My paternal grandmother was a really funny woman. Funny ha-ha as well as funny strange. It is therefore no surprise that I turned out the way I did.
She was the daughter of a fire chief. One of the earliest stories I remember being told is of my grandmother, decked out in her finery (she was going to a fancy event), sliding down the brass pole in the fire station. Rather daring under normal circumstances for a young lady in the early 1930’s, bordering on plain-dumb-stupid when your father is standing on the lower level watching his pride-and-joy coming down with her dress up around her navel.
She was always a great grandmother to my sister and I, and our two cousins. We loved spending time there, rifling through her cupboards and rushing off into her garden with as much Tupperware as our little arms could carry. She had a large lemon verbena plant growing up against her garage, and with the collective wisdom of all our young lives, we were determined to produce a perfume to rival Chanel. We would strip the leaves off her lemon verbena, and divide them amongst the containers, adding to them the essential ingredients for perfume – sugar, salt and water. We’d mix them like crazy and them bury the containers all around her garden in various spots, for the mixture to ferment and produce an award winning scent. Did we succeed? We never found out – our gran would painstakingly go through her garden as soon as we had all left and dig up all her Tupperware, no doubt lamenting the leafless nature of her verbena. And the next time we’d go back, we’d start again, determined to succeed.
My very first drunken episode was courtesy of this same grandmother. One Christmas, the clan had gathered at my parent’s house, and I’d been given the honour of sitting next to granny. Although, in hindsight, it may have been to look after her, but I digress. The champagne flowed and as it was a special occasion, I (all of four years old) was treated to some too in a liqueur glass. I suppose my parents had intended for me only to have one glass full, but dear old granny kept topping mine up along with hers, and it should come as no surprise that my parents watched granny and granddaughter (pushing a new doll’s pram that Santa had delivered) toddling down the road taking the scenic route from one side to the other (i.e. not in a straight line!)
She was completely mad and did things that blew my mind.
Like going hunting for mushrooms with me when the elastic in her panties snapped, and she calmly stepped out of them and rolled them up under her arm.
Or the way she would put little bits of masking tape with a name written on, on the back of objects in her house. I must say, it did make it very easy dividing up her goodies when she died, but I certainly did end up with lots of (weird) stuff that I had exuberantly “out-bid” my sister and cousins for!
Driving with her was an experience as I don’t believe she knew the value of a map book. Her theory was that as long as she was driving in the right direction, she was fine, and we should only start to panic when she told us to panic. I guess I’ve inherited this view as I firmly believe that all roads join up somewhere, even if they join up 50 miles away from where I am now.
She stabbed my dad once, when he was a boy. Apparently not on purpose, although knowing him as an adult, I can only imagine him as a child, and surmise that she “slipped”. She was carving meat and he was nagging around her, getting in the way and under her feet, when, in sheer exasperation, she raised her arm and drew it down sharply. Unfortunately, my dad was right there. And she’d forgotten that she was holding the carving fork. It plunged into his thigh – all the way. He still uses it today.
She was the gran who collected spoons, made endless pots of glue for us, out of flour and whatever other magic ingredient was necessary for us to cut up her magazines and paste the pictures all over her house. The gran who let us steer her Mini in the road while she worked the pedals. Who taught us to make kites. And the grandmother who always got the weather wrong and served cold meats and salads on the coldest days of the year. The one with the nicest rose garden, where a new rose was planted each time one of her pets was buried in the bed.
Yes, she was mad and she was nuts, but lately, I’ve started to use one of her maxims as my own. She had always said that “Life is a great game if you play it slowly” and I’d always assumed that she’d meant slowing down time or some such other sci-fi idea. It is only now starting to make sense to me. Things will happen in their own time. Sometimes you have to lose a couple of battles while winning the war. Picking those battles that you are prepared to lose is the hard part. And telling your A-type personality to go slow is almost impossible. But hey, it’s a great game!