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.