Granny Chaser

A lil something for Day of the Dead

Peter Paul Reubens, Old Woman and Boy with Candles*

We’re coming up on All Hallows Eve, wading through the spooky funk of another dying year. I really do think that you can feel the presence of those on the other side pressing in a little closer during this transitional season, and many old sorrows seem easier to bare in Autumn, when happy memories of the long departed bubble up.

When I was a child my maternal grandmother, my nanny Jessie, was one of my most favourite people. I had her phone number memorised from age 4 and would call her at all hours to ask if she fancied a chat. I would wake her up at 5am by phoning to ask how to make Angel Delight, since I couldn’t read the instructions on the packet. She never told me not to, in fact she was always happy to hear from me. I was her first grandchild and I honestly think, one of the few people she actually liked.

She was a real Scouse queen, a council estate matriarch who didn’t ever sugarcoat anything. She didn’t need to, nobody ever argued with her. My grandfather came home drunk and punched her once, but only once. The way she dealt with him, not through violence but by psychologically undoing him, was decimation itself, so effective that it reduced him to a sort of manservant figure in the background. For most of my childhood he was very much Max von Mayerling to her Norma Desmond, fetching lunch on a tray, opening the post, wheeling her out to the marina gardens in her chair. Yes, Jessie was something of a tyrant, often to get my grandfather’s attention she’d yell into the kitchen, “Jack Hughes, you curly headed bastard!”, but it was part of her charm.

She had a staggering lack of patience, and of what we would today call, filter. She was sometimes unkind, but never to me. If my mother or her sister complained about something she’d done, she’d tell them that she never wanted kids anyway, that they were the reason she’d never achieved what she knew she was capable of. I remember her dismissing my Auntie Dot’s buffet-side claim that she “ate like a bird” with the retort, “Yeah, a frigging vulture.” Even when she was mean she was entertaining.

Jessie was a diabetic Dorothy Parker, her favouritism and caustic turn of phrase, as much as her jade cigarette set and Lotus pearls, made her seem very elegant to me. Though she didn’t wear the pearls anymore, and she no longer smoked, the veil of mid-century cocktail party glamour very much remained attendant - even if she did live on the fourteenth floor of a council tower block. But then, you see to a child, that unlovely building was but a mere squint of the imagination away from an apartment building on the Upper East Side.

My nanny Jessie was only sixty-two when she died but compared to the women of her age I see today, she seems like a relic from the dim Dickensian past. I remember her always in a pink cardi and a floral nightie, watching Countdown or reading Mills and Boon, she was the kind of old lady who seemed to disappear overnight, around the turn of the millennium. Sixty-year olds now all seem to look like Jennifer Lopez and run skincare businesses from their kitchen, my nanny Jessie at the same age was rather more Whistler’s mother.

James McNeill Whistler, Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1

I have one or two friends who are in their eighties today and none of them really give grandma in the way my nanny did; they’re all active, they travel, they go to see theatre, but not Jessie. She gave up the ghost sometime in the late 1980s, when she became a wheelchair user, and retreated into a Dietrich like seclusion. She went to bingo, and made a yearly trip to Southport, but other than that I don’t think she really went anywhere. She was poor, she was in ill-health, but more than anything I think she quite enjoyed being left the fuck alone.

She hadn’t had the life she deserved, she didn’t ever get the breaks. She was intelligent and capable but her career was derailed unsurprisingly, by sexism and poverty. Her children were hospitalised for long periods and her husband drank so much of his wages that she couldn’t even afford the bus fare, so walked the full two-hours to Alder Hey daily. Her time dribbled away attending to a life she never seemed to have wanted, certainly one she never asked for.

