My Gran

Why do you call it elevenses, Gran, when you have it at half past ten? Why don't you call it half past tenses? I asked. I miss my gran. Once in a while, every now and again, it would be wonderful to have one day with her again; one last day. I loved her. My brothers and my sister loved her, too, with her wobbly hands and wonky legs and how she had to come down the stairs backwards. As children, we of course imitated her genetic neurological condition, unaware of that which we copied had been passed on to us. She said seeing me being born was the most beautiful thing she had ever witnessed. Many years later, with small children of my own, Gran said I was like the daughter she never had. She had an understated way of making her grandchildren feel special and secure.

Gran always had special things, like cakes or chocolate marshmallows in foil. There was such a fabulous aroma of almondy Bakewell puddings as she pressed the tin against her chest and popped off the lid. If we timed it just right, she would sit us at the dining table while she waited in the kitchen for the milk to boil and the ritual of elevenses at half past to begin. The spoon scraping against the walls of the white china cup and saucer while mixing the coffee, sugar and blob of milk together was enchanting. The milk would boil and Gran carried the saucepan through, walking like a racehorse, lifting her feet high off the ground. She had to do that to stop herself from tripping, which is why she wore calipers on her legs when she went out and had to come downstairs backwards. The angry bubbles hissed against the sides of the pan, spitting like fighting cats. Fsssss. She had to carry it with one hand on top of the other, to steady the wobble.

My sister and I loved to go round and play. We were puppies in a garden of mischief. There was an inner lobby between the dining room and lounge. A curtain hung from a metal rail on the dining room side, which made a fabulous swishing noise when pushed aside. It was a den, a cozy place. We would lift the lid on the storage box Gran called ‘Humpy’ and dress up in the chiffon scarves, all neatly folded, inside it. Humpy was made from half an old wooden barrel with an upholstered lift off lid in brown vinyl. The cellar steps, behind a clunky door led off it. Gran had to take our dad, as a small, sleeping boy, down there during air raids in the war, while Grandpa was at work. He had been a policeman in the Second World War.

Routines. My grandparents were defined by them. Maybe that was a reason I, for one, felt so secure at their house. Predictability and a love of routine is a key element in autistic children. Without it, we can flounder and fail to function. It can lead to reactive behaviour, which most people, lacking awareness, would interpret as bad behaviour.

Gran and Gramps did not have a bathroom but they had a fridge. She bought frozen peas and they were so much nicer than the tinned ones we had we had at home and got moulds to make ice lollies for us. We had a bathroom, which was very much like a fridge in winter because nobody had central heating then. It was so cold. Running a small amount of water in the bathroom sink to see whether or not it would freeze overnight was an experiment I tried many times. It never worked. Somehow, the water was never there in the morning. Maybe the plug leaked.

Their toilet was outside, like ours. It was lined with polystyrene tiles in a cracked ice design, painted yellow. They always had toilet paper, which was somehow affirming. Special people had toilet paper. At home, we used to run out and mum would make books of newspaper and hang them from string. It annoyed me. Why could she just not remember to buy toilet paper? Many years later, I realized she probably could not afford it.

They also had a television and Gramps would watch sport on it every Saturday afternoon when Gran went shopping with her sister, down town, as they called Nottingham. My great grandparents had nine children, five boys and then four girls, one of which, Dorothy, had died aged six. Ivy passed away when I was a baby. It had been their family custom for new babies to be named by the older ones and the brothers called their youngest sister Florence Harriet but the girls wanted her to be Mary, which is how she came to have two names. Their use of language fascinated me. They would buy things like a ‘bit of cooked ham’ and said trews, or troosers, instead of trousers, which hearkened back to their Scottish mother. And they would buy apples, always Granny Smith’s because that was what Grandpa would eat for breakfast, along with a slice of bread and butter. He would always peel the apple and poke a slither through the bars of the bird cage for Scotty the budgerigar to eat. If we timed it just right, and timing was the key with my grandparents, and went round to Gran’s on Saturday lunchtime before she went into Nottingham, she might take us with her. It was boring but so was being at home on weekend afternoons. All mum and dad did was watch old movies, the kind where everyone spoke in clipped English accents and the heroine swooned into the arms of the hero. Dull. And why did they all have radiant white faces?

