by Sharon Maas
Gran sat down on the edge of her bed, and patted the mattress next to her. I sat down. She took my hand, closing dry, skeletal fingers around it. Again I was reminded of a claw.
‘Darlin’ why you din’t write you old Gran for so long? Ten years, except for Christmas cards. You don’t love you old Gran no more?’
The voice was wheedling, cracked. I stuttered some excuse. When you hit your teens you grow out of things to say to an old lady you never met, and the spaces between letters had grown longer, and finally they had stopped altogether.
‘I still got all you letters! Right over there!’ She pointed to the smaller of her suitcases, the one that had arrived safely with her as hand luggage.
‘That one, the black one. Bring it over here, open it for me.’
I got up and lugged the case over. It was an old-fashioned one, without wheels, of battered old leather. I cleared some space, laid it down flat on the carpet in front of the bed and crouched down to open it.
‘It’s locked,’ I said, and looked up at Gran. She was fumbling with a chain around her neck.
‘Come, child, take off this ting for me.’
The ‘ting’ was a bunch of keys. I got up and pried the keyring off the chain, leaving a single golden cross. She rubbed the cross gently between thumb and forefinger before dropping it into her neckline. She took the keys from me, inspected them all. There were at least six, two of which were tiny suitcase keys.
‘One of these,’ she said. ‘Try them out.’
The suitcase lock sprang open at the first try. I opened the lid. Several shoeboxes were packed together in the case, the gaps between them filled by more stray pieces of clothing.
‘Good. Now take out everyt’ing for me. Lay them out on the floor.’
I did as I was told; Gran’s voice brooked no disobedience or hesitation. She watched in obvious satisfaction as I laid the boxes in a row on the carpet.
‘Good,’ she said, when I was finished. ‘Now put the valise away.’
Again I did as I was told, stepping around the albums and boxes and items of clothing on the carpet, and placing the empty suitcase back in the corner. Gran leaned forward, bending precariously low down from the bed, shuffling the boxes around. She opened one, peered inside, grumbled what must have been some kind of Guyanese curse, and opened another. This time her face lit up in pleasure. She straightened up and again patted the bed beside her.
‘Siddown, child. Lemme show you somet’ing.’
She reached into the shoebox and removed what looked like a bundle of letters. This she handed to me with a smile of pure delight.
‘Go on, open it!’
I removed the cracked rubber band that held the bundle together. I already recognised the writing on the envelope: Mum’s. I knew what was coming. Gran took the top envelope from the bundle and with fumbling fingers, removed its contents. She unfolded the one-page letter, and handed it to me in triumph.
‘There! Read!’
My eyes glanced over the first few lines, but Gran spoke again.
‘Read it aloud!’
I started again, aloud this time. ‘Dear Granny, I hope you are well. Thank you for your letter. I am fine. Mummy is fine. She sends you her love. Yesterday we had the school play; Alice in Wonderland, I was the rabbit. It was fun. Mummy took a photo of me in my rabbit costume, I will send it next time. Here is a photo of me with Daddy, ice-skating. I fell down three times but then I didn’t fall down any more. On Saturday I am going to a friend’s birthday party. She is going to be seven, I am three months older. Please write soon. Inky.’
I looked up, and found her beaming at me. I smiled back politely.
‘See! I keep all you letters. Every one. You want to read some more?’ She reached for the next letter in the bundle. I put my hand on hers to stop her, and shook my head.
‘No, it’s OK. It’s great that you kept them. So those boxes are full of your other grandchildren’s letters?’
Her eyes sank, and her smile disappeared. She took the bundle from me, and fumbled the rubber band back around it. She put it back in the shoebox, replaced the lid.
‘No. My other grandchildren don’t write. Nine grandchildren I got, and only one did ever write me letters, you. The others – nothing. Now Marion’s children, they don’t count, they grow up in Guyana, they know me. But Neville and Norbert – them children never write me. Just Christmas cards, birthday cards. And photos. Lots of photos.’ She sucked her teeth, a long drawn out choops sound. Then she chirped up again, grabbed my wrist, and said, ‘Hand me that album!’
