parramatta, New South Wales, Australia. The hand-written inscription read: “To dearest Maggie, with sincere affection and earnest prayers that she might ever abide under the protection of Mary Immaculato.”
I’m not sure what it all means now. It’s not necessary to tie all the threads. At some point Granny Maggie had moved to Glasgow, where she married a tailor and so Maggie O’Brien became Maggie Stronach. They had two children, the second being Mum, who married a successful doctor and so became Margaret Charters. They had four children, two of whom are now dead.
Granny was a girl of Irish ancestry, who had an Australian upbringing, a Scottish adulthood and an English death. On the pages of Girl’s Book of Piety, our fingers sometimes touch. Such was life.