If we went round to Gran’s after she had left to go shopping, we would find Grandpa alone in his armchair, watching horse racing or rugby. We would have to duck under the thick blue blanket of smoke as he puffed on his afternoon pipe. He was virtually motionless and slightly intimidating, almost dangerous, somehow, without Gran there. It was his lack of engagement, his silence, which added a sinister element to him. Unless he was crossing the road, he was benign and harmless. My sister and I could climb all over his chair, with him in it, and put curlers in his thin grey hair. He would never move, or say anything. He walked like Winston Churchill, slightly stooping forward and with the determination of a veteran from somewhere and of something. He crossed the road like Moses parting the Red Sea. Lifting his walking stick high over his head, Gramps would just step right into the road and march out. It was terrifying. Cars would have to stop. Grandpa, we’re going to get run over, I’d shout but would have to follow him, anyway. It was fear mixed with trust and bouncing along behind him was slightly less frightening than being left on the wrong side of the road. Dad said he still thought he was a policeman but that was how he met our gran.

He was a widower and the father of two children when he met his future second wife. She had an older brother Harold (Bob) Bexon, a veteran of the Great War’s trenches. In the throes of a nervous breakdown he was convinced he was in trouble with the police. Gran and her younger sister took Harold to the ‘local nick’ where my grandpa worked.

Dad said, many years later, it took some time to convince uncle Bob he was mistaken but he and Grandpa became very good friends.

Gran and Grandpa had a friend with a seaside caravan sited at an east coast resort near Mablethorpe and they would go there for holidays. They took my brother David once but dad had to go and fetch him back because it frightened him. He was very small and had never been in a caravan before. Convinced it was actually an ambulance, he was unsettled so Jane and I went instead. It was totally wonderful to have the freedom of our grandparents’ attention. Their holiday routines were fairly similar to their everyday at home ones. Each morning, Grandpa would get up and walk around with his braces hanging from his trouser belt with his portly top half covered by a white, granddad vest, slightly pulled back at the sleeves. He still had his breakfast bread, butter and apple. On our first morning, I watched him place a slither of apple skin precisely in the middle of one of the large roses which patterned the plastic table cloth. Grandpa, why are you doing that? I asked. It’s for Scotty, he said. It was amazing they did not actually take the budgerigar away with them but he was safe with aunt Mary, who had one of her own, who could talk. He would say Beauty Bexon, best budgie in Basford.

Their acceptance of me was almost total, unlike it had been when dad was growing up. My grandparents were children of Victorian England and inherited its values. Strict. Children who ‘must be seen and not heard’. It stifled the growing boy, who was constantly being told to ‘be good’. Being good, it seemed, meant obeying without question or he would not have been loved. I saw quite a lot of this trait in dad towards the end of his drinking days. At least in the expectation of complete obedience; there was no ‘love’ attachment to add a glimmer of redemption or reward. Had gran and aunt Mary not had occasional issues with my tomboyishness and wearing boy’s clothes, they would have been perfect. The calm and gentle pace of their lives with its predictable routines was what made them so secure. Even their houses had a familiar, similar smell. Aunt Mary went to Gran’s for Sunday lunch every week and every week, Gran would cook casserole for aunty to take to work in a flask. Sometimes, when it got boring at home, I would wander round the corner to enjoy the ambience of my grandparents’ house, which would also become dull so I would walk up to meet aunty coming along the road. Like Gran and Gramps, she adhered to routine and would leave home, the one in which she and her siblings had been born, at the same time, using the same route. It was about a mile and a half away but the walk involved passing tall and oppressive Victorian factories, which were dark, silent and menacing so seeing aunty walking along was always something of a relief. If their sister, Ivy, had still been alive, she would probably have also been on that walk but Ivy had died when I was a baby and Gran never cried so much but never cried again.