She pointed to one of the albums on the floor, half-wrapped in a lacy nylon petticoat. I leaned over, picked it up, and tried to hand it to her. She made an impatient flinging motion with her hand.
‘No, no, not that. The green one.’
I handed her the green album. She sat back in satisfaction, laid the photo album across her lap, and opened it. She pointed to the first picture on the first page.
‘You!’
I knew that photo, and all the other ones in the pages to follow. Gran flipped through the album, showing me the familiar pictures of me growing up, exclaiming over the ones she liked particularly. I knew them all; Mum had them in her own albums.
‘One t’ing I got to say for Rika,’ Gran said now, ‘she never write sheself, but she make sure you write and send photos. What she tell you about me?’
That last was a shot out of left field, in a different tone and a different tempo, stripped of nostalgic chattiness; urgent, probing. I looked up to meet her gaze, and this time there was nothing of the mirth I had seen there before. What I saw this time was – anxiety. I didn’t know what to say.
‘Why – well, nothing, really.’
‘You mother still vex with me, after all these years. She pretend nothing wrong, but she vex bad. She didn’t tell you the story?’
I shook my head. ‘What story?’
Gran searched my eyes for a while, then seemed satisfied.
‘Nothing. It was nothing. Long time ago – over thirty years. She was only sixteen. You mother always take t’ings too serious – she too sensitive. She don’t forget or forgive. It was nothing, everyt’ing sorted out. But she don’t write and she don’t never come back home. Just Christmas cards.’
I was embarrassed. ‘Mum always wanted to go home,’ I explained, ‘she always talked about Guyana, she calls it home. But it’s a long flight; she never had the money.’
‘Don’t give me that. Y’all was rich, rich. Y’all did go on big holidays; Kenya, Mauritius, America. But she never bring you home.’
It was true. There had been a few years of wealth and opulence; Dad had even invested in a Docklands penthouse, just before he went bust and his plans to move there dissolved into thin air.
‘She said – she said Guyana had gone to the dogs. She said it was no place for a holiday. She said, when things get better, she’d take me.’
But trying to excuse Mum only made things worse.
‘Holiday? Since when is going home a holiday? She cut you off from you own roots, and that’s a crime. You don’t know nothing about where you come from. Not true?’
I wanted to say, I come from London. There are my roots. That’s where I grew up. A London child; a South London child, to be precise. Streatham, Norwood, Crystal Palace. Croydon: that's my habitat, my territory. Those are my places, the localities where I prowl. I know the smells and the sounds; I’m sure I could find my way around blindfolded if I had to, and I rarely stray beyond my boundaries, because the sense of home begins to fade, and I start to feel slightly insecure and get fidgety. I will if I have to, of course, and it's fun to take a trip to the West End or Notting Hill or Brighton, or even America. But here is where I feel at home; where I get the sense of belonging. Yes, this was home. When people ask me, ‘Where do you come from?’ (and they do, because they think I look ‘exotic’. Christ. I hate that word!) I say Streatham, and stare them down. Because that’s where I’m from. Not this forei
gn place across the ocean, just because my mother grew up there. Not Guyana.
What did I care about some half-baked ex-British colony in South America? A country that can’t get its ass off the ground, its act together enough to make itself known, like Jamaica or Barbados? I wouldn’t have minded telling people I was from Barbados. Or even Grenada. A lovely Caribbean island, where everyone wanted to go. But Guyana? No one had ever heard of it. They all thought it was Ghana. A country at the very Edge of the Known World, and most probably a dump. Mum had hinted as much often enough. Not a place you could be proud of.
But I couldn’t tell Gran that. I knew what she meant; something nebulous, subtle; home being where the heart is, that kind of clichéd stuff. I nodded helplessly. She let the silence thicken between us, and then once again cut through it with a different voice, a different mood.
Gran fumbled in the big suitcase again and emerged with a bottle of some yellow liquid. The label on the bottle said ‘Limacol’. She splashed some on her hands and patted her cheeks and neck with it, then handed it to me. I took it and looked questioningly at her and at it. ‘The Freshness of a Breeze in a Bottle,’ the label stated.
