Not too long after, my aunt moved to the coastal town of St Leonards and took Granny Annie with her. They lived in a bright flat with my aunt’s little dog, who could clap her paws and spin in circles. There was a commode in the bathroom, stacks of medication in the cabinets, and a walker that helped Granny Annie between her armchair and her bed. Still, that place was happy. Grannie Annie’s hair was always combed and oiled and braided into two thin braids, and my aunt dressed her in joyous clothes: a cardigan covered in crocheted fruit, or a huge straw hat that swept out around her face.
When my second son was three months old, I decided to interview Granny Annie about her life. It was the winter of 2022, late in the year. I took the train to St Leonards, my second baby in his sling. When I asked Granny Annie if she minded me interviewing her, she said Well sure, but why would you want to do that?
The answer I gave was that I thought her life might inspire my writing. The answer I didn’t give was that we were losing her, and I hoped to preserve what I could.
There is another answer, I think, which I wasn’t aware of at the time: Being with Granny Annie, who had been a young mother herself, was sort of like being with myself. It was a way to look at my future, as well as my past.
That day, I asked her about her mother’s death and father’s remarriage, about her time at art school, about her accidental pregnancy and shotgun registry office marriage, about walking out on her husband two years later on account of his abuse. And about moving to London alone, at just 20 years old, with her infant son.
But Granny Annie wasn’t forthcoming. I’d hoped she would be flattered by my project, but she seemed to find it exhausting. I remembered a time some years before, when I’d asked for her recipe for her spinach and feta pie, and she’d simply told me to Google it. Granny Annie is not a performer. She is uninterested in romanticizing. Also, I could see that remembering made her sad, or her inability to remember made her sad, or both. I gave up after an hour. We did crossword puzzles for the rest of the afternoon.
Forced to change tack, I lined up conversations with people who had known Granny Annie when she was young. I planned to build the story of my grandmother from the outside. I spoke to my aunt, who told me how Granny Annie had been as a mother, cycling around west London with bike clips on her flares and children hanging off the back. She told me about Granny Annie’s work as an art teacher, about the drawers at home filled with glitter, toilet roll tubes, ribbons and buttons.
My grandfather (Granny Annie’s second husband) told me about their year living on a commune in Philadelphia, which they left when everyone got paranoid and started buying guns. He told me about the macrobiotic restaurant he opened with his brother, where Granny Annie baked unleavened bread and designed labels for fruit-juice sweetened strawberry jam. He told me about their open marriage, about the girlfriends who’d moved in for extended periods, and about the hardcore punk-rock boyfriend that Granny Annie fell in with when the children were teenagers, who’d send a postcard through the letterbox every single day begging her to leave her marriage, which she eventually did.