Читать книгу The Real Me is Thin - Arabella Weir, Arabella Weir - Страница 12

During all these early years of upheaval, disapproval, and the growing sensation that I wasn’t ‘good’ enough, there was always Granny She-She, my mother’s stepmother. Despite living in Scotland, miles away from London where we now lived, she had a hugely reassuring effect on me.

Every single time I bite into a slice of bread spread with raspberry jam I’m hurtled back into the freezing, stone-floored larder in Granny’s house in Melrose. I’m standing close by her as she puts the last touches on the scores of jars she’s just filled with her home-made jam. She covers each differently shaped jar, accumulated over the years, with carefully cut circles of greaseproof paper secured in place with a rubber band, followed by circles of remnants of faded material. Each one is then tied tight with old bits of ribbon she’s saved. On the top goes the handwritten label: ‘raspberry jam’, and the year. The jam’s still warm and glass around the tiny bit of space between the top of the liquid and the lid steams up. The jam’s been made in a ‘jam pan’ using raspberries Granny picked on her daily walks in the countryside around her house, Eildon Bank. ‘There we go, all done,’ Granny says, stepping back from the cold stone draining-board that fills the back larder, now covered with jam jars of all shapes and sizes. She puts her arm around me, gives me a loving squeeze, and I draw in that familiar smell of Granny – slightly musty Chanel No. 5, combined with many-times-washed lambswool. Adored and adoring Granny She-She, the first relative to show me unconditional love.

My mother’s mother, Eilidh, died when my mother was only 18. The story my mother told was that her mother ‘let herself die’ once she and my grandfather had retired from the boys’ school they ran, apparently saying she had ‘nothing to live for without her boys’. At this distance it’s hard to know how accurate an account that is. But whatever the circumstances of her mother’s death, it’s fair to say that my mother, an only child, had always felt unloved and untreasured by her parents.

Mum was brought up in the school – St Mary’s, a boys’ prep school of about 60 pupils – in Melrose, a pretty Borders town around 35 miles south of Edinburgh. The school had been established by her mother’s father in an attractive, large house with generous grounds.

By the time Mum was born in 1926, the running of the school had been handed over to her parents, and she was born in the house. It was a boarding school, and most of the boys saw their parents infrequently, since they lived either in colonial outposts or on remote farms too far away for even weekly visits. Mum’s parents took the view that the boys’ needs, particularly emotional ones, took precedence over those of their only child, the thinking apparently being that her parents were on hand whereas these boys had ‘no mummies’.

Shortly after her mother’s death, my mother went to university while her father went travelling to recover from his loss. When he returned he married a childless local woman, Sheila Fairbairn, who acquired a stepdaughter in my mum, whom she cherished right from the start, calling her ‘a gift’. And so it was that when Mum had kids, Sheila became, naturally, our Granny She-She, the abbreviation formed by her niece, who’d been unable to pronounce her proper name. Mum’s dad died in 1958, but Mum stayed close to her stepmother for the rest of her life. This was easily done, since Granny was the most generous-spirited, loving person imaginable. She was warm, cuddly, and physically affectionate – something that we, aside from during those few early years spent in Innes’s care, were not accustomed to. However, she harboured a dark secret, the evidence of which she kept closely guarded – so closely that I only found out about it after she died.

As a family we usually holidayed in Scotland, incorporating dutiful visits to both our grannies. First to Granny Nancy’s, Dad’s mother in Dunfermline (where we stayed as short a time as possible since she was so difficult and unfriendly), and then on, much more willingly, to Granny She-She’s. Later on, from when I was around nine years old and with different school holidays from my brothers, Mum would send me up to Granny’s alone.

It is those treasured times I recall best. My mother would put me on a coach at Victoria Station, nervously asking a random old lady if she’d keep an eye on me. An interminable 11 hours later Granny would pick me up in Galashiels, about 4 miles from Melrose, which was the closest the bus stopped to Granny’s small town. Coaches were very slow in those days and didn’t have toilets on board. Given the cost of coach travel compared to trains, it stood to reason that virtually all the passengers were OAPs, meaning the driver was required to stop every ten minutes for what was graphically announced over the tannoy as a ‘toilet visit’. Only the excitement of seeing Granny made the journey tolerable – that, and the knowledge that the kindly old lady into whose care I’d been entrusted would, upon seeing the meagre supplies Mum had given me, take pity on me and share her sandwiches with me or, better still, cake. Those old ladies always had cake – perhaps not the best cake, but cake is cake, especially to a child for whom cake has recently become off limits. Even half a slice of stale Battenburg was always gratefully received.

Mum would grudgingly concede that I probably had to have ‘something to eat’ during the long journey. She would equip me with a rancid piece of fruit in a wrinkled old plastic bag, still slightly moist inside from God-knows-what, an ancient, smelly Thermos flask filled with watery juice (‘not too strong because squash is full of sugar and that’s the last thing you need’) and, if I was lucky, a piece of sweaty Cheddar wrapped in re-used clingfilm.

