Granny Was Here

You might have noticed that I haven’t blogged for months. And as I can no longer class myself as a blogger and my Instaphoto account consists of photographs of horse's ears and Northumbrian beaches; I cannot call myself a “Social Influencer” either.

So to fill a gap on my “Blog” I thought I would share a post that I wrote for a dear friend of mine a year ago. Her blog about mental health is now deleted but I am very proud of the post I wrote for her and thought I would share it with you. Because after all; we are mates. And I miss her blog very much:

Granny Was Here

This feels a bit strange this Guest Blogging malarkey. It’s like sitting at someone else’s desk and finding that the pens are in the wrong place but there’s a packet of chocolate HobNobs in the top drawer.

Now just to be absolutely clear, if you want to know where to buy the most fulfilling bottle of red wine for under £6 or how to make soup or toast, I have an understanding that is superior to most people. I know how to pour a fabulous gin and tonic that will quench your thirst and make you forget how your legs work, I can teach you how to ride a horse, calculate VAT from the gross amount and I am ruthlessly good at Snakes and Ladders; but when it comes to mental health, I know very little.

But I do know that my Granny was Bipolar.

Granny was born in 1908 and as a teenager was sent to stay with her cousins in Norfolk as her family thought she had Saint Vitus Dance. Back then, the name that was eventually given to her bouts of inconceivable energy and concise periods of exhaustion was Manic Depression. I much prefer the term Bipolar as Manic Depression sounds like a much more flippant term for what dominated my Granny’s life.

As a child I didn’t realise that there was anything wrong with Granny. Her house was full of many marvellous things that had been either purchased from various auction sales or retrieved from skips and bins. There were sofas, lamps, chairs, cookers, exercise bikes, tennis racquets, paintings and empty bird cages. There were stacks of mysterious bits and pieces that no longer had a purpose to serve in life and all these objects were stacked high in every room to form the most incredible tunnels and passageways for me to play in. The items were like towering skyscrapers and I recall most vividly once sitting in a swivelling armchair, pushing my foot against a tumble drier to spin myself around at tremendous speed.

To me, this was normal, this was just Granny and Grandad’s house. When we visited on a Sunday, sandwiches and hot tea were served by Grandad and a tube of sweets was dropped into my pocket for the journey home.

Granny would get to the point when she could no longer deal with the myriad of household goods jammed tightly into her home and the local Auction House would be called to clear the house enabling Granny to begin her white goods collection all over again. This is rather like going to a charity shop, buying a pair of jeans and then donating them back to the same shop the next day. You might say that I could have used the term “coals to Newcastle” but as they did actually live in Newcastle this term is more than a little ironic.

Of course the problem, was that the people who were destined to receive the things that Granny bought, didn’t actually want them because they were usually shit. She bought a car for my eldest brother who didn’t have a driving licence and at the age of 11 she bought me a clarinet. I didn’t play the clarinet but to be fair, I sharp learnt to play it and my friends were very jealous that I had my own instrument, made from wood and not a plastic edition that could be hired from school.

Granny bought fridges and freezers for people she hardly knew and beds, sideboards and sofas for people that she knew well. Once, the day after an auction sale a removal van drew up at Mum’s house. As the bloke opened the rear doors of the wagon, Mum enquired what was for her and he replied: “The whole lot, love”.

Granny had an allotment near her home where she spent a lot of her time. It wasn’t neat rows of vegetables and flowers, it was a tumble-down affair, with a shed that smelt of tobacco and leaf mould and many strange shaped tubs and pots standing around collecting rainwater. She grew raspberries and redcurrants and rhubarb under broken buckets. She grew peas and beans and sometimes the family were called to clear the overgrown vegetation when that also became too much for her.

Mum tells the story of Granny riding a moped almost 40 miles with carrier bags dangling from the handle bars to help her look after my 4 brothers and once she had a big win on the horses and gave Mum and Dad a present of some cash that was enough to pay off the bank loan they had taken to buy their car.

In her younger years she had worked as a nurse at the Psychiatric hospital, St Nicholas’ in Newcastle and later in life she capably and single-handedly ran a Guest House in the little village of Embleton on the Northumberland coast. Granny rolled her own cigarettes with her arthritic fingers and Old Holborn tobacco and sometimes she smoked a pipe. She liked a swift half of lager every now and again and she also liked the occasional flutter on the horses. She wore wellingtons, a trench coat and trilby and looked a bit like Ann Cleeves’ Vera; only 30 years older.

I was 17 when Granny and Grandad came to live with us and it was then that Granny stopped taking her medication. At first we laughed when we discovered that Granny had written “Granny was here” on a wall in the public toilets in the local town and when she pretended to have a heart attack when I said that I was going to tidy my bedroom. But as time progressed there was no humour to be found in the situation.

