The Tamesis
Soon after, my aunt moved to the coastal town of St Leonards, taking Grandma Anne with her. They lived in a bright apartment with my aunt’s puppy, which clapped its paws and spun in circles. There was a toilet in the bathroom, piles of medications in the cabinets, and a walker to help Grandma Anne move between the armchair and the bed. Still, it was a happy place. Grandma Anne’s hair was always combed, oiled, and plaited into two thin braids, and her aunt dressed her in cheerful clothes: a cardigan covered in crocheted fruit, or a huge straw hat that obscured her face.
When my second son was three months old, I decided to interview Grandma Anne to learn about her life. It was the winter of 2022, and it was the end of the year. I took the train to St Leonards with my second child in his carrier. When I asked Grandma Anne if she minded me interviewing her, she said Okay, but why would you do that?
The answer I gave was that I thought her life might inspire my writing. The answer I didn’t give was that we were losing her and I wanted to keep what I could.
There’s another answer, I thought, that I didn’t realize at the time: being with Grandma Anne, a young mother herself, was kind of like being with myself. It’s a way of looking at my future and my past.
That day, I asked her about her mother’s death and her father’s remarriage, about her time in art school, about her unwanted pregnancy and shotgun registry marriage, about leaving her abusive husband after two years. At only 20 years old, she moved to London alone with her infant son.
But Grandma Anne didn’t show up. I had hoped she would be flattered by my project, but she seemed to find it tiring. I remember one time a few years ago when I asked her for a spinach and feta pie recipe, she just told me to Google it. Grandma Anne was not a performer. She’s not interested in romanticizing. And, I can see that either the memory makes her sad, or her inability to remember makes her sad, or both. I gave up after an hour. We spent the rest of the afternoon playing crossword puzzles.
Forced to change tack, I spoke to someone I knew from Grandma Anne’s youth. I’m going to tell my grandmother’s story from the outside. I had a chat with my aunt and she told me how Grandma Anne, as a mother, rode her bike around west London with bike clips on her horn and the kids hanging on the back. She told me about Grandma Anne’s work as an art teacher and the drawers in her house filled with sequins, toilet paper tubes, ribbons and buttons.
My grandfather (Grandma Anne’s second husband) told me about the year they lived on a commune in Philadelphia and when everyone became paranoid and started buying guns, they left the commune. He told me about the macrobiotic restaurant he co-founded with his brother, where Grandma Anne baked unleavened bread and designed labels for juice-sweetened strawberry jam. He told me about their open marriage, about their long-term live-in girlfriend, and about Grandma Anne’s hardcore punk rock boyfriend who he met when the kids were teenagers and who sent a postcard through the mailbox every day begging her to leave the marriage, which she eventually did.