The only happy memories she shared with me were from her own childhood, as a WWII evacuee, when she’d been sent away from the inncer city slums to live in the countryside. Unlike many children who found evacuation terrifying and traumatic, she seemed to have enjoyed herself. She was billeted with a woman she always called Auntie Nellie, who owned her own home and had a full-set of matching crockery, and with whom she remained close until the ‘90s, always speaking of her with a reverence usually reserved for the Pope or Doris Day. I think Auntie Nellie must’ve shown her a kind of life she’d probably only ever seen at the cinema, a life that she didn’t ever quite make for herself, though the memory of its possibility never fully faded for her. I always felt that this potential is what she most wanted to pass on to me. I was her chance to get it right.

Family history tells the story of how, late into her pregnancy with me, my mother started to bleed heavily. The doctor seemed unable, or unwilling, to offer any advice beyond, try and take it easy. Neither she nor my father knew what to do, how could they? They were teenagers. His mother told them quite coldly that perhaps it was for the best, as they weren't married. Maybe if my mother lost the baby the two of them could get on with their lives, and be more careful next time.

Jessie however was of a different opinion, it was for her beyond disgraceful to even suggest a miscarriage as the best outcome. She called together daughters and sisters and women from the estate and they prayed the Hail Mary over and over, over my mother, until the bleeding stopped. I’m sure that she made a pact that day, dedicated me in some way I still don't really understand, to the Virgin. (It’s honestly the only way I can explain having survived some of the truly insane and horrifying shit I have come out the other side of). A few months later and I was born one whopping big baby, ridiculously juicy and in rude health. After such a miraculous entrance into the world perhaps it’s not surprising then that she invested so much in me, identified, projected perhaps?

I don’t remember a font at the door or any pictures of the Sacred Heart on the fridge, but Jessie was culturally very Catholic. I’m sure she would never have allowed my mother to marry my father if he’d have been a Protestant. She herself stopped attending Mass back in the sixties after a bust-up with the priest, who denied her Communion because she hadn’t been churched after giving birth to her son. I don't think she ever went back to church, besides for weddings and Baptisms, but all the same she waited six hours to see John Paul II arrive in Liverpool. I wonder if she’d have found her way back had she been granted a genuine dotage and not died having barely made the age of retirement.

She had a peasantly kind of religious faith, everything was attributed to God either helping you out (good marks in school) or paying you back (tripping over right after giving cheek). For her God was very involved in all the most boring details of the day. At the same time she was quite comfortable with the unknowableness of it all, some things were not for us to understand. This also made her fantastically stoic. As a child, and to this day, I found myself actively consumed with devising emergency escape routes for whichever space I was in. As my grandparents lived on the fourteenth floor my ongoing panic was over what we would do in the event of a fire. How would we get downstairs when we were forbidden to use the lifts and my nanny couldn’t walk? Driven to distraction by this obsessive fear I asked her directly, and she said, “You and your grandad would have to go down and leave me ‘ere.” Obviously I was horrified, in no way comforted, but I knew she was completely serious. She was deeply unsentimental like that.

Jessie gave me the affection which should have come to me by way of inheritance through my mother, who was herself denied it. I think my mother was generous enough not to begrudge me this love, though it must’ve hurt her, in the way the endless attentions my mother lavishes on her dogs hurts me now. (Pathetic, I know but these patterns loop don’t they?) I don’t know why exactly my mother, who spent so long trying to please Jessie fell short, perhaps because they were too alike. Perhaps because of her remarriages. Perhaps because Jessie would’ve liked to ditch her own husband and start all over again, though ofc she didn’t.

In many ways she was resolutely nineteenth century, she stopped short of insisting Mass should only be said in Latin, but she was completely against separations. Jessie had very a fixed morality, yes, but it was undercut but a uniquely Liverpudlian sense of the absurd. She called the local religious book shop and tea rooms, “the holy cafe” and said of my Born Again Christian Auntie Marjorie, “She’s never been the same since she found ‘im upstairs.” I thought she was just about the funniest person imaginable, in part because she had such authority and so could make light of anything.