Tears. An intense closeness developed between Gran and me, when she was dying. She longed for it, prayed for it. She spent the last two years of her life going from hospital to home, to nursing home and back. Her inability to let go of life was hard to watch and my drive home from the visits I made. The feelings of uselessness were intense. How could I make her more comfortable? What could I do to help? She asked me to pray for her, so I did, holding her hand and pouring all the love in my heart into her emaciating body. Oh, Lord, come and take me, she would plead. She wanted to cry but could not so I prayed for her to have the relief of tears pouring down her face, to soothe her. And I would read to her until the pain of hearing words became too much. She said nobody understood what it was like. So I prayed for dreams and had one. In it, she was up home, as they called it, the small mid terrace she had lived in with her parents, brothers and sisters. The one her brothers left to fight in the trenches. They all came back to leave again when they married and had families. The home, warm, loving and secure, where her father was, who was the kindest man on earth and brought her brandy in hot water to take away her period pains. In my dream, we were in the house but it was just a little different. The yellow walls were there but, in the kitchen, there was an arrangement of bench seating. Gran was sat with her back to the wall and I gave her a meal of fish fingers, peas and potatoes. Giving it to her, I asked her a question. The next day, I visited the hospital again and asked Gran the question from the dream. Do you ever wish you were back at home with your mum and dad? She said yes, I do. Exactly as it had been in the dream.

Once, I sat holding her hand and found myself stroking her forearm, very gently. Out of nowhere, I asked if her dad used to do that when she was a child. He did.

They say people with autism lack empathy. Sometimes, we feel others’ pain so intensely it suffocates and becomes unbearable so we lash out, run away; become aggressive. That is why the world, in its insistence that we demonstrate and express ourselves in proscribed ways, to fit a pattern does not understand. It therefore becomes dismissive of our difference.

Gran looked beautiful, lying in her coffin. She had no wrinkles and was at peace, at last. Jane came to tell me. There would have been no other reason for her to call that evening and I turned around in my living room doorway and said she’s gone, hasn’t she? Yes. Oh, I’m so pleased. I did not know what else to say but it was true.

Six weeks later, Grandpa died.

Deal with your baggage or it deals with you

They were sitting in their car opposite my house. No doubt I should have felt extra safe that Friday night, sleeping, knowing the visible presence of two of Derbyshire’s finest police officers keeping warm in their Vauxhall Astra with the flask of tea provided by neighbours would deter any miscellaneous miscreants strolling along. The street was quiet, at last; the fire engines had gone along with the council workers, ambulances, news reporters and road barriers. A respectful silence had fallen for Linda. Nobody knew where she was.

I had been woken that Friday morning by large, noisy, diesel engines. Presuming it was workmen about to start drilling in the road, I covered my head with bedclothes, obstinately attempting to stay asleep and expecting my attempts to be shattered by the vicious sound of a pneumatic drill. It almost worked, for about five minutes but the noise was persistent and nasty. I lifted the duvet for air and smelled smoke. Out of bed faster than an earthquake, I looked out of the window. Three hours sleep and a mild hangover from a great night out with my two sons did not need the surveyance of chaos flinging its sticky fingers at me when I opened the bedroom curtains.

Fire Fighters, like ants around jam, were tackling the blazing house across the road. Instead of the usual nose to tail cars parked along this built up, residential street of Victorian houses, I counted five fire engines and three ambulances. Police were directing residents to move their vehicles and, as I looked down, noticed a female police officer about to knock on my door. Dressing quickly, I grabbed the keys to my van and left by the back gate. A police officer moved it just around the corner on request, wholly on double yellow lines and partly on the pavement. It would have been easy pickings for PC Jobsworth to nick me for still being over the limit. Paramedics were laying kit onto large green sheets outside the houses on my side of the street, the even numbers. The burning, smoking house was number 41. Giant yellow, wax crayon, oxygen canisters with face masks beside each one lay waiting on more green sheets. It all looked very over the top. Only one woman lived in the house. One woman and floor to ceiling, wall to wall junk in every room, including the loft cavity, hampering the progress of the fire crews.

