Dear Erp:
It is raining here today, but humid. I knew it would rain. I watered my garden yesterday.
I have just returned from the library. I am a member of eight libraries - i.e. Invercargill, Gore, Dunedin, Otago University, Chinchilla (Aust), Brisbane, Lane Cove (Sydney) and Toowoomba (Aust). When I was seven years of age, my old Scottish grandmother took me to the library (she was on her way to the pub where she spent her Friday afternoons drinking gin and water) and enrolled me. After that I went three times a week and got three books each time until I turned twelve, when I moved to the adult library and began to step up my reading. I don't know what I would do without a public library. It is my first port of call wherever I am in the English speaking world. Today I got The Thirteenth Tale, by Diane Setterfield, (recommended by yourself, Erp), The Old Devils, by Kingsley Amis, and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (which I have read before but need to re-read) plus three videos - Finian's Rainbow, I Claudius, and Agnes Browne.
My old Scottish grandmother therefore has a lot to answer for if it is true, as my father said many times, that sitting on one's backside reading is sheer laziness. My grandmother's name was Martha and her parents owned a dairy farm in the days when cows were milked by hand and Martha had worked hard until the time she was sent at 18 to look after her recently dead elder sister's six children. (She married her brother-in-law and eventually had six children to him herself.) She brought up 12 children, working on the farm as well, then eventually bought and ran a hotel, which hotel catered for up to forty paying guests. She nursed her husband, a daughter-in-law who died, a grandaughter who also died (aged eight), and then, old and useless, came to live with my family. She had the front room and I promptly assumed proprietal rights and moved in with her. She stayed two years, when I was aged seven and eight. Then she moved out again and went to look after her widowed son and Faye, his fourteen year old daughter. I was furious and performed beautifully, crying and screaming for her until threats of 'getting something to really cry for' quietened me. I never really liked my parents after that.
Grandma seemed to have two sets of everything. One set for around home, and one set for going out. That included teeth and rings. She was never idle. She knitted her skirts and tops, and made rag rugs. She smoked Capstan Cork tipped cigarettes until she died at 84. She drank gin and water and got very merry every Friday afternoon with about half a dozen other old pensioners, but the rest of the week she made herself useful (particularly to me, I made sure of that), and taught me to knit and let me play her 78 records on her wind up gramophone and rifle through her belongings. Every night she made Milo for us both (with two malt biscuits) then we climbed into bed together. This was a feather bed, by the way, a rarity today. The only demands she made on me were that I was quiet (I was, sitting there reading) and that I did not move around in the bed (which I did not, knowing I was onto a good thing). I thought I was set for life.
Grandma never seemed to mind my watching her, (with fascination as she prepared to go out on Friday afternoon - first her corsets, then seamed stockings, a knitted suit, going out jewellery. black wide fit shoes, a fur coat, hat, gloves and handbag, and going out teeth) but I watched with admiration, never with a critical eye. I never thought one day she wouldn't come back.
I look at old women today with their grey hair and comfortable clothes - my grandmother was never like that. She had her hair dyed jet black until her final stay in hospital. She was short and broad and walked with the determination of a sumo wrestler. She rarely smiled (except when not sober after an afternoon on gin and water) because everything in life was serious for her. She had a doggedness, a sort of slogging on or battling against the odds, an air of never giving in or giving up, a sort of understanding that no-one wins, death waits for all, but in the meantime you must do the right thing, and keep up standards.
I think living with my grandmother for those two years set the pattern for my old fashioned behaviour, that is to say my love of routine and peace and quiet, from then on. I always think of her when I hear 'Lily of Laguna' or 'At the Balalaika' (big hits in her youth and often played by me on her wind up gramophone), when I see laxative chocolate (I ate a whole block found whilst rifling through her drawers thinking it was real chocolate and it tasted okay as well), when I see a fox fur draped over a woman's shoulder in an old film, when I knit (it wasn't easy for her, me being left handed and her being right handed, she had to reverse things to teach me), and many other things when my grandmother lives again - in my memory. I wish I had her back just long enough to tell her even after over fifty years, I still miss her.
With nostalgia,
Jude
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2 comments:
Beautiful. You're lucky to have had at least one person to love and admire in your life. I had no such one and have sorely missed it.
My earlier comment was brief as I was on my way out on errands.
Firstly, I wasn't accurate that I didn't have anyone to love and admire as a child. There was my baby brother, who with the exception of my husband, is the only person on the face of the earth I would trust with my life and wonderful uncle by marriage. The poor guy was married to my father's oldest sister, a mean, nasty, childless (thank God) woman who envied us our relationship.
He was a wrestler and somewhere there's a picture of him in a wrestler's pose that made him look ferocious. Hardly the picture that was worth a 1,000 words because he really was an old softy. When he retired, he became a butcher and opened his own small grocery store in Bridgeport, Connecticut then as now a blue collar town on the Long Island Sound. One of my prized possessions is the scale he used to weigh purchases for customers.
He was about the only adult who paid any attention to me and in fact, he let me drive his big 12 cylinder 1939 Cadillac on the highway when I was only about 10 years old. A thrill so stupendous that I can't think of anything else remotely analogous to it.
Libraries. Ditto. When the big day came that I could enter the adult's section of the public library, I remember getting dizzy with the number choices and actually started the fiction section with the A's (that's how I discovered Isaac Asimov) and just kept going.
The film you mention, Agnes Browne, is unknown to me.
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