by Paul Magrs
They had a telly quite early and they were proud of it. The programme he was on about was, of course, Coronation Street. I never saw my granddad. My mam used to call him ‘my dad who would have been your granddad’. He died at the end of that week. When he called Jean about the telly, he started to cough, and when the fit passed he heard Jean wailing in the kitchen and saying she’d turned blind.
They got the doctor straight in — doctors were different then, they came out. Jean said she sat on the chair in the scullery and wouldn’t move. She could smell the nicotine, the thick yellow of the doctor’s fingers as he waggled them in front of her face, but she couldn’t see them. And she could smell the kippers, which, it turns out, were off. She would never shake the idea that offish kippers had robbed her of her sight. While the doctor was there, all she could think about was the awful smell. “I worried he’d think I’d wet myself in shock.”
She stopped seeing things until 1979. She was at her daughters’ weddings, five of them shared out between three sisters. Never saw a groom, a gown or a flower spray. She couldn’t look at her grandchildren, whose number steadily multiplied over the years. She sat in her stiff-backed armchair holding baby after baby, staring straight ahead, smiling a funny smile. In 1979 I wasn’t quite ten. Mrs Thatcher had come in and we were living in Darlington, my mam and dad and me, in a beautiful Victorian house in the terrace by the park and the Arts Centre. We had space for a granny flat downstairs, which my parents argued about. Living in that house, my mam said, was one of the only times in her life when she felt she had arrived somewhere. Set into the wail up the stairs we had fish tanks brimming with exotic fish, which Dad collected.
One day in 1979 Nanna Jean turned up in Darlington under her own steam, which was unheard-of. She had come over thirty miles in a taxi and had to pay a fortune. But, unflustered, she stepped out of that cab all dressed up in a new suit, fashionable and pastel blue, with a ruffled collar. Her hair had been eased out of its usual bun, coiffed up and dyed amber like Mrs Thatcher’s. When we opened the front door and stared, we realised that her eyes were wide open and she was looking straight back at us. Twinkling, even.
“It came back! My sense of sight!” she shouted. “It’s like the scales have fallen from my eyes! Look at your faces!”
The years had dropped off her, too, and it was a sprightly, somewhat raffish Nanna Jean that inspected our house and ourselves. She cast a quick glance around the granny flat we’d hoped to convert for her, sniffed and said it would be impossible. She could never live with us. We needn’t worry about her.
She spent the eighties having her home in Hyde Street modernised. New windows, inside loo, bit of a conservatory. The yellow wallpaper went in favour of big, cheerful floral prints, borders and dado rails. She even took the nets out of the windows and fitted venetian blinds. Then she took a big interest in the new colours that had come in for make-up. Almost cruelly she ribbed her daughters for not keeping themselves up to date. For letting themselves go as they headed for middle age.
Nanna Jean started going out. She got herself a gang of cronies she went dancing and gambling with and the next thing was that they all went on holiday together. She went all round the world. She started in Marrakesh at the age of sixty and she’s still going strong. Trogging round bazaars, having continental breakfasts in places I’ve never heard of. She’s filled that little house with knick-knacks from all over and you can tell each one has a story behind it. Every jade sculpture, every pot and carved little effigy.
After Mam and Dad died when I was eleven, Nanna Jean took me in and set busily about looking after a teenage boy. Feeding me up, jollying me along. As it turned out, I never took up that much energy in the looking after. I wasn’t as demanding as some.
I’ve still got a lot of stuff at Nanna Jean’s. I wake in the back room, look around, and it surprises me, the stuff I’ve got. It’s funny. Photos of school friends on the walls in little frames, which she has left up. There’s even a picture of Vince with me in about 1987. We’ve both got hair with streaks, gelled up. It was taken here, that picture. She used to let him come and stay at weekends. She must have known what we were up to.
I moved out to my uncle Ethan’s shop when I was eighteen. Back to Darlington, to live alone above a taxidermist’s. It seems wherever I live I’m surrounded by exotic things.
