Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Truths listener, Eileen Pound, pays tribute her grandmother who taught her the importance of friendship ...
I feel sorry for children who don't have grandparents. My grandma was everything to me. She brought me up until I was 8. We lived in two rooms in her rented house in Handsworth, Birmingham. Relationships were not always happy. To escape the unemployment of the 20s, dad had to work in his sister's electroplating factory. He hated it. Mother was a part-time cinema cashier. I now realise she'd been forced to marry by my accidental arrival and resented losing her idependence at the age of 20. Both felt humiliated at having to share Grandma's home. Young as I was, I sensed these anxieties and even felt somehow responsible, though I didn't understand why. Grandma was haven. Source of all care and comfort. She was thin and wiry, dark like a gipsy with flashing eyes. Her long dark hair was fluffed into wings onto each side of her bony face and drawn back in a bun. She always seemed to wear the same long, high-necked heavy dress. People said she had strange powers, and I believed it - still do. I thought Grandma very wise when she advised me at 4 years old "Waste not, want not." And "A man's a man for all that." And warned me "Ah! Life's a battle!"
Her life had indeed been hard. Her Cornish husband died young, leaving her to bring up three children by taking in washing and dress-making. She still worked hard, blackleading the grate, fighting the washing in the copper boiler or the iron mangle. Cooking meat black in the fireside oven. One of her few indulgences was to wrap the oven shelf in newspaper and warm her bed with it.
But Grandma wasn't at all bitter. She had a great sense of fun and loved a naughty joke. One of her sayings was "Every little helps, as the old woman said as she peed in the sea."
Sometimes her friend, Mrs Young would visit. They would sit at the kitchen table, drinking Grandma's parsnip wine, gossiping and laughing until the tears ran down the wrinkles in Grandma's face, and Mrs Young's hat tipped sideways. I would listen in wonder. Sliding my back up and down the wall, my face hot in the glow of the fire.
In the afternoons we had to go to bed for an hour. I would lie beside grandma, smelling her musty smell, reading without understanding the motto on the wall, "Our relations are given us, but thank God we can choose our friends." I would listen to the street cries, "Coal! Coal! Rag for Bones! Rag for Bones!" And wait impatiently for the cries of children coming home from school - our signal to get up. I was always very anxious, fearing that grandma might not wake up at all. She seemed so old, she couldn't be far off death! I now realise that she was in her 60s, far younger than I am now!
She rejoiced at all my successes, at school and later at university. But when I took my finals in 1946, I knew she was very ill. I hurried to see her. She sat up in bed and laughed with me. And because I'd started smoking, accepted and smoked her first cigarette. Reassured, I went back to London to get my results. Grandma was never able to rejoice with me over my greatest achievement. She died during my brief absence.
Years afterwards, I learned the amazing truth that Grandma wasn't my Grandma at all. Mother was the illegitimate daughter of someone I knew as Aunty Nelly. Grandma adopted her in infancy and brought her up as her fourth child, much younger than her own. After wrestling with this strange truth for some time, I managed to accept it. But I decided it didn't make any difference. The motto on the bedroom wall simply took on new meaning. Grandma may not have been really my relation. But she was truly my friend. And she remains my Grandma to this day.