They were still there, along with news crews, when I returned from an appointment in mid morning and it looked no less busy. The stretch of road where the burning house was had been closed off. A sole police officer patrolled the blue and white tape, preventing unnecessary foot traffic from passing and asking for permission to return home added to the cloying atmosphere. Fire Fighters had begun strapping on harnesses and were going to attempt to enter the house through the roof cavity. The female resident was known as a loner who rarely went out during daylight hours and her house was crammed with years of accumulated junk, hampering the search and, equally as urgently, the attempts to bring the blaze under control. Artificial tunnels had been dug through the clutter to enable progress into the house.

By lunchtime, the story was in the online version of two local papers and BBC Radio Derby. Living in my town, on the Derbyshire side of the Nottinghamshire border, when a good story broke, it hit the headlines across two counties. Neighbours were interviewed by film crews from East Midlands Today, their sound bites re-quoted in the local press. Disturbed by the noisy activity, getting down to serious work was hampered and my frequent coffee breaks were taken outside over short conversations with the emergency teams. A strange picture began to emerge of the woman and her lifestyle, pieced together with morsels of information gleaned from these brief meetings. She was reclusive.

This is a reasonably friendly neighbourhood. People pass acknowledgements while taking out or bring in wheelie bins, or by their cars, as one person comes and another goes. As the years go by, more people with cars move onto the street and parking has become very difficult, especially as quite a few households have more than one vehicle and only two houses within sight of mine have driveways. The family living next door to the one on fire irritate others of us by leaving their brown wheelie bin in the road when they go out. The elderly widower next door to me can be grumpy and unfriendly; we have three same sex households within a few doors of each other and a young couple nearby live with their small son. My son and I had been in kick boxing classes with the mother a few years earlier, when she was single and lived in the next street. The family next door to me have had two sons since moving in and wanted to move to a house with a bigger garden. Their house was taken off the market a month earlier as there had been a shortage of viewers. One property, diagonally opposite mine, is much more modern than the rest. At around 40 years-old, it is reputedly owned by a former England goal keeper who had played for Nottingham Forest during their late 70s peak. The days before top footballers commanded ‘silly money’ and who bought detached houses in streets like ours. A regular neighbourhood with ordinary people living on it.

Even though I have lived opposite her house for over eighteen years, we have never spoken. Everyone was invisible to her. Any attempts to catch her eye, nod, smile, or make any acknowledgement were ignored yet she did not look unfriendly. She was a slightly built woman who still wore the loose fitting and wild coloured trousers of a sixties flower child. There was something remote and eccentric about her. Rarely seen out during the day, she could often be seen silently watering the front garden in the middle of the night. The shrubbery, which had been none existent when I moved in, had grown to cover the front ground floor window. At some point, she had moved wardrobes across the front bedroom windows. A man lived with her then but nobody had seen him for years. It was her husband and he had been working in Spain, according to one of the police officers I questioned. The door to door enquiries were repetitive: everyone knew who she was, nobody knew her name and she was reclusive. Three hundred years earlier and she would have been the village witch, burned at the stake. She became a real person, a missing person, when her name was revealed in the local newspapers. Linda Parkes.

The fire was out; two council trucks and a dustcart moved in to begin clearing the vast amount of debris. Everyone said the same: ‘Never seen anything like it.’ Not only could Linda have never thrown anything away at all, she must have also actively brought in more of it. When my friend moved out of number 44, he had a house sale; like a garden sale without the garage. He opened his front room for the day and sold off books, CDs and some old vinyl and was the only person I know who had spoken to her. She was, apparently, very intelligent and nice to talk to. Whatever she bought that day much have been among the charred debris being wheel-barrowed into the white trucks. My daughter said she could be hostile. Felicity had worked at the local Cooperative store for some years, as a supervisor. It was her student job, which she did very well at. She told me that Linda, or ‘that weird woman who lives over the road’ would dispute the prices on reduced goods and make the staff go and check. Then she would spend a while counting her change to make sure it was right, blocking access for other customers.

I escaped from the chaos that evening by sharing drinks with a friend seven doors up. We talked, over wine and then tequila shots about everything and nothing at all, as good conversations often go. The street between our houses was deserted. The police tape had been removed yet nobody had brought their cars back. A lone patrol car was parked outside Lind’s house, two officers inside keeping themselves warm. The purr of their car’s engine was the only sound the now eerily quiet street. It was what woke me up the next day, when more police cars arrived, along with a forensic support van and more masked and overall clad officers working from a Mercedes Sprinter van. Local residents were carrying on life as normal, often questioning the team working in the house, as I also did. Cars began to repopulate the street but the atmosphere was cloying, oppressive and dark.