Nanna Jean didn’t miss me, I don’t think, when I moved out. She started travelling for longer periods to ever more far-flung places. Then, on a white sandy beach in Australia, she did her hip in. I didn’t ask what she’d been up to. She had one hip replaced and then, a year later, the other one followed. “That’s cooked my goose,” she said to me, sitting up in her hospital bed. Bupa, of course. She voted Tory all through the eighties; it was the only note of discord between us. She went through this again that day on her Bupa bed. “What you don’t understand, Andrew, is that they’ve sorted things so that ordinary people like me can buy our own houses and do what we like with them. It’s free enterprise. It’s a very important thing. You’ll see that. And, actually, I do think the pendulum’s swung too far. On lots of issues.”
At eighteen I would feel myself blush and go cross and have to leave the room. But this time I felt obliged to stay until the end of the visiting hour. “You’ll see, you’ll see,” she said. “It’s human nature. Maggie’s got it right. The first right thing she did was take away the free school milk. That’s setting the bairns up wrong, thinking they can get something for nowt.”
It always got back to the free school milk and how it bred a generation of ingrates. That was my mam’s generation. Her sisters were remarried, doing very nicely, thank you, with six cars and seven bathrooms between them, both living in the south with different accents. Nanna Jean still couldn’t quite approve of them. Full of the spirit of free enterprise they might be, enjoying holidays in Tunisia and all the rest. “But the joy has gone out of them!” Nanna Jean moaned. “Before they’ve even hit forty!” My parents were killed in the first plane ride they ever took, to Hong Kong. They had been on Bruce Forsyth’s Play Your Cards Right and won the holiday. Only Mam was above Nanna Jean’s criticism. She was an angel.
I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose a child. Sometimes I think it hastened Nanna Jean’s reinvention of herself. As if regaining her sight and seeing her daughter die were things to make her seize what remained of her life and shake it for all it was worth. Every time I come here and wake in this room full of my old things, I think about this stuff. I look at the wardrobe of clothes left behind. I always had too many, none of them quite right. I thought I was a funny shape. Every Dr Who novelisation Terrance Dicks ever wrote, about two hundred of them, are lined in a bookcase on top of which stands an almost complete set of Star Wars figures. Only Princess Leia is missing. Every time I’m here, going over all these old thoughts, I think, if Nanna Jean thought the generation after her, her daughters’ lot, were wasting their time, footling it all away, then what must she think about my life?
At twenty-four I’m sitting up in bed wondering what to do with the Lemsip I’ve let grow cold and toying with the bare Action Man I’ve found under the bed. Listen to his joints squeal!
Then she pops her head round the door, smacking her lips to get the fresh lipstick even, pulling on some lilac gloves and asking, did I want to come into South Shields with her? She had an old friend dying she felt she ought to visit and there were a few things to pick up for tea.
On the Metro going into town we have the following con-versation. I say, “I like this train system. It’s like a little London.” It’s homely, I think, with a map that isn’t at all complex, and much of it, unlike the tube, runs overland. The Tyneside Metro whistles and shunts over scrubby waste-land, through docks and estates, across town centres. And there are thrilling moments when you glide on bridges over the Tyne. All the trains are an off-yellow colour, that of the juice in the cheapest of baked beans.
“You haven’t been to London much,” she says and it�
��s not really a question.
“No,” I say, knowing full well that Nanna Jean can’t see the point of London or the south of England at all. The south is where she has to pass through on her way to travel the world. Gatwick, Heathrow, these are the south to her and they are just waiting rooms, stepping stones. Everything in the whole world, she says, you can find here in the northeast. Now that she’s been everywhere, this is her solemn declaration. More than once I’ve sat on the Metro as we’ve rattled across Tynedock and she’s told me without a glimmer of irony that all human life is here. Any human drama can be played out in South Shields. There’s room for everything, she’s said.
“I thought you’d end up going to London,” she says. “You lot often do that, don’t you?”
