granny's refrain

I disliked Mona Lisa when I  saw a print of it in a library book, not for the usual childish reasons based on  crappy artistic merit, or the adolescent shock of having an opinion to call my own, but simply because the portrait, and in particular the smile within the smile, a silent world, reminded me of grandmother. Her father was six-feet four inches tall, broad shoulders and narrow hips, dark pinstripe, and bowler hat, he carried a walking stick, not because he had a gammy leg, or stalked the pavement as if stepping in and out of cow dung, but because that was what bank managers did.  I’m not sure granny believed in her fall. She lived in a council house in Shinwell Avenue with the great merit of having its own inside toilet. That wasn’t a given then, not for grandad, not for men that worked as navvies in the yards. Reality’s calling-card had come with marital sex and a succession of son, son, son, daughter.

My earliest memories are of that four-in-a-block the house my own mother was born in. Before visiting grandmother I was torn apart and scrubbed pink in the kitchen sink, until I shone, prodded and pushed, before I was ready, into an ironed sack of  print dress, my ginger hair tamed, so it changed colour and looked like a pokey-hat. In contrast, I was not overly impressed by grandmother’s well-groomed appearance and I showed her my shiny black shoes so she could be impressed with me as my mother was. That was my first imprint of grandmother’s delicate face, hint of perfume, and the Mona Lisa smile. Her skin clear, without wrinkles, was unusual for a woman of that time and age, when even the young were born middle-aged and taught not to make a fuss about it.

‘Don’t do that!’ Grandmother spoke softly, but directly. And although I can’t remember what I was doing, I stopped at once. I had a foreboding that the evil eye was unblinking, pale blue in colour, and existed outside story books and fairy stories.

Grandmother despite child bearing was not dumpy like her neighbours through the wall and the married women across the road, but slim as a nun and tall as her father. When she walked, the world took notice of her upright shoulders and her downcast eyes. She sat upright during dinner, in one of the four high-backed chairs with red cushions, and waited for the opportunity to disappear into herself and chew her food when no one was watching. Her dining table smelled of beeswax, shining as if it had come out of a kiln. A bowl of fruit, plastic apples, oranges and a yellowing banana, centred the table.

She baked dumpling for Christmas and birthdays, hot from the oven. The thickness of a sixpence, wrapped in silver paper, the secret ingredient that kept me chewing long after the urge to stop. Once I threw up and mother slapped me hard across the face and apologised to her mother on my behalf. I cried tears of repentance, and begged forgiveness, but secretly, I was glad, because then I thought we’d be barred. I’d cultivated a secret self, a devilish and impish child that longed for school and the regular beat of that enclosed order so that we didn’t have to visit the house in Shinwell Avenue, and I knew that made me different.

We were Protestants and there was much in grandmother’s house that was unfamiliar. Grandmother disliked gossip and liked long silences. She had to be coaxed to talk of family matters and I soon picked up that her family were Jesus, Mary and Joseph. They overran the house. Durer’s hands appeared like ectoplasm from the walls. Venetian blinds, fringed, fireproofed mauve curtains kept Jesus’ bleeding heart above the fireplace radiating a spidery yellow light from giving grace to the graceless on the streets outside that drank all the money God gave them and deserved everything they got.

The Mother of God, Virgin Mary was always blue and had eyes that could follow you around corners. She had a tendency to appear in the Balkans and war zones, courting prayers and Novenas,  and  even made a debut in plastic, Mother Most Pure, in the bathroom, her crown a removable blue lid, a reminder to wash your hands properly and don’t think about touching yourself anywhere below the waist.

I’d sympathy for poor St Joseph, perpetually carrying Jesus as a growth on his back, no sex and no space left between heavenly hosts jousting on the mantelpiece, relegated to the boy’s toys and a back bedroom, left for dead on the windowsill, beside a trophy-sized portrait of St Francis and the mirror image of Padre Pio on the other wall.

Grandmother had a habit of turning the wedding ring on her finger again and again. Her room, a grotto, invited you to peek in. It had a peculiar smell where she kept a lighted candle burning red and cosy, with a knocked-up  prie-dieu made of pieces of ill matched four- by- two, slightly askew. Six crucifixes to keep out even the most determined Dracula, rosary beads and a missal on the chest of drawers. Statues and other holy figures gawping. But grandfather’s side of the bed was denuded. On his bedside table an ashtray filled with blackened douts.  

Grandfather was such a small man that worked such long hours and spent his other time, God knows where, if he went to heaven nobody would have been sure to notice. He believed in his wife and that was enough. Didn’t expect her to change and that was miracle enough. She believed in the old-fashioned Creator that rewarded virtue and never tired of judging and punishing and saying I told you so.

‘I told you so’. That was a refrain I became very familiar with.