On Sunday morning, two large skips were delivered, taking up parking space all over again and the forensic team carried on, clearing large amounts of debris from the house. My son was going out that afternoon and would be away until Monday afternoon. It would be good for him. The neighbours had been around to the back of Linda’s house with cameras and it was winding Martin up. Seeing so many people, who never had time for her while she was alive, now seemed enthralled by the whole drama. I decided to catch up with a friend in a village in the Derbyshire Dales. Fresh, clean air and a change of scenery was to prove an excellent antidote to the sickly smell of old fire smoke that hung around by the skips. It stuck in my throat as I spent a few minutes talking to one of the forensic officers before leaving. He had spoken to Linda’s husband that morning, he said, but denied there had been any rubbish in the house. He said he had been there six months earlier and there had not been any junk in the house. Astonished, the officer told me he could not believe the husband’s denial. He had missed the bags of human excrement in the house? He shook his head and was gone by the time I returned home.

I get up at around 6.30am for work on Mondays and saw, that week, a bicycle propped up between the skips. A thin man in a dark duffle coat and pull on hat was shining a torch in one of them, then the other. I watched him from my bedroom window. It is not unusual for passers by to peer into parked skips but this man seemed intense in his search. He then began poking through a pile of rags in the front garden. He was still there when I left for work just before 7am so I wandered over.

‘You won’t find much in there, lad,’ I said. He was back at one of the skips by then and did not even look up.

‘She was my best mate, she was,’ he replied, ‘a lovely woman. Her husband’s going to be heartbroken when he sees this, he is. She was with me till half past two that morning and as happy as anything. I walked her back round here and we were laughing and joking all the way. The police have said I’m a key witness. I’ve managed to find a couple of necklaces in there,’ and pointed to the rags under the front shrubs. ‘I just wanted something to remember her by.’

I left him to his search and went for the train.

Linda’s body was discovered at 11am that day. She had been buried under the junk for three days. According to a report in the Derby Telegraph, she had been trying to escape.

Over the next two days, a few flowers and messages were left on the wall between her house and next door, where the guy who had been interviewed by news reporters on Friday lived. The same one who had often complained to the council about the vermin and mess and who had first alerted the fire service on the Friday morning. People have to pay their respects. It had hardly seemed so when they were peering in the house, taking photographs or making sniped remarks in the online version of the local paper.

People are often unaware of the powerful impact they have on the lives of others. Linda had that effect. I would not leave flowers. It seemed a sick gesture, given that she died unable to escape from the chaos in the house. Why add to the clutter?
What was most moving was the metaphor between the obvious physical mess at the house and the assimilated internal chaos of our reclusive neighbour. We all carry burdens, clutter, and emotional baggage; call it what you might. Not one of us goes through life free of issues but it is how we take control of them that makes the difference. Linda clearly could not deal with her internal or external junk and it was the death of her, quite literally. There is a profound lesson to be learned from Linda’s life and indeed tragic end, which would not be to leave it too late to address problems before they get too big. It is possible, as Linda proved, to live hermit-like, even in a densely populated area such as mine. However much we shun social contact, our lives do affect those of others. Our personal burdens whether physical or metaphoric, impact on other people and people care. On whatever level, whether it is out of desire not to live next door to so much junk, noise or bad smells or a wish to help the clearly suffering individual.

Three weeks on and the house is boarded up. The police and emergency vehicles have been replaced by occasional men in vans, sifting through the remains of the junk. One of them looked like Linda’s husband, who has been seen at the house, his Peugeot estate car parked opposite my house. Everything that remains of Linda’s life is being slowly brushed away. May she rest in peace and the lessons learned from her remain. The unaddressed issues we all have, ignored and neglected in some foolish hope they will simply melt away, can wreak devastation to more people than we could ever possibly imagine.