GRAN
She was a gardener. My early childhood was full of her. She walked the earth with a casual sadness, the mother of seven children and the Grandmother of dozens and later the Great-Grandmother to dozens more. She smelled of Imperial Leather soap, Nivea hand-cream and home. She had a glass cabinet that was filled with her “crystal” animals and she delighted in the colours when they caught the sun through the window and manifested rainbow shards around the room. She also kept other ornaments in the cupboard like little stones children had given her and holiday trinkets made from shells or cheap plaster; “Tenby”, “St David’s”, “Pembrokeshire”. She loved Wales.
My Gran was the generation of Grans from an era now lost to Enid Blyton books, Laurie Lee memoirs and The Darling Buds Of May. She was warm and soft and gave you strong cuddles and had a working Cotswoldian accent, she wore a headscarf, had a shaky hand and made proper roasts and dripping and sprinkled bran on her dinners. She loved music and always had BBC radio 3 or 4 on, she loved her obnoxious dog (Skippy) and kept Asparagus Ferns and Money Trees and Spider Plants and made the best hot chocolate in the entire world by tipping the milk from pan to cup ten times over the sink to make it silky and frothy. I still haven’t mastered it… or her roast potatoes… Home grown of course.
On rainy days she let me choose a record or tape from her collection and we’d sit in the living room and make things or draw or read. My favourite records were The Wombles, Captain Beaky, Lonnie Donegan and Jeff Wayne’s War Of The Worlds, which was such an unusual departure from lightness for my Gran. I found a mild thrill from terrifying myself looking through the artwork and listening to the story. Perhaps she found the same thrill. She’d always get me to “make mum something” often involving fashioning holders or bags for tiny perfume sample bottles or guest soaps or bath salt squares which she kept in her “smellies draw” and was full of fragranced items from Avon (who she loved).
My Gran was at her happiest outside. We would wake up early and take “Skippy” for a walk heading out through the back garden past her apple trees and squeezing down a “secret” path from the side of her garden and come out at the garages. From there we’d walk for miles under clamouring starling-strewn street Rowans bright orange berries crushing under our feet in autumn. We’d walk out past the allotments, out past the new housing estates and Industrial units and out into the English countryside skirting the river Chelt. We’d meander and find things; insects in the summer, butterflies and moths rising from lush meadows, beetles and grasshoppers dangling from stems, Gran knew all the wildflowers and always returned home with a little posy of beautiful things we’d collected. In the autumn we’d hunt giant field mushrooms and fill bags to bring home and eat them for tea, fat and succulent and full of flavour (probably dripping). In winter we did less walking but Gran would obsessively feed the garden birds and we’d spend whole mornings watching them from the kitchen window in companionable silence, the Robin “watching you to tell Father Christmas if you’ve been good”. Gran loved Christmas and two weeks before would fill her home-made snowman (old sweet jar covered in cotton wool) with individually wrapped penny toys which Grandchildren were allowed to dip into when they visited. She also kept boiled sweets in a plastic ice-bucket pineapple, it was a year round thing, but at Christmas the sweets went from chocolate limes, toffee eclairs and murray mints to Quality Street in their shiny wrappers.
And then her garden. A picture postcard of post-war British gardening. Pinks up the path edges, four stout and gnarly apple trees with a swing, a lawn on the apple tree side of the path an allotment and my Grandfather’s canary aviary on the other. It wasn’t a huge garden but it was full! Straight rows of vegetables, neat lines and tidy corners and a well maintained compost heap, nothing wasted. My Grandfather did everything in a suit and smoked a pipe. Roses adorned the walls of the house and the yellow one with giant thorns I used to adorn myself with by licking the backs and sticking them to my face to turn myself into a thorny beast and me and Gran would pluck the rose blooms to make rose perfume “for mum”.
As with many millions of people it’s my Gran who instilled the love of gardening in me, not in an obvious or deliberate way but in a way naturally beautiful and osmotic. She gardened, so I naturally gardened with her, even if it was just collecting snails to release into the fields later or creating mud pies while she dug over beds or harvested curley-kale. Every time I work with plants my Gran is never far away. I am often walking in her quiet company in the long grassed, wild flowered, crab-appled gardens of my childhood. It pleases me to know that there are so many of us out there walking with the spirit of our grandparents in the liminal gardening realm. I imagine it in golden late summer sunshine, warm and scented with salves, roses and roasts.
