Grandmother's Footsteps

Some of my friends say I’m odd. They all probably think it. But they make a point of saying that it’s nice odd. It’s not the kind of odd that’s embarrassing or awkward.

     “Sometimes I can’t quite make you out, Irene,” my friend Sonia said the other day. “You’re a conundrum. A contradiction.” Irene is an aspiring writer and a darned good writer too, but she does sometimes seem to feel compelled to prove the fact by over-use of alliteration!

     “How so?” I asked, though of course I knew the answer.

     “Well, sometimes you seem to be miles away, and yet you have a capacity for getting things done quickly, too.”

     Such a practical reply was both reassuring and vaguely disappointing. Deciding there was no harm in recycling a good phrase, I said, “Well, perhaps in some ways every one of us is a conundrum and a contradiction.”

     I think Irene and I would probably have been friends anyway, but we also, well, at least on the surface, have a great deal in common. We’re both mature students, but unlike some of our fellow mature students, we don’t have commitments to care for children or elderly relatives. The best of both worlds, you might say. But it also means we don’t necessarily “fit” into the convenient groupings. My Grandma, a golden-hearted but plain talking Yorkshire woman (sometimes the stereotypes are right!) used to describe such things as Neither t’other nor Which. At least, I always used to think that was what she said. I bear a certain resemblance to her. The unusually high forehead, and the figure that kinder folk call “rounded”. There’s a lot to be said for fringes and loose tops. 

     It was quite a difficult decision for me to leave my job in the Health Food store (though the owner, Merle, never liked that term) and take up my interrupted education. I was happy there. I had found my niche, and Merle knew perfectly well, and acknowledged, that I knew more than she did about – well, let’s say certain elements of the work than she did, but I had no interest in the admin side, so was quite content to remain her assistant. But I suppose it was something that I’d known all along I was going to do. “And I won’t stand in your way, or try to,” she said, “I know what you’re like with your history, and if you don’t take this chance you’ll always regret you didn’t.” Perhaps I should explain what she meant by this chance. There was a window when the local council were offering grants for mature students – to finance their retraining. The theory was that it was to help fill skills shortages, but I was lucky enough to deal with people who interpreted that loosely. Though another of Gran’s sayings was that we make our own luck. 

     I like my course, and am putting in the necessary work, and my tutors are happy with me. But I’ll make no secret of the fact that access to the university’s resources and archives is at least as appealing as any return to the groves of Academe or the thought of the qualification (useful or otherwise) at the end of it. 

     The History department isn’t one of those that completely ignores Kings and Queens and Presidents and Parliaments and Wars and engineering feats on principle. And I have no problems with that. But they’re very big on local history and social history and all that, and that suits me absolutely fine. 

     My thesis is on the “hidden feminists” in village life back in medieval and Tudor times, and how women were often not just the power behind the throne but the power behind the farm and the power behind the loom and sometimes in front of them. It’s interesting and revealing, but I’m not going to pretend it was triggered by wholly academic interest. 

     I hope this doesn’t sound condescending, but I can’t help feeling a bit sorry for anyone who grew up entirely without their Gran’s stories. And I hope this doesn’t sound like boasting, but I reckon you would search far and wide to find someone whose stories equalled the ones Gran told!

     She was, of course, perfectly literate, and sometimes read to me from her favourite books, many of which are still my own. She was a good reader; never flashy, never pedantic, her voice low but clear. Still, both of us preferred it when she put the books to one side and told her own tales. She sometimes joked, resignedly, but without rancour, that she was bilingual, she could either talk Yorkshire or talk proper depending on the circumstance and the listener. It was true, but if wasn’t even a quarter of the story. There were nuances and transitions, and sometimes she spoke with an accent that was neither proper nor Yorkshire, but seemed to come from other times and other places. In interviews and on forms I might well say that my grandmother originally piqued my interest in social history and genealogy. And that, too, is true. But there is a difference between the surface skim of truth and the layers beneath it. On both sides of her family, quite a few people had married and borne children late, so living memory “at one remove” went back further for me than it did for many people. 

     But though I loved the stories of Great Great Grandmother Sybil who delivered the Lady of the Manor’s firstborn when the doctor was held up in the snow, and of Great Great Uncle Leonard who went down the pits when he was only 13 but ended up as a schoolmaster, the ones I loved best went back further than that. Much further. Gran sometimes used the phrase I don’t know how many greats and I suspected that she probably did, but was too interested in the story to hold it up with repetition and tedious chronology. I don’t know how many greats Aunt Betsy, who was always called that, never Bessie or Betty or Beth or her full name Elizabeth, lived in the time of the English Civil War. 

     “And rum times they were, too,” Gran said. “She lived down Suffolk way, I reckon near Lowestoft as is now.”

     Gran’s attitude to the Civil War, on which she was a bit of an expert though she said she had never studied history since she was 14, was somewhat ambivalent. She said that the Cavaliers were probably the lesser of two evils, “But neither of them had much time for our sort, and that’s a fact. Still, it was worse in other places.” When she said that, her eyes, which were generally bright and beady right into old age, seemed to have a shadow in them. “What is it, Gran?” I asked, when I must have been about 10 or 11. “Just – thinking, lass,” she said. “Just thinking.” One of her most prized possessions was a picture – well, a copy of one, of course – that might have been a likeness of Betsy. “I can’t vouch for it,” she said, “Our sort didn’t generally have their likenesses painted, and some reckon it’s Wilhelmina Marriot – little Lady Wilhelmina – from the Big House. Betsy’s Mam was a servant there, I’m not sure if she was a lady’s maid or a parlourmaid, and it seems, though in a way it pains me to admit it, that the nobs treated them well enough, and Betsy was allowed to play with Wilhelmina when the two of them were lasses, though they put a stop to it later.”

