Gran

I don't remember meeting my gran. She just appears in my memory, sitting in my living room with the rest of my family with Jamaican ginger cake on the table and Last of the Summer Wine on the television.
As a kid, she was frustrating in many ways. She was someone I had to change for. I had to speak louder. I had to sit quietly. We even changed as a family, eating ginger cake, sitting around watching Last of the Summer Wine. We never watched ITV or Channel 4 – gran would not watch anything with adverts. She used to breathe audibly.
Her house was big and cold, with an outside toilet. I never remember the television being on. She would bring out a tray of biscuits and tea. She always drank tea from a cup and saucer, not a mug. On one side of the living room wall was a large mural that featured a painted bridge and a painted cottage beside some faded trees. Sometimes we used to play i-spy and granny would spy with her faded eyes cuckoo clocks and picture frames. Mostly we used to play a card game for hours. Always Beggar-My-Neighbour. I have never played that game outside of granny's house.
Her kitchen was cold, but her indoor bathroom was colder. It was on the second floor and I never went any higher. There was Imperial Leather soap in her bathroom and smoker's toothpaste. With the soap I used to create a lather to form bubbles between my fingers and hand. She taught me that.
For awhile I kept having time off school. I wasn't being bullied. There were other reasons. I got taken to my gran's for her to look after me while mum and dad were at work. On top of her mantelpiece was a photo of me and my brother and sister. There was another photo of my cousin's son. There weren't any other photos.
At some point we stopped seeing granny. The only explanation I have is religion. It didn't make sense to me then. It doesn't make sense to me now.
My secondary school was a couple of minutes from her house. One day I walked there after school. It had been three years since I had seen her and after I pulled the doorbell gran came to the door and was surprised to see me. I went in, she brought out tea on a tray. The tea was served in a cup and saucer, not a mug. We played Beggar-My-Neighbour. When I left she stood in the doorway. She said that she hoped she would see us again soon. As she watched me walk off with my school-bag slung over my shoulder, there were tears in her eyes. When I told my dad, he said that it might mean things would change and we would see her more. It was another five years before I saw her.
A couple of weeks ago I went to visit my mum and dad. They went out to an evangelical church and I started to look through an old photo album that had photos of my gran. I knew it was her because it had her name beneath the photos - otherwise I would not have recognised the young woman who the camera remembers with a smile and a laugh - when I knew her she did not laugh that often.
Her husband, my grandfather, was in the navy. When his ship was sunk he was presumed dead. He survived and spent the rest of the war in a prison camp. During the war gran became a Jehovah's Witness and sheltered passive objectors in her house and the town and her husband did not forgive her. When I knew her, I didn't know anything about her. She was only tea-cups, strange murals on the wall, games of i-spy and Beggar-My-Neighbour. She was speaking clearly and watching Last of the Summer Wine. She wasn't watching bombers flying up the Exe estuary. She wasn't a young woman who never knew her real father. She wasn't love, hurt, pride or dignity. She was granny. Poor old granny.
In 1998 my family moved away from Exmouth. I stayed in the area with friends. Every so often I would pass by the nursing home my gran had been moved into. After I passed by it one too many times to ignore, I finally went in. Contrary to what I'd been told, she remembered me. The nurses brought us tea and we played Beggar-My-Neighbour. When it was time to go the nurses were full of smiles. They encouraged me to visit again soon. They knew what I didn't: granny was a pleasant but lonely old woman. I said goodbye and I never went back.
Six years later I was told that granny had been taken into hospital. She was ninety-nine years old. For as long as I could remember, people had said that she might not have long left and she had ignored them all and kept on going. I had come to think of her as invincible. All the same, I was told that this time might really be it.
I was living in Brighton but visiting friends in Devon and I was only a few miles from the hospital. I caught the hospital bus and found her ward. I wasn't sure what to expect, only that I wanted to visit. I had to visit. When I got to the ward I looked in. It was a ward of the nearly dead. Beds were filled with old women with their heads tilted back on the pillows, mouths agape, barely a breath between them. I didn't recognise any of them. They were not young women. They were not smiles or laughter. They were not mothers, sisters, aunts or grandmothers. They were tubes, withered faces, labouring eyes; a century's last lungful expiring on a hospital bed.
Before anything more could happen, before I could recognise her, before I could be recognised by any of those sad eyes, I turned and walked as quickly as I could out of the ward and out of the hospital. And I didn't go back.
A month passed. I tried to find a reason why I hadn't gone in that ward. I couldn't find one. Another month passed and granny was still with us. My inability to say goodbye to her on the ward became less important. It didn't matter that I had not gone in there. Gran really was invincible.
And then I got a phone call.
'It's your gran,' then there was a pause. That same pause that everyone must hear at some point in their life. There must be a name for that pause. Pregnant, it is not.
She was dead. I was more upset than I thought I would be. I was angry as well. I shouted at a God I had long forgotten about. Her death was unjust; she was not doing any harm. It was as simple as that. As unfair as that. She was peacefully living and she should have continued in that way forever...
I went back to Exmouth today and I stood outside her house. The doorbell had been changed and there were model boats in the window. She lived in that house for nearly sixty years.
And now she's gone.