There are lots of things I already know.
I know she is a tireless flirt and she has always had men asking her to dances, down to the beach, asking to marry her. She still does.
I know she worked in a factory, and dropped a frozen chicken on her foot once, and I know she worked in a shoe shop.
I know that she has told her GP, many times and at length, how she has four grown up children with a university degree. I know she is proud of this.
And I know that when she was very young her family had an American soldier living with them during the war.
But today I learn other things.
I ask her, of course, how she met my grandpa. (I never did.)
At a dance, she says. This was when she was working in the shoe shop and having to send her wage slips back to her mother. Eventually the man in the shop stopped putting all her money in the envelopes that went home, so she had a little money to herself. So one night when there was a dance at the Hemsby holiday camp, she went.
My grandpa was a good dancer, she tells me. She wasn’t. If she went to the ladies she might come back and find him dancing with another girl- but it was only because he was a good dancer, she says. The funny thing is those girls were both redheads, like my grandma at the time. (She used to dye her hair a lot, you see. That is something I already know.) But I believe her that it was only because he was a good dancer.
(In fact, she says she saw one of those girls on the bus the other day. I don’t know if she said hello. I think it is a small world, the one my grandma lives in. I think that is why, instead of changing, her world has aged with her. I think it is strange.)
My grandmother doesn’t say ‘well, you know how it went from there’. She says that my grandpa went to the shoe shop where she told him she worked- he went with a friend- and he asked her if she was going down to the dance that evening. She didn’t go to dances very much, with her wages being sent off, but this time she did.
It might be at this point that she tells me about the redheads, but it’s all the same story. I learn that as well as being a good dancer my grandpa didn’t have a sense of humour. If you’re going to mess around we may as well sit down, she mimics. Deep voice, grumpy tone. Fred did have a sense of humour, I am told next. But he isn’t part of the story yet.
My grandpa was a carpenter. He was a perfectionist. Like my father, but that isn’t actually relevant because this is my mother’s mother who is telling me stories.
When my mother and her siblings are born they are living in a two bedroom bungalow which is too small, so my grandpa and grandma move into a house on a new estate, at a discount because my grandfather helped to fit the houses. He hasn’t fitted this one. Don’t get grease on the chipboard because then the Formica won’t go down, he says. After five years the Formica is still not down, there are no doors on the cupboards, and things are going to end.
I think the year must be around 1973. This is where Fred comes into the story. Fred isn’t related to the Formica or the unbuilt house, he just becomes part of my grandma’s life at about the same time. She married my grandpa in 1960, and in 1974 she marries Fred when my mother is twelve and she has left home, left her daughter and two sons.
Now I start to think about my mother’s story. It wasn’t too unusual to have divorced parents when she was young, but it was not expected that my grandma had left the house and left her children. I think my mother once told me which parent she wanted to stay with, and I think it was my grandma but because my grandma had walked out my grandfather was granted custody. I know I shouldn’t have done it, my grandma says. Or maybe she says, I knew. Right now she is standing across the kitchen from me and she looks like she is lost in memory. Again, I believe her.
I’ve missed out a bit of story. It’s about my grandpa sitting in a chair reading a newspaper- I’m reading the newspaper, he says, in my grandma’s grumpy impersonation and Norfolk accent. I’m guessing that means ‘don’t talk to me’? I say. Yes. They didn’t really talk that much.
That part really just shows a tiny piece of why things happened.
So then I met Fred, my grandma says.
And she tells me how these two men were just different, that her relationships with them were just different. She doesn’t say it as easily as this. She uses different words, more difficult words.
I don’t know what Fred was like, but I have photographs of him. Last Christmas my grandma gave my mother and aunt all their old photos, but my aunt didn’t want the ones of Fred. I did. I like old photographs, and some of these have writing on the back. Since my grandmother had them I think he must have sent them to her.
Yes, he probably did because he worked on an offshore oil rig. That is what my grandma tells me next. I’ll just do two years and that’ll set us on our feet, is what I am told Fred says, and then he works for twelve years. Away for three or four months, home for one, and my aunt is three months old when he starts. I don’t know if my grandpa is still in her life at this point. It’s no way to live a life, she says.
It’s no way to live a life, so she didn’t. She stopped. This is where the story ends and she starts to talk about something else, but I think about it.
So I live 