September. Your Sunday best, a tailored two-piece trouser suit, pastel blue. Of course, you’ve put your Estée Lauder face on, blotted your lips, dotted a dab of Shalimar behind your ears, on your wrists. That walk to St James, humming September Morn and making sure that chic handbag is closed for the dozenth time. You’re carrying a heap of memories, too. It’s the church where daughter number one was married at seventeen. Seventeen! Sunday lunch with daughter number one and her family after the service. That’s why you’re carrying a shopping bag as well. Wine. It won’t do to let the bottles chink in church.
Ought to slow down a little. Not that you mind arriving first. Two lovers playing scenes from some romantic play, September morning still can make me feel that way…
Oh, now that’s queer. I feel woozy.
One of your neighbours hears you coming back to your apartment. She can set her watch by your Sunday morning routine. She thinks you must’ve forgotten something, hasn’t known you for long but long enough to know you’re muddleheaded.
Serves me right for thinking about that good-looking vicar. You lie on your bed, on your side at first, as always. But then you have a thunderclap headache. It takes all your strength to turn onto your stomach when you vomit, frightened as you are of choking on it.
When you didn’t show for lunch with daughter number one, her son climbed onto the roof of the residents’ lounge and onto your window ledge. Soon, the police and an ambulance are on their way while daughter number one administers CPR. You’re still warm, you see. But she knows. She knows you’ve gone. One side of your face is grey. Seventy-four years, six months and twenty-two days old. And you’d looked after yourself, vegetarian, non-smoker, you loved walking. How can this be, how can this be?
Later, daughter number one, daughter number two, and me, daughter number three, learn you died from a subarachnoid haemorrhage.
“That’s how I’d want to go,” said our friend Vee, a mortician.
“So you know what to expect, when you go into the chapel,” said the funeral director, “your mum will be lying with her feet closest to the door. She’s wearing the suit you chose, and the blouse, you know how it has a frilly, ruched neckline? It’s rather high on your mum’s neck, but please don’t be tempted to rearrange it, because of the postmortem, you see.”
I remembered going to see Ron Mueck at the National in Edinburgh, my emotional response to his diminutive sculpture Dead Dad. I wondered if you’d look tiny and vulnerable in your casket. And yet, Mum, you looked so beautiful, not at all waxy. I lost all thoughts of the incision which I knew would be at the back of your head, and the incision down the front of your body. You looked just like you were asleep and would wake up the moment we kissed your cheek. The next day, the funeral director walked in front of the hearse in his top hat and tails with his cane, all the way to the village church. All the way. Your service was carried out by that vicar you fancied. The vicar remembered you always sat on the front pew (your daughters mightn’t have told him your motives for doing so.)
You were born in March on International Working Women’s Day that, later, becomes International Women’s Day. On your seventieth birthday, the IWD theme was Education, Health and Poverty Eradication (I looked it up just now.) It struck me, writing this in 2024, that you and I weren’t aware of the movement in 2003, I don’t think I was, at least. I suppose IWD gets a lot more coverage, these days, on account of social media being such a part of our lives. But, looking at what the IWD theme was in 2003, your seventieth birthday, I remember a conversation we had that night. We were sitting in a bar below your apartment. You lived in a gated complex with a wrap-around garden. The bar doors were wide open, we were admiring the uplit palm trees, cherry, almond and peach blossom. There was an intense fragrance, something like jasmine or coconut or almond, from a white-flowering broom. You said the bougainvillea and jasmine would flower any day now. I’d gifted you the story of your Father’s heritage in a comb bound document and we talked about the garden, how my Grandfather would’ve loved it.
“How about we make a start on grandma’s history together, mum?”
“Oh, you won’t find anything about your gran. Bit of a mystery.”
“But do you think she’d a Romany background, like she hinted at?”1
We talked about a story we’d talked about many times before, and I knew you’d never quite got over it, a part of you would smart and bristle for the rest of your days because of it. Your teacher, keen for you to attend a grammar school, came to your home after Methodist Church one Sunday. It had all been arranged. But your mother, “a socialist,” you told me, “suspicious of the educated elite,” said no.
“No. No, she won’t go to the grammar. She’ll go to work and not get any fancy ideas.”
Over the years that have followed your death, I’ve chased this and that lead until I’ve found, I think, a way into my Grandmother’s story and, therefore, into your story. In the 1940s, grandma is angry with the way a headmaster berates her two daughters. She hits him over the head with a bicycle pump. When he takes the pump from her she goes for him with a fire shovel. She even goes so far as biting the man.
“I’m glad I did it,” she tells the court. “He’s always sneering at the squatters from the camp. He wants to be a Hitler.”
I cannot be certain this is my Grandmother, but the place, date and circumstances sound right; and her actions sound so very much like my Grandmother.
Mum, I know you wanted a career. And you didn’t want to marry a factory worker. I understand you were aspirational, and I know grandma was disappointed when you joined the WRAF.
The WRAF. You’ve a flair for logistics, become a stacker (supplier.) One day, you tell a man off for not wearing his cap in “your storeroom.” He’s amused, reminding you that he doesn’t have to wear his cap indoors and you give him a smart reply because you’re both standing at the counter in front of the storeroom.
“We’re practically outside,” you say.
“Come out with me for a drink.”
He keeps asking until you say yes. In no time at all you’re married. Satin, Cluny lace and ermine, my Father in his uniform. A winter wedding.
Here’s my favourite photograph of you. You are twenty-one years and five months old, wearing your beloved H & M Rayne of London shoes, that I will wear for a party when I am fifteen years, nine months and twenty days old.
Enchanted by this curious entomological sideshow, I told Grandma and Horatio I’d once seen a snake put its tail in its mouth and wheel away. I suppose I was too young to grasp that my grandmother had a reputation in our family as a fabulist and a spieler with a story for every occasion. But I remember what she said next, looking into my eyes while leaning into the table.
“Only gypsies see cartwheel snakes.”
At that moment, Grandma’s dress disappeared into the chintz wallpaper and soft furnishings. What remained, as if hovering over the table, was her powdered face, her dark eyes, white hair. Bright coloured lipstick gathered in the cracks of her lips. I remember how her breath forever smelt of coffee and chocolate mints.
“Only gypsies,” she said again, as if this would mean something to me. “Close your mouth, you look like a goldfish.” (Bee Lilyjones from Love in the Time of Covid.)
What a lovely read, thank you