Interlude - My Grannie

 A friend of mine had an unusual 50th birthday request. She asked her friends to send her letters that included a story about someone elderly we have cherished.

I decided to write about my Grannie and thought I'd share what I wrote. 

My Grandmother was the first person I thought of as being old. My earliest memories of her are from when I was four or five and she was sixty. She seemed like a fairytale grandmother with silver grey hair and wrinkles when she smiled, but I realize she was only ten years older than I am now. She was a remarkable role model for how to age. She had strong opinions about how to make the best of her time: keep mobile by walking everywhere and practicing the Alexander Technique; keep the mind active with writing, conversation, playing cards, reading murders and Shakespeare. Most of all she had an insatiable curiosity for people and their stories, especially young people with backgrounds very different to her own. She fearlessly explored new places, new foods, new languages.

Storyteller. 

She was an extraordinary storyteller. At barely five foot two she was a tiny person but she could hold a room with a story or reminiscence. 

My first true memory of her is us sitting together in my bedroom on a very 70s purple carpet while we created a story together: The Magic Beach. A land with purple sand inhabited by Pinkie and Brown Bear (my teddies). I can’t remember the exact words but I have a copy somewhere written in her looping copperplate. I do remember the timbre of her voice reading this story that was made just for me. 

Later in life I would sit in her flat and hear the familiar stories from her childhood growing up on a farm in Africa, from living among the descendents of convicts in rural New South Wales, Australia, and from her many travels around the world. Big dramatic stories of violence and death and small amusing stories of slights and misunderstandings. I later heard much more mundane and factual versions of the same stories from my Great Aunt and then truly understood the art of my Grannie’s storytelling. She said of herself that she used her imagination to interpret reality. 

Sometimes we would shout her down as she embarked on yet another retelling of a familiar story - seeing the black mamba, Jill appearing and saying she’d shot her father, ‘Goodnight Mr Ghost’. But now of course I would give anything to hear the stories again. Those stories, just as with my Magic Beach, were her gift.

Everything had the potential for being woven into one of her stories. This could be enchanting but also aggravating. Everything is fair game to a storyteller. 

Traveller. 

My grandmother travelled throughout her life. She lived in three countries - South Africa, Australia, and the UK - and travelled for work and pleasure to India, New Zealand, throughout Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and finally America when, in her late 80s, she came to visit me in Los Angeles. Her writing took her on many adventures: she took her family through India by train in the 1950s, voyaged up the Myall Lakes in Australia with drunken Aussie fishermen, toured diamond mines in South Africa. Later in life when she and my grandfather were ‘slowing down’ they took voyages and cruises on Soviet Russian ships. 

When she finally moved to the UK after my grandfather died she lived in a block of flats surrounded by young families from all over the world. She befriended many and often as not she would have visited their country and knew something of the history and religion.

She periodically read the complete works of Shakespeare and the Bible from cover to cover. She never tired of the stories, the beautiful language of Shakespeare, the opportunity for new interpretations. I like to think that she saw the world and its people as a book that she could read over and over, her travels always giving her new meaning and insight.

Independent, original. 

Yes my grandmother was financially independent in the sense that she worked for much of her life, first as a secretary, then novelist and journalist, and she lived alone for her last 15 years. But primarily she had an independent and original mind. She challenged herself to seek different perspectives in her writing, writing as a Zulu, an Indian girl, writing stories set in the past. Today she might face the criticism of cultural appropriation and I’m sure she’d have a lot to say about that. She had strong opinions and theories about everything. She could be infuriatingly stubborn but she could also be convinced by a good argument.

Her schooling was a strange mix of unconventional and conservative. Due to illness she didn’t learn to read or write until late, I think maybe nine or ten. When she did go to school it was to a convent where she was taught by colonial nuns. Somehow from this unusual upbringing came a radical, unconventional thinker.

Full circle. 

As I write this, my strongest memory of her alongside her voice is holding her hand. ‘Oh, your paws are cold,’ she would say. Always ‘paws’ or ‘mitts’. Her hold was firm, but her skin had a delicate papery feel. I can picture her hands, surprisingly smooth, very strong. She, of course, had theories. That one should not knead bread because it would coarsen the hands. To apply cocoa butter at the end of the day. On her ring finger was the thread-thin band of her wedding ring. Apparently it had started out as a regular width wedding band, but now there was just a thread of metal. Could it be made of the traditional gold and still wear away like that? I don’t know. I look at my own wedding band and wonder if it will look the same when I am in my nineties. She was married for 53 years until my grandfather died and continued to wear the ring for another twenty years.

As she got older I learned that our relationships with people change with time. That a hand offered as comfort becomes the hand that is comforted.

The last time I spoke to her I had the strongest sense she was holding my hand. We were separated by 5,000 miles. She was 93 and in a nursing home following a stroke. Strangely, the home was run by a Catholic order. Back with the nuns. My mother held the phone to her ear. Grannie couldn’t talk, but I thought I could hear her breathing faintly. I spoke to her through tears. I told her that I was pregnant, barely a month along. I told her that I hoped it was a girl because when we’d spoken the summer before she’d hoped I might have a girl. That call was the last time I spoke to her. She died a few hours later.

I did have a girl. We have sat on a carpet together and made up stories.

I am old but I still feel the great surges of images and words I knew when I was sixteen. The Zulus say the body perishes but the heart remains young. 

                                                                                                 - Daphne Rooke (aka my Grannie)