And I don’t know what she means. She might mean young people generally, or she could mean queer fellers specifically. And now there is an ironic cast in her eye as she sits opposite me, bouncing slightly on her seat. Oh, I’m not out to Nanna Jean. Whatever that means. I can’t make that phrase sound right in my mouth. That I’m out to anyone at all is more by luck than design, I suppose. Easier just to be self-evident, no questions asked. But sometimes you want more. You want questions, interest, you want — I suppose — explicit acknowledgement. I want Nanna Jean to ask about Vince, now, on this day out; have I seen him, how is he, will he be coming back to me? I want her to divine, with her wise old womanly instincts, my unhappiness and to tell me I was silly, insane, lucky or entirely right to get involved with Mark Kelly, the tattooed man. I even want to tell her about his tattoos. Nanna Jean’s husband, my granddad as would have been, was in the navy and he probably had tattoos. We could share that.
“You don’t think about going to London, then?” she says.
“I’ve thought about moving,” I say. “I wanted to last year.”
“Ah,” she says simply, gazing out of the window at the grey shelf of the sea. In that ‘ah’ I can hear as much understanding as I want. She’s given me that much space. It’s true, though, I have thought about moving to somewhere bigger. I was going to go to Edinburgh and live in the gay village part of town, wear tight T-shirts and go out dancing every night.
She changes the subject.
“It was in the Gazette, the day before you came. They’ve closed down Lampton Lion Park. You used to love it there.”
I wince because I can’t remember and I’ve always wished my was memory better, especially of those years. I have that sharp digging in my stomach again. A stitch, trapped wind, a claw in my gut.
“When you were very small we took you round the park. Your little face pressed against the back window. Your dad was going mad because the filthy baboons were jumping all over the bonnet, pulling and twisting at the windscreen wipers. Your mam just laughed and laughed. She threw back her head and laughed until the tears rolled down her face, she was always like that. Screaming at the monkeys’ pink little things sticking up. We were held up by one of the rhinos standing right across the road. Ten minutes and it wouldn’t budge, wetting all over the tarmac. Imagine wetting for ten minutes! It scared us. Your mam said it looked like it was made out of rock.”
I could picture Nanna Jean as she would have been then, unseeing and buttoned up hugely in her thick winter coat. We would have had to describe to her everything she is describing to me now.
She says, “What you loved best was the big cats.”
I flinch.
The train is whispering and clunking into South Shields station.
“How big they were. You kept telling me, in ever such a serious voice, ‘Nanna Jean, the big cats are as big as this car.’ They came right up to the windows. And you gave a yell, I remember, because this one pushed its face up to the glass. A big cat’s face filling all of the window, your mam said. And you howled that it was staring right at me, its nose inches away from my nose. Of course, I couldn’t see a thing then. I just stared back. That stuck in my head, that story. I thought you would remember.”
“No,” I say. “I’d forgotten completely.”
We get out. The passengers around us are mostly old women who get to travel anywhere on Tyneside for five pence daily. Whenever I have been in London it surprises me how young and busily energetic all the commuters are. Nervously watching stations notch by. The ladies on the Tyneside Metro system spin their train journeys out. They want to miss their stations on purpose for the fun of going back the way they’ve been. Sometimes they have their knitting with them.
We walk about town. All my muscles ache they feel the lack of exercise. I feel stretched and then left alone, not knowing how to relax. And my pockets are full of crumpled toilet roll. This miserable cold, expressing itself in a stream of snot as we go round the shops. We look at ladies’ slacks in Marks and Spencer’s because Nanna Jean wants something comfy to wear on the plane to Corfu. We have coffee in Minchella’s, an ice-cream parlour that’s been there for years. The sugar cubes are wrapped in twists of white paper. I go to the loo to get new tissues. All my old ones are like papier-mâché. Some bloke in the loo is looking at me sideways. I hurry out.
It was funny to see Nanna Jean like that — indecisive and
fluttery. We spent an hour walking the streets while she ummed and aahed, trying to talk herself out of seeing Iris, her friend.
“We know what each other looks like. Why do we need to see each other? We’re both on the phone.”
I gritted my teeth and wanted to ask, Why did we come out, then? Why did you dress up, lilac gloves, best shoes and all, if not to go and see your best friend?
