Lockdown Day 12: Friday 3rd April, 2020

Grandma is sitting in a large chair in the centre of the bay window, silhouetted by the matriarchal sun. The armchair dwarfs her. She was only ever five feet tall. And that was before she shrank with the passing of the years. Always a force of nature, though more a chastising storm than a cheerful sunny day. She has outlived her husband and nine brothers and sisters through alcoholism, seething poverty, trench warfare, emigration, invading Europe, disease, gang strife, hunger and simply the struggle to achieve a better life. And as the century winds down she is now outliving her sons and daughters. Aunt Vivien is the first of her daughters-in-law to pass although she has already buried a daughter and two sons, my youngest aunt and two uncles. She has collected a near century of dead, almost everyone she has ever known. Yet even as this happens, clan MacAlba grows and spreads ever further, while she watches and says little.

  I remember when I was a cocky twenty year old, been there, done that, knew it all, nothing anyone could teach me, I was painting the outside of her house and she made me lunch every day.  Always home-made oatcakes and barleyed Scotch broth. We sat and talked, mainly me answering her questions about what I’d been up to, reassuring her I was staying out of trouble. I knew she was happy for the company although mum traipsed along dutifully every day to make sure she was comfortable and make her tea.  

  On the last day I finished the coalhouse around noon and we sat down early for our final lunch. She talked far more about herself than before, about turn of the century Glasgow, about growing up in teeming Brigton, two rooms for thirteen children and two adults, losing two brothers before they were 6 months. About two world wars. Losing brothers at Ypres and Picardy, then her second youngest brother in Madagascar to the Vichy French a war later gave her an interesting take on the pain, the loss and the futility. She never blamed the Germans – they didn’t know any better she said – but she struggled to forgive the French. A bit harsh I felt, as I learned young this grayscale world shades wildly between the black and white. About aeroplanes. About television. About a man walking on the moon. On the moon! How was that even possible? Her deep incredulity that man had walked where only gods had walked before. And about Granddad. Fifteen years he had been gone and for fifteen years she had prayed for his soul. She was no devout Presbyterian but she prayed daily still. Now she prayed to join him. The years, the pain, the loneliness had sapped her spirit and worn her down.

  It came as a shock. She was immutable, immovable, immense. My Grandma with the heart and strength to survive where so many of her family had succumbed now looked to join them. I was twenty, the losses I had known, though hard, were minimal in comparison, accidental rather than constant threads in the inextricable mosaic of life. This was way beyond my understanding. It undermined my certainty that life is the most precious gift we ever receive. That it should be revered and respected and relinquished only with your last fighting breath.

What did I know? I was twenty. Despite living in the same spartan house for 60 years she had seen so much more of life than me. If I thought about it, I certainly didn’t want to go through the poverty, disease, wars, hunger, loss, struggles, pain she had known. A hell of a price to pay to be a stronger person. I just wanted to be happy.

  I didn’t know if this was a temporary depression or a desperate plea for help. I had no clue what to do. But being Grandma, she had it all in hand. She told me not to tell anybody. It was between us. Something she had needed to say, couldn’t say to mum and now she had finally said it out loud she felt a weight lifted. I shouldn’t tell anyone because they would just worry, especially mum – who she always treated harshest but loved the most, though she could never let that show.

  Mum did her important growing-up in Canada, evacuated in 1940 from the shadow of indiscriminate Nazi bombing of industrial towns, torn from a war-scattered family to spend her teenage years in Ontario. She returned a totem stranger, child of New World hopes and habits, curious customs, odd dreams of the future, and an otherness at odds with my grandmother’s Vicorian worldview. Five short decades of future life defined by five long years of separation.     

  I never told mum or dad or any of my uncles and aunts, never told anyone what grandma said. And she’d never speak of it again. But it tore me up at the time. A decade later there she is, still going strong and outliving everyone she ever loved.

  Granny is sitting beside her.
Child of a very different world, a moneyed Manchester upbringing rather than the slums of teeming Glasgow. Torn from the same cloth as Aunt Vivien, though no blood relation, she was constantly topping up the glass of her busy social life. Drinking and playing cards and phoning dad at three in the morning for a lift whenever her taxi (believed mythical by some) failed to materialize. Even though she knew he got up for work around five.

  Where Grandma was austere and private, calm and Presbyterian, Granny was Episcopalian and extrovert, suffragette and extravagant. Never seen without her face on even in her nineties, never dressed in less than her best. On the face of it, the two of them should never have got on. But they do. They’re sitting close, both talking away at each other but I’m not sure if either of them are listening.

  Perhaps that’s the secret.