Georgios Jakobides, Grandma and grandchild

I remember that she was the only person who took me seriously when I said I was going to become a vegetarian at age 12. Whilst the rest of my family would fob me off saying the scouse was made with Quorn, or simply tell me to pick the chicken out (lol), she had my grandad wheel her to Iceland to source the Linda McCartney’s. When at age 14, I got drunk on cider and arrived to her fortieth wedding anniversary dinner blotto, she told me to switch to Coke and said that I should ignore my mother’s fury, it was her anniversary after all. I’d obviously had fun, she said, but I should try to pace myself. There was no scolding, only what you might think of as a teachable moment.

She also heard me when I told her how difficult it was at home. She didn’t tell me to be grateful because a lot of kids had it much worse, but rather than coddling me she levelled with me. Things were hard, but there was a way forward, and that was through education. She’d seen the world change after the war and I suppose imagined that it would only get better, and moreover, that I was someone who would grow up to be capable of riding the tide of progress. As such she treated me as a small adult, we watched her favourite Doris Day movies, not cartoons (though this might well be owed to a certain streak of selfishness on her part) and we read together. I can remember watching Silent Witness with her when I was eight or nine, and asking what a hooker was. She didn’t even look up from her knitting, she just said, “A woman you pay to have sex with.” She was unshakeably frank, which could be mortifying, but also made me feel very grown up, which was wonderful because I hated the whole concept of being a child.

She died very suddenly, of a heart attack, the paramedics couldn’t get up to her quickly enough. It was the first big loss in my life, one of those moments which cut a deep before/after into everything. The extended family fell apart pretty quickly after that since she’d been the one who more or less held it together. At her wake I got drunk, fell off a barstool and ripped my trousers, then had to go and pick my younger siblings up from school, quite dishevelled. I remember walking them all home, feeling very sorry for myself, and how they started weeping one by one, the way small, tired children do when one of them starts off, falling like sorry little dominoes.

Next year is the thirtieth anniversary of Jessie’s death, which is strange given that I’m only 27 myself. Several of my younger siblings were born after she’d already died, they never knew her. To them she’s like the Berlin Wall, some lost monument they don't quite understand the workings of but whose significance they still feel. I find this very sad; she wasn’t a great mother but she was a fantastic nan, and I’m sorry for both her and my younger siblings that they didn’t have their time together. The sadness of her loss has been compounded by the fact that my paternal grandmother, still going today in her late eighties, has never really wanted to know me. I suppose in a way I have become my own grandmother now. I’ve taken upon myself the mantle of millennial nana, what with my cake baking, my love of ceramic knick-knacks, my mid-century hairdo and taste in vintage frocks. I honestly can’t say what my nanny would’ve have made of all this, but I can’t see it being a huge shock to her. I mean, what other kind of twelve-year old sits through repeat viewings of Move Over Darling and knows all the words Copacabana? I wonder if I’ve achieved the kind of life she wished for me, though?

In her will, such as it was, she left me a gold St. Christopher, a sovereign, probably the most iconic piece of nana bling of all time. She had decided it would be mine on the day I was born, it was worth a chunk of change in fact. I kept it in a velvet pouch and wore it on dates and special occasions for years, until my brother stole it and sold it for smack. I was heartbroken. Jessie probably would’ve shrugged her shoulders at the news of this theft, just carried on knitting and said, Well, it was dead old fashioned anyways. She might’ve assured me that she’d have a word with my brother, probably she would’ve offered to get me something else. Undoubtedly she’d have called out, “Jack Hughes you curly-headed bastard, where’s this frigging tea, then? We’re gasping ‘ere.”

R.I.P Jessie you were a real one.

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*Interestingly the Reubens painting at the head of this piece, Old Woman and Boy with Candles, is also known as Two Women with a Candle.

As always, thanks for reading and subscribing, if you’re a bit of a granny chaser yrself do share yr memories in the comments.

I’ve been delighting in Lynn Tillman’s “American Genius: A Comedy” of late, you might like it too =} I’ve found many many weird overlaps between this novel and the book I’ve been working on this past two years.

And finally! I’d like to wish my dear friend Gran a happy belated birthday!!!!!!! Happy birthday Gran, yr still the best to ever do it (whatever it is, I’m still unsure).