Grandmother's House

My grandmother didn't give sweets and chocolates like the other children's. Instead she made stews of rotten apples and rhubarb crumbles with souring cream.
"Waste not, want not! She said.
At Easter we bought her a special kind of chocolate egg with no sugar. I did not ask why. This was something that happened to old people who did not smile.
Every now and then, I would attempt to join in one of her crosswords, piles of which would always be stacked up ready to tackle on the square yellow Formica table in the dining room. The crosswords were hard. One puzzle out of every three I might pick out one clue I knew the answer to. Grandmother always got it first.
Grandmother lived in a place a long, long way away. Even the name of it was long, Nor-thum-ber-land.
The house was always very quiet. Grandmother did not watch television; she did not care for music. There was a small black and white TV set in the lounge; later replaced by a larger, up-to-date colour model as a Christmas present from my parents.
It remained switched off.
I don't remember anybody else ever visiting. No neighbour popping round for sugar, no phone call from a friend.

There were two things I liked about Grandmother's house. One was that the house was built strangely so that when you walked in the front door you were already upstairs and then had to walk downstairs to get to the bedrooms: A topsy-turvy house.
The second was the garden. The garden was kept stored away on a special shelf in the kitchen in an old pink and white striped biscuit tin. Most of the paint had scratched away to reveal the rusting gold beneath. The grass of the garden was a hard square of green felt; the soil was brown plastic lumps with holes in which to plant miniature flowers with a small plastic hoe. There was a tiny white picket fence and a wee brick coloured wall, intricate plastic trees and bushes and a tin foil lake for the little ducks to swim on.
It was the garden I would be thinking of as we made the long journey by car for our biannual visit.

Inside the topsy-turvy house there was always a pot of freshly brewed tea waiting for us, kept warm with a hand-knitted cottage tea cosy. Even if we drove up the gravel drive-way two hours late, the tea would still be freshly brewed, as if she knew the exact moment of our arrival.
In the bathroom, the unused toilet rolls would have their modesty covered by the gown of a knitted doll. The dolls stared at me as I sat on the toilet, wrinkling my nose, breath held to avoid the musty smell, thinly veiled as it was with perfumed talc, that I came to associate with age.

"Hello petal, Grandmother would gush, kissing my cheeks as I screwed up my face.
Grandmother only ever referred to people as 'Petal', 'Pet' or 'Dear'. Her husband when he was alive had been 'Darling'.
"Darling?
"Yes darling?
"Have you put the kettle on?
"Yes darling.

My grandfather called me 'Poppet'. I don't remember ever having heard anyone else call a person 'Poppet'.
My grandfather was one of those people who had always been old. Even in pictures of my mother's childhood, even at his own wedding, his hair was white as cumulous cloud. There are rumours it was red in his youth, but that seems almost unthinkable.
There are pictures too that show him smoking, cigarette in hand, thoughtful expression, looking slightly left of camera; thin wisps of smoke curling round behind his ears. My grandmother detested smoking, a habit she forced him to give up. None of her daughters have ever smoked.
This was a woman who got her own way.

I only remember my mother and I driving the long journey south to Northumberland, leaving dad at home to his computers.
My mother would spend hours alone writing, leaving grandmother to look after me.
The silence of the house gave it a mystical quality and I rarely dared make a sound. In grandmother's day, children had been seen and not heard. Instead, I would play quietly while grandmother pottered around the garden weeding, or the kitchen making her stew or crumble or fruit cake.
There I would sit, bent legged and expectant, knees burrowed into the leathery flesh of the stool, elbows digging at the Formica table while Grandmother fetched down the familiar tin.
I would open the tin and remove each of the contents one at a time, laying them out on the smooth yellow surface.
One day when I'm older, I will have a garden like this

Mummy is out at a meeting. Grandmother bustles around the quiet house. She goes out to the garden, soon reappearing with arms full of apples, bruised from a bumpy landing on the gravel drive. She washes each one carefully as I steadily position a white picket outline around the green felt square.
A rhythmic thood, thood, thood can be heard as sharp metal slices through the fruit and onto the dull wood of the chopping board.
I use the metal spike of the plastic hoe to embed a row of daffodils above the tulips that already adorn the bank of the shiny foil lake. I place a duck in the centre, hesitate, and put another down next to it.
Nothing should ever be lonely.

Grandmother is layering apple slices around the bottom of a white oval dish while I arrange a circle of trees around a miniature bench when the telephone rings. The dull monotonous ring sounds shrill and urgent over the hush of the house. Grandmother draws a sharp intake of breath, then gathers herself, removes her apron and wipes her hands before moving into the living room to answer the phone. I hear her voice muffled through the door and open it a crack to hear more. As the receiver goes back into its cradle, I dash back to my stool - in my hurry knocking a protruding corner of felt. Daffodils, tulips, ducks, trees and foil come crashing to the hard kitchen floor as Grandmother appears ashen faced in the doorway.
We both look horrified.
She doesn't look at the garden. Instead she pulls up a stool across the table and climbs carefully onto it. She looks into my eyes. I never noticed her eyes before, how they're the same brown as mine.
"Joanne, she says, "mummy wants me to tell you something¦