But it was all worth it because everything was lovely at Granny’s. There she’d be, waiting for me at the bus terminal, with a slightly anxious, searching look on her face until we caught sight of each other, when I’d hare off the bus and throw myself into her arms and she’d squeeze me tightly. Granny felt like soft wool. She always wore the same thing – a ‘good tweed skirt, made to last’ and a twinset made of lambswool (or cashmere if she’d found a decent second in the local tweed merchants’ sale). Granny was healthy and strong from lots of hearty walks, but, like her sweaters, everything about her was soft and giving.

We’d go back to Granny’s house on the local bus and as soon as we walked through the front door I could smell the boiled mince and overcooked potatoes. Ever thoughtful, Granny would have prepared the meal before setting off to collect me. Boiled mince and overdone potatoes aren’t most people’s idea of a lovely supper, but to me this was a feast: hot food in plentiful quantities prepared by someone who loved me and wanted to feed me. Granny’s food tasted like what it was – unconditional love. It had all the necessary ingredients: care, forethought, and kindness.

Looking back, what I appreciate now is that Granny loved me enough to think, in advance, about what I might need following a whole day’s travelling on a coach which reeked of old people’s wee. Granny didn’t want me not to eat; she expected me to want to eat. Me eating didn’t make her cross. She thought I was entitled to be hungry. I loved her mince and potatoes. I loved anything Granny made, and some of her cooking was absolutely heavenly.

Nothing in the world comes close to her drop scones, still warm from the griddle, smothered in her raspberry jam, sweet and packed with fruit. And she always made cucumber sandwiches for tea. This was proper tea – cucumber sandwiches, followed by something sweet, usually the drop scones and jam. A proper tea to tide you over until supper. Thinly sliced cucumber sprinkled with a little salt on buttered bread. A snack so simple yet so tasty. When I slice a cucumber now and get a whiff of that fresh, wet smell, Granny’s teas by a roaring fire in her living room (even in summer – this was Scotland) immediately spring to mind.

Every morning of my stay, before I woke up, Granny would creep down the windy staircase to the cold kitchen. There was no central heating – she wouldn’t have dreamt of going to such an indulgent expense. She’d make two soft-boiled eggs with toast soldiers, accompanied by tea for her and, for me, orange juice in a small can that tasted like aeroplane juice but which I loved anyway. She’d set the breakfast on a tray laid with a linen mini-tablecloth and bring it upstairs, where I’d hop into her bed to eat it with her and chat about what we’d do that day. It was the cosiest, safest place I’d ever been. I was with someone who wasn’t irritated by everything I did or said, and who fed me un-questioningly. I was never nervous with Granny, never worried that I might make her cross. She used to say she loved hearing me cry out, ‘Granny, where are you?’ – explaining that, as she’d never been a mother, she’d never expected to be a granny, and when she heard me call she was reminded of how lucky she was.

Granny’s dark secret, which I knew absolutely nothing about at the time, and which makes Granny’s capacity for unconditional love and consistent nurturing even more remarkable, was that she was an alcoholic. Granny was drinking so much that she had to get her booze delivered from the next town along, once she’d realised that the store in Melrose had noticed she was regularly ordering an unusual amount. As Granny knew only too well, a small town is a hard place to keep a secret and gossip abounds. Tongues would have wagged, and I could just picture Mrs Laidlaw, the grocer’s wife, arms crossed over her pinny-covered bosom, hissing into the ear of Mrs Muir, the baker, ‘See, Mrs Walker hasn’t had visitors for a good long while but that’s another bottle of gin goin’ up there with her messages and it’ll be the third this week!’ It was the norm to do your ‘messages’ (shopping) by visiting each shop, choosing what you wanted, and the goods would be brought up later in a box. That way there was a fair chance everyone would know what you’d ordered. Granny was a proud person and an active member of the church, St Cuthbert’s, situated just behind her house. She sang in the choir and did the flowers for all the weddings, funerals, and christenings. I can’t imagine she’d have found it possible to talk about her dependency with the minister.

Yet Granny’s drinking never affected my visits. She always seemed calm and in control. We had long walks with her beloved Labrador, Pani, and chatted away to each other happily, never short of topics, mainly the important question of what I wanted to be when I grew up (nurse, pop star, bride, then actress). Granny was never, ever cross or short-tempered. Every night, she’d fall asleep in the armchair by the fire while I watched TV – but all grown-ups did that as far as I knew, drunk or otherwise. So, here was an alcoholic, childless woman of strong Presbyterian faith, that most unforgiving of religions, the only notable joy in her life having been her marriage to my grandfather and the acquisition, thereby, of a cherished stepdaughter and four beloved grandchildren. Yet she harboured no rage, no nastiness, no frustration – outwardly anyway, since clearly the drinking was her antidote to whatever turmoil was going on inside.

Mum adored Granny, too; we all did. But when, after returning home from one of my stays with her, I mentioned to Mum what a good cook Granny was, Mum laughed and said, ‘Sheila is many lovely things, but she is not a good cook.’ I know now that what Granny cooked was wartime British meals, the very meals from which Mum’s generation was trying to escape, but at the time I was confused and upset. To me Granny was the perfect cook. She was my idea of that, at least: someone who provided regular food without resentment but instead with enormous love and affection. And, above all, she was happy for me to eat it. This was the complete opposite to Mum’s increasingly terrifying reaction to my need to eat.