Gran first learned that she had cancer in 1980. She told nobody. My mother, and her sister Alice, took a very short time to suspect something serious when they knew Gran had visited her doctor and they could see a lingering tiredness in their mother-who quiet stubbornness was her strength. Eventually Gran being tight lipped about her health became the give away. But she had good reasons to keep the diagnosis of the cancer to herself. When she was bringing up her daughters, they learnt from her the malapropism 'Where there is a will there are relatives.'. Her silence let the rumours mutate and spread, rather than stop them. Until Gran's officially let it be known that, yes, she had cancer but no she not accepting treatments for it. Had any of us who had unintentionally spread the rumour looked into what treatments there were for cancer locally, then they would have found that the NHS might have treated the young people with it in some far off city hospital. But medication for pain relief aside, the old had to take care of themselves, particularly if they valued the independence of their own homes.
At the time Gran confirmed her cancer my relationship with my parents was somewhere between being pliable and an awkward stand-off. My late teens had been difficult for them. My parents had endured several different stages of attempted self determination on my part, all of which they tolerated whilst what they really wanted was for me to get a job that would instantly make me middle aged and have no interests, because interests cost money and take time they thought they could organise better. They did not want me to be vegetarian, did not want me to be secretary of anything, least of all my local CND, and they definitely did not want me taking 'O' levels whilst on the dole. What they wanted me for me was an employer who remove any ideas, drive, and character, that they had failed to remove, and for the employer to pay me handsomely enough for that so as to set me up to start on the property ladder. Not that they ever expressed their hopes for me in that way.
I regularly visited a friend whose parents were kind enough to him to give him a whole room for him to use as a music listening room and a place where his friends felt welcome. The parents themselves had no interest in music. The centre of Graham's music room was the hi-fi which was set up like a shrine with everything to play on it, tapes and LPs, either side. Corner lighting, scatter cushions and two big settees set against the walls of the room made it ideal. And the house was the end house of a terrace so no neighbours were disturbed by his playing music at volume.
My last act of imagination was for me to buy a hi-fi like his, though without the room to go with it, the hi-fi was very little of what I wanted. It was the last straw for them when my parents learned how much I'd spent on the hi-fi. But by then my parents had drained each other and me of initiative, enough for me to be find organising myself difficult. Shared houses for rent were rarely advertised. With my parents wanting me to be in well paid work and on the property ladder, rather than renting and on benefits, their utopian fantasy was becoming my anxiety dream. But I eventually did find a house to rent at short notice.
This was only part of the personal conflict I was enduring prior to this utopia-on-the cheap twenty first birthday party. I had also endured completing a youth training scheme which my trainer had moulded into it being a knocking shop for his personal pleasure, where the problem was more the lies he told himself and made me act out then the fact that the lies were about his sexual appetite. The worst part for me was that I could easily be a bad judge of character, and I thought him to be a friend when really he was an opportunistic sex pest. No matter that sex pests need good cover to disguise themselves....
With my head bound by all those conflicts it was easy for the women in the family, Mother cousin Heather and a few others took over so easily and hatched their plan of having a garden party where Gran and Grandad had to be present as guests of honour, at an event supposedly for me. This became the last of the family gatherings that Gran and Grandad attended. Gran who enjoyed being in a garden seat in the sun, amid the noise and pointless milling about. There was a stillness about her that was affirmative, which I would have appreciated more if only I could have screened out everybody else. As it was I found the event somewhere between mildly and extremely excruciating. The best part was the relief of it being over. Gran and Grandad got out of the village and into the town less and less often after the party.
Four years after the diagnosis, and fifty years after they bought it, Gran and Grandad sold their home, two workers cottages knocked into one, 'Maydene', and moved to a first floor council flat for the elderly in the village. The house had even been named after Gran, her first name being May, and the house name being Maydene. Still, nothing was said about how it was a sign of an era closing. Perhaps less was said about the sale of the house because of the serious structural repairs that they could not afford to get done, which must have reduced the sale price of the house.
Alice, my mothers sister, was one of the few in the family who had a car and driver, in the shape of her husband Terry. Alice was the one who took it upon herself to both move Gran and Grandad down the street, to their new flat, and to clear the house to make it fit for sale. I only heard about the sale of the house and the move after it was all over. I'd often found Alice to be secretive and high handed, and been unable to say this out loud. I only heard after it was done of how Alice and Terry had cleared the house and furnished the flat with furniture etc from the house kept enough of what Gran and Grandad owned to furnish the new flat that they moved to, and in the interests of 'efficiency' cut Mother out of the process. Mother would have found it hard to be as ruthless and efficient as Terry and Alice, but still she would like to have been invited to help. On the other hand, Mother was a hoarder and being denied the chance to take items away because they held personal value when her house was already bunged was temptation averted.
Nearly forty years on from the sale of Maydene, and nearly fifty years since I last visited there, I can say that I found the clutter of that house to be welcoming. The height of the doorways 'quaint', the cool of the pantry under the stairs with the 'milk safe' at the back, the range, the rag rugs and comfy light armchairs in the living room all seemed friendly. Gran must have made the rugs, herself, when she and Grandad had moved into the house in the 1930's. If I could have saved anything and somehow found a future life for them, then the rugs are what I would have rescued. But then I was pre-judged within the family for falling on the sentimental side of materialistic thinking. If ever I liked an antique, then I liked it for it's aesthetic value and my connection with who it previously belonged to, more than the price it would raise in an auction. More than any material heirloom of Gran's, I had somehow followed her faith. I was the only one n the family to do so.
To be directed to Chapter Eight please left click here.
No comments:
Post a Comment