When I Had a Little Sister: The Story of a Farming Family Who Never Spoke. Catherine Simpson

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ was known to almost everyone as Gran, possibly because Elizabeth couldn’t say Grandad as a toddler, although in fact no one really knew, and we didn’t bat an eyelid to hear ‘Gran’s having a shave’ or ‘Gran needs more bacca’ or ‘Gran’s checking his mowdy traps’. One of Gran’s hobbies was catching moles (‘mowdies’). He set vicious claws into the ground to crush the creatures as they burrowed between molehills which ruined the grass. I once discovered a mole rooting up the seedlings in a tray of baby lettuce on the back yard. My schoolfriend and I raced to save it as Gran hovered nearby shouting ‘Kill it! Kill it!’

      He used the same penknife for cutting bacca, paring his nails, peeling apples and setting his mowdie traps. The penknife lived in the pocket of the old coat he always wore over his ancient trousers and jacket, and which was wrapped round at the waist with a length of baling twine.

      By the 1970s Gran’s Dairy was lined with Marjorie’s old cheese shelves which were packed with the flotsam and jetsam of his farming life: decoy ducks, empty milk bottles and rolls of wire, all coated in a thick layer of aged dust. Pushed up against them was his armchair, ingrained with grime and packed with newspapers where the springs used to be.

      Bit by bit Gran’s Dairy filled up with broken furniture that Mum wouldn’t have in the house: legless chairs, chairless dining tables, overwound clocks and a wooden fire surround, all dating from Marjorie’s day and too precious to Gran to throw away. The only things my mother seemed to want to get rid of were things that were precious to other people.

      When one of the cats died on a sofa in there, another cat flattened the body and turned it into a bed before anybody noticed.

      One day a barometer slid from the wall and smashed. Mercury rolled around the stone floor and we stamped on it watching it shatter and gather itself like the quicksilver it was until it finally splintered and was lost down the joins and the cracks.

      Gran came into the farmhouse to sleep and to eat his meals. He would peer through the kitchen door to see what was on the table and if it had a crust or a hard skin he’d go back for his teeth. He ate everything; fat, gristle, the lot, both courses from the same plate, wiping it clean in between with a slice of bread. ‘You don’t know you’re born,’ he’d say if he caught me wrinkling my nose at the sight of custard covering traces of gravy.

      Visiting children found Gran intimidating but he had a sense of humour – as dry as dust and well hidden. One time I remember hearing his rumbling chortle was when a caterpillar, boiled in its entirety, rolled out of a cauliflower floret I’d just chased round my dinner plate.

      On our birthdays he gave us fifty pence. He’d root through his pockets, sorting handfuls of washers and bits of straw, until he found a silver coin which he’d look closely at then hand over with a faint chuckle. Life was tough and we’d better get used to it.

      He was a veteran of the trenches at Ypres where he was shot through the shoulder. In hospital in Boulogne he learned to thank the nurses – mercy boo coo.

      When he was an old man he said little. Aged twelve I went out to his dairy with my notebook and pencil to ask him questions for a school project about ‘The Olden Days’.

      ‘Gran, when you were little what did you do on a Sunday?’

      He tamped his pipe and puffed a bit to get it going.

      ‘Put on me fustian breeches and watched tide, ’appen.’

      I wrote: ‘watched tide’.

      ‘What did you do during the war?’

      He did a silent kind of a snort, thought about it a minute then put his head back.

      ‘War … huh.’

      As an adult when I reminisced about Gran spending time in his dairy, my dad’s sister, Aunty Margaret (another one), was upset that he should be remembered thus. She recalled him during her childhood as ‘a smart man’ whose successful efforts to keep his family together, despite the death of his wife, were nothing short of heroic.

      Gran fought in the trenches at Ypres in the First World War

      Not all the furniture from Marjorie’s day ended up in Gran’s Dairy. A mahogany glass-fronted cabinet stacked with silver tea services, dating from David and Marjorie’s wedding, and with drawers full of sepia photographs, remained in the farmhouse sitting room. If we opened the drawers and asked about the people in the photographs, Mum told us: ‘Shut that drawer and stop rooting.’

      Years later, when we took the photographs from the drawer and tried to work out who they were, there was nobody left to ask and all we had was a sea of sepia strangers whose lives and stories were lost to the past.

      Gran kept leather-bound farm diaries detailing animals that went to market, crops planted and cheese produced. On 15th May 1938, the day his wife died in childbirth, it says only ‘M died’ and after that there are no more entries. He found my dad who was milking the cows that day and, shaking his head, said, ‘Never mind,’ then with another four children to think about, including a newborn baby, he left my dad to finish the milking.

      My twelve-year-old dad never went to school again. The truant officer poked his head into the barn every so often as my dad forked hay or fed the calves. ‘Try to get to school today, eh?’

      Eighty years later my dad keeps a postcard in his desk, addressed to ‘Master Stuart Simpson’, sent by his mother from hospital in Preston as she waited to give birth. The card shows a painting of a spaniel. ‘Wasn’t Preston lucky on Saturday. I heard it on the wireless. Hope you are doing your best for Daddy.’

      He still cries when he sees it.

      Also in his desk is the bill from the hospital for the maternity services his mother received. A bill issued to her husband after her death.

      Grandma Marjorie was survived by her baby girl, who was also named Marjorie. As a girl, Young Marjorie was red-haired and sparky. She worked on the farm, throwing herself into everything – baking with gusto and covering herself and the kitchen with flour, chopping logs and accidentally hacking her finger-end off with the axe. She got engaged to a local undertaker called John but Young Marjorie had a digestive disorder and no one realized how serious it was until she collapsed and died. Instead of being married in 1959 she was buried. This was four years before I was born. She was twenty-one.

      Young Marjorie, aged 21, the year she died

      I think it was in 2005 that the Kilner jars of damsons, picked from the orchard and bottled by Young Marjorie, and that had been lining the far-pantry shelves my entire life, were finally thrown out.

      It took me a long time to realize that Grandma Marjorie was so scarcely mentioned I didn’t have a proper name for her and had settled on ‘Dad’s Mum’. Stories about her were rare not because nobody cared but because Dad and Gran cared so much. On this subject, as on so many others, we were dumbstruck.

      In my lifetime the cupboard halfway up the farmhouse stairs had been painted shut with layer upon layer of thick gloss paint. As a child I pressed my eye to the keyhole, shone in a torch and saw book spines untouched for more than twenty years.

      Books СКАЧАТЬ