The brilliant and wenchy Christina has posed a great question: Is there a day in your life you would redo? At first I could think of nothing. Then it occurred to me that I would travel back 15 or so years and not kill my Grandmother.
I should make it clear immediately I did not murder Nanna. I loved her very much. Though not enough, as she latterly became inclined to point out, to make the effort to travel down to Bexhill-on-Sea to play crazy golf with her. In that self-centered way that teenagers have, it never occurred to me that I had any obligation to go visit her. She was supposed to come visit me, clutching a gift (usually, even when I reached my twenties, a colouring book). I wish I had seen more of her. She had a twinkle about her I sometimes catch in the eyes of my sisters and a sense of fun stapled to a fearsomely solid sense of responsibility and decorum.
When my family split up it did so with a truly theatrical venomousness that horrified her. My father was her only son and the proverbial apple of her eye. What he had done by walking out of the family and taking up with his mistress plainly upset her but how can you help but forgive your son? Round in our house we were having no truck with forgiveness. My own speciality was petty acts of revenge which, should there be demand for it, I will list in another blog post.
The place I grew up is a popular retirement spot. Once grand seaside hotels, cracked, faded and then fell into the hands of developers who converted them into sheltered housing for the elderly. Entrpreneurs devised ever more complex schemes which were designed to remove the life savings of members of my grandmother’s generation whilst allowing ungrateful and inattentive familes to feel less guilty about doing nothing themselves. Nanna became involved in one of these schemes. A developer had built a private housing estate close to where we lived with small flats and houses built around a day centre. Residents had a place of their own but access to shared facilities. Nanna bought a house in the development. It was outrageously expensive. The deal was, should she die, the company got to buy it back from Nanna’s estate at a knockdown price and re-sell it.
The day before she was due to move in she came round to our house. Being saintly, if naive, she decided to broach the subject of our relationship with Dad in the hope of improving it a little. This was like making a black power salute in a KKK meeting hall. Vitriol sloshed across the wallpaper. Words never spoken in genteel company caused the cucumber sandwich she was holding to brown and crackle. She began to look genuinely terrified. Seeing her distress I changed the subject and asked her how she was. She told me her legs were hurting and I offered to rub her calves for her. I knelt on the floor and worked away at her papery leg muscles. She looked down at me sorrowfully and then told me in a dry quiet voice how sad it all made her. I can’t remember what I said but it was almost certainly another elaborate condemnation of my father. She looked at the ceiling, lost in grief. In my viciousness I thought it better she get a clear idea how things stood given that she was going to be in the neighbourhood.
The next day, as she moved into her new home and as the removal men shifted boxes around her, she collapsed and died. The doctors told us that she had had a stroke. She had, he explained, probably had a blood clot form in her legs which had somehow been worked free and travelled its way up into her brain. If I had my time again I would not let my arrogance and ill-will spoil the last few hours of her life.