There are two solid anecdotes I know about my grandma. One involves an air-raid shelter and a pair of knickers, the other is about an amputated leg. She has been telling them ever since I can remember.
Aged about seven, I would sit next to her on the sofa while she explained the blitz in a way that completely stripped it of its enormity, as if the whole war had been a minor inconvenience. She would laugh, but not hysterically – like someone telling a story about a mix-up in the supermarket where they had mistakenly gone off with someone else’s trolley.
In the air-raid incident, the siren had sounded one night and she, her sisters and her mother had piled into the garden shelter in such a hurry that one of her younger sisters forgot to put on a pair of knickers. In a spectacular show of Britishness, once she realised her mistake, she ran back inside the house to rectify it. My great-aunt, it seems, would rather have been blown up than have failed to meet the dress code of a pit with a corrugated iron lid. I used to laugh at that story, too, although I suppose my grandma was only a background character.
The leg story is from the 50s, when she was a nurse. She was assisting in the amputation of a man’s leg, below the knee. When the leg had been removed, the surgeon said, “Here, nurse, catch,” and – in a morbid display of spite – threw it at her. She failed to catch the airborne appendage and, thereafter, was known in the hospital as the nurse who dropped the leg. Again, though, there is no detectable trauma in the telling of this story. It has always been told with a stoic laugh.
Even when I was seven, I would take these two stories, place them under an imaginary microscope and look for clues as to who my grandma was. She had given me very little emotion to work with, and no opinions. Everything, be it a bloody sawn-off limb or a skyful of bombs, just was. Nearly 20 years later, I still don’t really know who she is. Because of her now advanced dementia, I never will.
So what do I know about my mother’s mother? My mum, aunt and uncle can provide me with facts: she was born in Essex, she left school at 14, and, in her 20s, she called off an engagement to a man from Sheffield, whom she didn’t love (apparently, it had something to do with him wearing a pork-pie hat) and instead married my grandad, a dapper Jewish man with a spiv moustache. But the intimacy and intricacy of a mother-child relationship is something that can’t be passed down to the next generation via anecdote. Even my mum doesn’t claim to fully know her mum. I get the impression my grandma was always too busy existing for other people to exist for herself. Whatever or whoever she is, was formed entirely in the spaces between everyone else in her life.
There aren’t many photographs of my grandma and me together. In one shot, taken days after I was born, my mum sits up in bed cradling me while my sister, grandad (who died three years later) and grandma loom over my tiny blob self. Of all of the loomers, my grandma is the most distant. With her light grey hair, white blouse and giant glasses, full of reflections, she is distinctly ghost-like.
It is not that my grandma wasn’t there. I would stay with her during school holidays. She would tell me her two stories and let me rummage through her jewellery box. There weren’t many clues about who she was in there either, although I did learn that she loves the colour blue. When I was about five, she taught me how to blow my nose. I remember her pressing a tissue to my face and instructing me to “blow out all that muck”. I had a cold and I remember how little it bothered her. If you can cope with an amputated leg, I reasoned, you can probably cope with some snot. I have always admired her ability to not be disgusted. I just wish I knew where it came from.
When I visited her the other day, we drank tea and I shouted at her about the weather. Anything other than a loud, terse statement about rain or wind, she either won’t hear or won’t understand. She asked about “the baby”. The baby is my nephew and her great-grandson. Every time I’ve seen her for the past few months, she has asked his name and I’ve told her: Ezra.
“Ezra,” she’ll say, as if speaking a foreign language.
“Yeah, Ezra,” I have to prompt her, “like in the Bible.”
As recognition creeps in, she proceeds to recite all 66 books of the New and Old Testaments, in order.
“How do you do that?” I ask her.
She looks confused.
“Is it from your childhood?” I’m pushing my luck here. It’s too complex a question. I’m guessing it is something from her childhood though, seeing as her father was a strict Methodist. Between her Methodist upbringing and her conversion to Judaism in the 50s, so she could marry my grandad, I have no idea what she was. Or what she is. I want to know if she believes in God, what her politics are, why she likes crime thrillers so much, why she is unshockable. A part of me wants to know if she has ever had good sex. Although I don’t suppose a lot of people know that about their grandparents.
I have always been amazed by how complex people are. How, if you were to try to catalogue every detail about any given person, it would take an eternity. My grandma – the nurse who dropped the leg and likes the colour blue – is just as infinite as everyone else. She’s as infinite as Emperor Nero or Virginia Woolf.
When she found out I was gay, a few years ago, pre-dementia, she was a little surprised, but not detectably upset. She was fine; nothing more, nothing less. I placed her reaction to my sexuality under the microscope, looking for signs of liberalness or plain apathy. The results, as ever, were inconclusive.
Knowing that, while she fades, I will never see the intricate patterns between the bare facts of my grandma (of which I already have so few) is strange and stark. It is easy to beat myself up for not having asked more questions while she could still answer them – but maybe she wouldn’t have wanted to in the first place.
“Pretty,” she said the other day, touching one of the tattoos on my arm.
How many octogenarians are there who think that tattoos and homosexuality are anything but vulgar and pertaining exclusively to sailors? Even my parents loathe my tattoos. Why doesn’t she? She wasn’t afraid to hint, quite strongly, that a pair of glasses I was wearing the other day were unflattering.
It is difficult to shake the feeling that my grandma is a living time capsule with a missing key. She was born in 1926. She is older than bubblegum. She is way older than rock music and the atomic bomb. She can’t remember where she was born, though, so asking her about what it was like to be alive while Europe was descending into fascist chaos seems a bit pointless. Plus, all I can ever remember her telling me about the 1930s was something about a cat who used to let her and her sisters dress him in dolls’ clothes.
Though I’m close to accepting her as just My Grandma: The Nurse Who Dropped The Leg.