Many years earlier Granny had bought a caravan which was kept at our house. Obviously “on a high” as my Mum put it, she moved into this shed-on-wheels and was up all hours of the night tending to a vegetable patch that she had created on a rough piece of grass beside her new home. She was vile to my Mother and said the most horrible things. It took great strength from Mum but she eventually went and talked to our Doctor and Granny was sectioned.

It was one of the most horrible days. I’m sad to say now, that at the time I was secretly relieved that she was going. She had called me a kleptomaniac for borrowing her Sinead O’ Connor tape and not returning it. At that age, believing that I ruled the world and was the only important thing in it, I used get infuriated with Granny cheekily asking me if I couldn’t sleep when I rocked out of bed 11.30am.

But obviously my Mum was very distressed and it felt as though we were taking Granny’s dignity away. Saying that, Granny had a gargantuan sense of humour and as the Paramedic went to wrap a blanket around her shoulders to lead her to the waiting ambulance she asked him if he’d forgotten the straight-jacket.

Other family members became involved and decided that Granny’s behaviour had been caused by a urinary tract infection and upon her release from hospital allowed her to move back into the house that she still owned in Newcastle.

The rambling letters that followed from Granny to Mum were pages and pages long and were incredibly vindictive and aggressive. Mum was told that she had to remember that it was the illness and not her Mother saying these hurtful things to her. But as Mum said, it’s hard to remember that, when the illness looks and sounds exactly like your Mother.

A few years later we heard that Granny had been sectioned again and this time after a spell in hospital and with her medication in order, she was moved to a care home.

Mum and Dad visited her at least once a week for the remainder of Granny’s years.

I loved visiting her. Her sense of humour was still wicked and she once complained to me that the gorgeous silver plated cutlery in the dining room “must have been made in a ruddy shipyard”.

In this lovely home, Granny’s occasional smoking dwindled as you were only allowed to smoke outside. One day a lady sat down next to Granny in the garden and explained that she was only there for 2 weeks while her family were on holiday. “How long are you here for?” the lady asked.

“Until I die.” replied Granny calmly.

She used to take herself off to Gosforth High Street and return with her pockets full of betting slips. The ladies who took care of her, said they didn’t mind her going off into town at all, not even to Ladbrokes; as long as she let them know first, so they didn’t call the police.

Granny was very settled and happy in her home and whenever we went to visit she used to jam her walking stick in the front door to stop it locking her out so she could come and wave us off at our car. Sometimes we walked around the block so she could have a smoke, occasionally having to wait for her to rub the wet end of her badly rolled cigarette on someone’s garden wall to dry it out.

When all the residents were called for lunch there was an array of zimmer frames, wheelchairs and walking sticks used to move everyone to the dinner hall. Not Granny, she took the arm of the carer and walked smartly, she was 15 years older than some of her comrades and could still outdo them.

As she became more unsteady on her feet, the carers told her not to get out of bed during the night without one of them present. I don’t think Granny ever truly believed that any rules made applied to her and one night she fell and broke her hip. The broken joint was operated on but sadly she never made it out of hospital and back to the home. She was 98.

There was a colossal bunch of Lillies on the top of her coffin in honour of her name and Van Morrison’s Bright Side of the Road was played as we left the crematorium. It felt as though the old lady was tipping everyone a crafty wink.

A few years later I was pregnant with my daughter Britney (Not her real name) and was booked in for a caesarean as the baby was breech. Mum told me that Granny would have been so relieved as she too had endured a breech birth. Granny had known that her baby was breech and knew that it was going to be much harder work for her. This was in the 1940’s when there were few options for a Mother carrying a breech baby and Granny had suffered the loss of a child for which there was no counselling and no discussion.

We gave our daughter my Granny’s first name as her middle name and as a toddler at a family gathering I jokingly handed her a can of beer and told her to make herself useful. She tried briefly with her tiny little fingers to open the can then picked up a teaspoon and attempted to use it to lever open the ring pull. I had never seen anyone do this before, but it came as no surprise to learn that Granny used to open cans with a teaspoon.

I should have known that a personality as big as my Granny’s wasn’t going to disappear without leaving a trace somewhere.

I emailed my guest post to the Host Blogger at 10.28am on 11^th April. She replied with a beautiful thank you and said that it was 3^rd in line as she had other guest bloggers in the queue who had sent their pieces earlier and I should expect to see my piece on her blog in a few days.

And then at 5pm the Host Blogger emailed me again and reported that she was just getting my post ready and that it would be online in about an hour.

“Granny Was Here” had over 50 shares to Facetube from her blog which I thought was frankly amazing. But what’s more amazing is that I sent the link to the post to my Cousin who asked if I knew that the post had gone live on the anniversary of my Granny’s death.

I hadn’t realised. And when I told the Host Blogger, I asked her how I had managed to jump the queue of other guest posts.

She replied that throughout the afternoon after receiving my post she had the most overwhelming feeling that she had to post it on her blog immediately.

I have no explanation – except that perhaps I was correct; and Granny was here.