A childhood memoir of life before polio, and immediately after, and my magical childhood adventures in and out of a wheelchair
My Grandparents
Mother's First Home
My granddad showed me the darts he kept in a piece of cork. My granddad filled our dining room Sunday lunch with the smell of beer. Did I miss him only for that? Did my mouth only water when he completed the smell of roast beef with his beery breath? No, I missed him for more than that. When he was in his late 60`s he at last opened up to us with his song: ''Key `ole in the door, key `ole in the door, I found I was a shuvin` the key `ole in the door'' We were no longer kids but adults. The thing was that we were always kind of afraid of this little man who stood no more than 5 foot 2 inches tall.
Tales of his strictness filtered through from mother: "Children should be seen but not heard". When Mother was seen reading books (which was her only delight for a poor country girl), he tore them from her: "Help your mother!" When she couldn`t read her books she used to read the bits of newspaper that were put down to cover a freshly mopped floor. Noticing my mother, her head bent over sideways trying to read, he would order her to go to the fields and pick rabbits` food! He said it with such venom that she has not read a book from that day to this.
Mealtimes were held in absolute silence. To enter into her parent’s conversation was received by a rap over the knuckles. Even my Grandma, whom I remembered as a kindly woman, when playing with her only child a game of rough and tumble, my mother accidentally touched her breast and was rewarded with a hard slap across her face: "Don't ever touch me there!" was the only explanation.
My granddad planted a lawn in their front garden. My mother had the job of cutting it….with a pair of scissors!
My father took the deeds to their bungalow, with their reluctant approval, against a loan from the bank…then tried to burn it down to collect on the insurance. My grandparents were away working for us at the time. Only years later did we put two and two together. It didn’t burn, thank God. "It must have been a stray firework," said my father
.
When Grandma died at the age of 55, Granddad stubbornly refused, as only the old know how, to come and live with us. He stayed in the bungalow that he had built with his own hands, until he too succumbed at the age of 72. The bulldozers had a god-awful time ripping that bungalow apart to make way for something modern. They hadn't bargained for old iron bedsteads, entombed like nuns, in the concrete walls. We, on the other hand, turned out and burned a whole room full of paperbacks - mostly westerns.
Granddad smoked Digger Plug, the strongest tobacco on the planet. He not only smoked it in a pipe but rolled it in cigarettes: thick, black stuff. Granddad let me have a puff or two on his pipe. I turned the colour of bile. When people say they turn green when they are seasick, believe them! Why can`t tobacco taste as gorgeous as it smells?
Granddad caught malaria when he was a sailor. It turned his hair snowy white. From that time on he was called Snowy
When granddad died of cancer of the throat (what else with tobacco like Digger Plug?), his next door neighbour swore she `saw` him trying to enter the bungalow at about the time of his death. Spooky, huh!
Not to worry, though, my Mother and I travelled to see both my grandparents in the dream state. They still lived in a bungalow in the country, only this time we had to cross over a rickety bridge in order to visit them (I guess the bridge represented the gap between life and so-called death). Granddad was seated at a table outside, piled with his beloved books, books that he had forbidden his only daughter to read. They greeted us casually as if they had expected us, as if they had expected us to pay them a visit. I remember that the table was a little wonky, so Granddad put a book under one of the legs to steady it. I sat with him whilst Mother and Grandma went inside, talking.
[previous] [contents] [next]
[Return to Home Page]