     “She certainly has the family fringe,” I said, weighing up the image of a little girl that was faded, and not even that well-painted, but still had something intriguing and wonderful about it.

     Gran looked uneasy, and for once, flustered, as she said quickly, “Well, I wouldn’t go reading too much into that. You know what little lasses are for copying each others’ hairstyles and I reckon it was always that way.”

     Later on, after Gran’s death, I managed to find out a bit more about Lady Wilhelmina, and it was a sad story. She was married – and the phrase married off sprung to mind – to a man called Ambrose, who was more than a decade older than she was. Though I only had the bare bones of a family tree and no evidence at all that he ill-treated her – for all I knew he could have been a loving husband – I wove my own story round her. Anyway, she died in childbirth, and the baby too. I say there was only the family tree, but other stubs and snippets of tales told hundreds of times over had managed to slip through the cracks of time, and one of them was that in the throes of labour she cried out, “I want Betsy! Only Betsy can help me!”

     That was the only reference to Betsy I could find at all, yet she was more real and alive to me than the unfortunate Wilhelmina. 

     Gran’s stories could go back even further than that. Betsy had an I don’t know how many times great grandmother (or possibly Aunt) called Hepzibah, who – according to the story – had been quite inspirational in her home area (which was still Suffolk, or possibly Norfolk) in inspiring and ministering to the participants in the Peasants’ Revolt.

     “Like a kind of Joan of Arc!” I exclaimed.

     There was that flash of darkness, but even darker, and Gran merely muttered, “You could say that, lass.” 

     “I wish I’d known your Gran,” Sonia said, “She sounds like a real character.” At first I wasn’t sure I was happy with that, as a real character can be a kind of code or euphemism for someone who’s frankly tiresome, but I was pretty sure Sonia didn’t mean it that way, and didn’t bristle, only saying, “She was, though she said herself she was only one link in a long chain.”

     I was genuinely fond of Sonia, and was distressed when in our second year at the university she began to develop frequent and debilitating headaches. As anyone would, she put them down to stress or eye-strain, and fretted that she might be developing migraine – her Mother was afflicted with it, and so she knew exactly how horrible it could be. Finally she gave in and went to the doctors about it, and was sent for an EEG, and was far braver waiting for the results than I ever would have been. You can imagine her relief – and mine – when they found absolutely no evidence of a tumour. “So I suppose I’ll just have to put up with it and take painkillers, not that they always do much good,” she said. “I’m more inclined to think it’s NOT migraine, as I don’t have any nausea – I suppose I should be thankful for that, at least! – and have found out on the Internet about Cluster Headaches – men have them more often, but women can.”

     Well for all my good intentions and for all I was quite happy, thank you, with my normal life, I couldn’t let a friend suffer when there was at least the possibility I could help. Still, I didn’t know how she would react when I made the offer! Generally very good natured, she could be scathing about what she called snake oil though she was never actually rude about my former employment. “Sonia,” I said, almost too casual, “Why not let me have a go at helping you? I know you’re not into alternative therapies,” (I intensely disliked that term, but made myself use it) “but they can’t do any harm.”

     “Irene, I’ll try anything, unless it’s potentially poisonous or from an endangered species,” she said, “though, no disrespect, as a lot of it’s probably the placebo effect, that hardly makes me an ideal patient!”

    I could have told her what a fallacy that was, but she wouldn’t have believed me. Mind you, she wasn’t entirely wrong. Though the calming fragrant tea I made her and the poultice I put on her brow might well have some sedative effect and were very pleasant, they were only what Gran called trappings. If needs must I could have managed without them. “Well, if nothing else I’m being pampered,” Sonia said. “I could get used to this, though I don’t suppose I’d be allowed a glass of wine instead of the tea!”

     “I’m afraid you’re right,” I said, whilst thinking that it probably wouldn’t make that much difference either way. Then I concentrated on the matter at hand.

     I hope this doesn’t sound like bragging, but Sonia was decidedly more surprised than I was when it seemed to be working. She went a couple of days without a headache, then a week, then a month. “Oh, Irene,” she said, giving me a little hug, “You’ve well and truly converted me!”

     “Don’t talk daft, as Gran would have said,” I replied. I’m not keen on that word convert. It has unfortunate connotations, though of course Sonia had no way of knowing that. 

     There is satisfaction, though, in a job well done, especially when it helps a friend out. 

     I had the hint of a headache myself earlier on today, and, it’s just one of those things, my methods don’t work so well on myself. That’s normal enough, Gran said, and yes, it could be bloody vexing. Still, it wasn’t that bad, certainly not like Sonia’s suffering, and I decided that at least some of it was the heat. It’s turned suddenly warm and at times like this I wish I didn’t have to wear that heavy fringe.

     But I do, of course. It wouldn’t do for anyone else to see my third eye. My witch’s eye.