“They reckon she’s turning yellow. Her skin has turned yellow all over and she has to sit by the phone, ready to ring out.” Nanna Jean shuddered. “I couldn’t abide that. When it comes to my turn, Andrew, don’t let them let me deteriorate.”
With that she trotted into the Shields museum, where she thought we might waste another hour or so. Inside it had been made into Catherine Cookson Country, a sign said. It was all reconstructions. Waxwork people dressed up as the 1930s on Tyneside. Milk carts and horses and kids with whips and tops. Nanna Jean clicked about on her heels with a glum expression. It was echoing and cool inside and we talked in reserved tones. There were racks of Catherine Cookson’s novels on sale. Nanna Jean had read all eighty.
“They say she’s a wonderful woman,” she whispered, gazing at a blown-up photo of the author in a bed jacket. “Ah, look at her wrinkled old hands. She gives every penny she earns to charity.”
The main attraction turned out to be an indoors recreation of Hyde Street and how it was in the 1930s. This was news to Nanna Jean. She turned the corner into a dimly lit hallway and her feet scraped on cobbles. “Well, you bugger,” she gasped and instinctively drew her hand-bag in under her bosom. “This is like being on This Is Your Life.”
Beyond the street there was a cross-section of a house: the back parlour, the scullery. “Look at the old stove,” she said. “We had a cat die in ours. Oh, look!” It was her house before it was modernised, before she had gone blind.
After that, emerging blinking into the street, we decided to head up the hill at the top of the town. We could have a poke around the Roman remains. I was interested in that kind of thing, wasn’t I? She was harking back to a school project I did at twelve, but I didn’t let on I wasn’t interested.
The Heritage people had downed tools for the winter and the half-remade fort was quiet and still. We got up to the top with no bother. Looked out at the town. The view of the sea and the docks still took my breath away. I said, “Imagine being a Roman soldier, the wind here shushing up your leather skirt.” She smiled.
I asked gently, “Should we go and see your friend now?”
Nanna Jean sighed. “I suppose we should, if she’s expecting us.” She was clasping her handbag, I noticed, upside down. “It’s not that I don’t want to see her,” she said. “Every time I do, though, she looks worse. It reminds me of the way things go.”
As we walked back down she told me ho
w her other friend, Minnie, was the first to know of Iris’s illness. Iris had visited with tea and cakes and vomited blood on Minnie’s new three-piece. The stain wouldn’t come out. Minnie said Iris had dropped to her knees to help scrub it up. After that she stopped visiting people. Nanna Jean said she couldn’t look at anyone ill these days. She’d seen enough of all that business.
Iris’s skin was almost olive in the late-afternoon light. After hearing Nanna Jean’s lurid reports, I’d been expecting this poor old woman the colour of custard. She lived above a pub that she used to run, but that was all over now and it was a fun pub these days. While we ate our sedate tea with her, we could hear the video games and the jukebox downstairs. Iris had laid on tinned-salmon sandwiches cut in white triangles. Nanna Jean looked impressed and relieved. We ate sandwiches and angel cake and sipped tea almost wordlessly while someone in the fun pub kept putting on that Billy Joel song ‘I Love You Just the Way You Are’.
Nanna Jean popped off to the bedroom to try her new Marksies slacks on. I was alone with Iris and suddenly aware of a rank smell.
“I’m not sleeping in my room now,” she told me brightly. “I sleep in my chair. And, oh, sometimes I do feel heavy.”
There was a fruit bowl made of shiny metal wiring on the sideboard behind her. The fruit had turned brown and deliquescent, the shapes all humped into one, spreading into a puddle through the wires.
Nanna Jean came back to show off her slacks and we admired them. She kept them on for the rest of the visit. “Did your nanna tell you that we’re related, Andrew?”
Iris perked up suddenly. She had flecks of white bread-crumbs on her lips. Her voice was rather posh, I thought, gentle and restrained in comparison with Nanna Jean, who, scarlet-faced and embarrassed by something, was braying out when she spoke. Iris went on, “I’m some kind of auntie to you, I think.”