‘Go on, go on! Use it!’ she said. So I did as she had done. It was like Eau de Cologne, fresh, tingling but in this case, limey. I quite liked it, but now I knew where Gran’s distinctive smell came from.
‘You mother was always a queer one,’ said Gran. ‘She was a Quint, a real Quint. Eccentric, them Quint boys, all a bit loopy. ‘Cept one, me husband Humphrey. And Ma Quint, of course. Granma Winnie. But she wasn’t no Quint.’
I felt something soft, smooth and warm press against my calves. It was Samba. I bent down and picked her up, placed her upon my thighs and stroked her shiny black coat. Usually, Samba would snuggle into my lap, meow gently to ask for affection, and, when it came, show her appreciation by purring. Today, she simply stood up and padded slowly over to Gran’s lap, where she circled three times and settled into a cosy ball. She didn’t even have to ask; Gran’s hand was already there, sliding over the sleek black fur.
‘She never goes to strangers!’ I exclaimed.
The only response was Samba’s smug and steady purr as she contentedly kneaded Gran’s thighs. Gran stroked her absentmindedly, and didn’t reply. She pointed to a red, much older album. ‘That one.’
I handed it to her, and she opened it at the first page. There was only one picture on it, a sepia photo of five young women standing in a row, five beautiful young women in long dark skirts and white long-sleeved blouses, the buttons up the front rising into stiff high collars. It could have been a photo of Victorian students from a Ladies Finishing College – except that all the women were ebony-skinned.
‘Me mother and she sisters,’ Gran said. ‘Mother in the middle.’ She pointed to her mother, then, one by one, to the four other girls. ‘Henrietta, Josephine, Penelope and Elizabeth. The Williamson girls, my Aunties. All dead.’
She turned the page. ‘Me and you mother,’ she said of herself holding a toddler in a white frilly dress. ‘Me eldest child. And look, me and your Grandad, with your mother.’
She and a handsome, fair-skinned young man were sitting next to each other, a baby on her lap. The man wore a dark suit and a bow tie; she wore a white dress just covering her knees. Hemlines had obviously shot up drastically between photos.
Then it was her, Granddad, and Marion, followed by several combinations of those four, occasionally with Mum in between, looking slightly lost. Towards the end, the new babies, the Terrible Twins, joined the group.
The photos stopped abruptly near the middle of the album, the last photo followed by blank pages. Gran picked up and opened yet another album. Here were still more photos, quite different to the first batch. Here, there were all boys. The photos were all black and white or sepia; totally vintage. I loved vintage. I took the album onto my own knees, and slowly turned the pages.
The photo on the last page showed a group of children, ranging in age from about a year to early teens. ‘The Quint brothers,’ Gran explained. It wasn’t obvious that the boys were siblings, as each was entirely different; some had fair skin and light hair, others were as dark as the Williamson girls. The toddler wore a frilly dress not unlike the one my mother wore in the family photos, so I thought it was a girl, but Gran pointed to this child first and said, ‘Freddy Quint.’ She pointed to the tallest, fair-skinned, boy. ‘Humphrey. Me husband.’
So this was my grandfather. Mum had never shown me photos of her family back home. I assumed she had none. I peered closely at the boy who would grow up to be my Grandad. All the boys wore sailor suits, Humphrey included, though he must have been about fourteen, far too old for sailor suits, even then, surely. The boys at the front wore knee-length socks and highly polished shoes or boots. Not one of them smiled. If not for the fact that some were as dark-skinned as Grandma, it could have been any group of English boys from that time, not mixed-blood boys from a distant tropical colony.
One by one, Gran named the rest of the eight Quint boys: ‘Fine, fine, boys, but wild. Dead and gone. ‘Cept one. Freddy now, the youngest, he was the wildest. Humphrey the studious one, my husband. Them Quint boys ...’ She sighed. ‘We lived round the corner from them, in Waterloo Street, me and me sister. You could see their house from my room upstairs. Handsome boys, all of them. Every man jack gone off to war. Look.’
She turned the page to show me a photo of the several young men dressed as soldiers, all lined up and smiling into the camera. There were more photos, of young men in uniform. Again, she named them.
‘Humphrey, William, Gordon, Charles, Leopold, Rudolph, Percy and Frederick. All a-them run off to fight Hitler. Except Humphrey. Charley, he get killed in Singapore. Freddy, now…’
But instead of telling me about Freddy, she flipped the page. There was a portrait of the man at the other end of the row, presumably the eldest Quint brother.
‘Humphrey. Me dear husband. Dead and gone.’
On the last page was a photo of a thin-faced white man with a walrus moustache, staring straight into the camera with pale eyes that, had the photo been in colour, would most certainly be blue.
‘Maximilian von Quindt,’ said Gran. ‘Quindt with a d. The first of the British Guiana Quints. A German; a zoologist who came to study turtles. He marry a black woman and drop the von and the d. All the rest come down from he.’
In spite of the obligation to remain youthfully bored by her old-lady ramblings, I was intrigued. I took the album onto my lap and leaned in, turned back the pages, peered into those faces, those eyes. Who were all these people long dead? They were the ones who went before me; if not for them there would have been no me. They had been living, breathing, moving human beings, filled with life and love, moved by emotions and passions, just as aware of their own lives as I was of mine, and unaware that one day in the distant future a young girl carrying their genes named Inky would be looking at their images and wondering about them; just as one day, perhaps, a hundred years from now, some descendent of mine would look at my image and wonder about me. The ephemeral, fragile nature of life on earth struck me like a hammer-blow – they were once here and now they were gone. And how many other faceless, nameless ancestors had gone before them? People of whom no photos existed; melted into the shadows of history! For the first time ever I felt a connection to the line of ancestry that went before me; my life was simply one little leaf in a huge spreading tree whose roots spread far into the past and branches would reach far into the future. A shudder of excitement went through me …
Gran snapped the album shut. ‘Everybody in that book dead and gone, except me and me chirren and you Greatuncle Rudolph, in Canada. Dead and gone, ashes to ashes. Ah well. We all gotta die one day. Now, child, hand me those albums over there. Those two t’ick ones.’
Something about Gran made you obey. I shook off my sentimental musings and got up, picked up the ‘tick’ albums she’d pointed to, and handed them both to her. They were each at leas
t two inches thick; one newer and the other older, battered like the suitcase. She opened the newer one. I expected yet more old photos, but I was wrong.
It was filled with stamps, most of them arranged in neat rows, but several of them loose and falling out, some in sheets or groups of four or five, some on envelopes, first day covers, bright, beautiful stamps, from all over the world. She knew the country names by heart, and pointed them out to me: Ethiopia. New Zealand. Iceland. Bolivia. She looked at only one or two pages before shutting it and picking up the old album.
This album seemed not just old but ancient. Its green cardboard covering was cracked and dog-eared, the spine fractured. But she touched it as if it were sacred.
‘The family heirloom,’ she whispered, and opened it.
I was disappointed. For an heirloom, the album held nothing of beauty, nothing of appeal. No beautiful foreign stamps, no first day covers; the stamps in here were all from British Guiana, and they looked cheap and insignificant, bland and musty in their monotony, primitive in their production. She pointed to one particularly ugly stamp on the last page.
‘Theodore Quint’s – your great grandfather!’ she said. ‘Very valuable!’ She launched into some convoluted story of its origin; I listened with half an ear.
‘A hundred and fifty years old!’ Gran whispered. ‘Very precious. Worth millions. An heirloom. I holding it for the next generation.’
She closed the album, placed a hand on it as if in blessing, then clasped it to her breast.
‘Very, very precious,’ she repeated. And in her eyes I recognised a new glint.
I’d seen it before, not too long ago, on the big screen. Gollum’s glint.
* * *
Later that evening I fled the house, leaving Gran to Mum and Marion. I slammed the front door, hurrying out to the pavement before Gran could somehow recall me. There I stopped, rummaged in my shoulder bag, pulled out my pack of pre-rolled fags and a lighter. I lit one, and, sitting on the garden wall, smoked it right down to the filter. That was good.
