In the town where I was born lived…. my mum; my dad; my sister and myself.
And my aunt, Ivy.
Ivy loved the Beatles. She loved all of them like she knew them - which she didn’t – and her favourite was George.
“He’s so cute!” She exclaimed, regularly.
“Who?” My Dad replied. He had a short memory, shot to pieces in the war my Grandmother said.
Oh yes..
There was my Grandma too, and hundreds and hundreds of other people also in the town – all who loved The Beatles- but I didn’t know them.
I knew my Grandmother.
She knew me too, or so it seemed.
“You’ll be a writer when you grow up, you’ll see.”
She was sitting in her famous red armchair, next to a coal fire when she said this.
It was after the war and coal fires were still all the rage, and raging in most of the hearths of the city centre.
The coal fires made a lot of smoke that somehow became smog which killed a lot of people the war had missed, but her red armchair frightened me more than the smog.
It was because it was comfortable and I was drawn to sit in it. But it was her throne and if she caught me sitting there then I'd be better off taking my chance with the poisonous air outside than facing her wrath.
“I don’t want to grow up,” I told her.
I was certain about that, look what it had my dad.
A world war, a commuting job which he hated and – although it had happened yet (I was telepathic it turned out) – a heart attack the day after he had retired.
“Ha!” Grandma snorted, sounding like the steam trains that ran past the windows at the back of the house, on their way to the city centre.
“Your father used to write. Before….” Her sentence trailed off, loosing themselves in her dark memories of wartime, most of which she spent under the ground in an Anderson shelter playing cards with my Dad’s sister.
Grandma was an influencer, long before anyone used the term. Among other results of her influencing was that my Dad and Ivy were enthusiastic Rummy players.
My mum played too but I’m not sure her enthusiasm was blood deep as it was with the two siblings, my sister and I played too but I don’t think we were ever offered the choice.
It didn’t really matter as the form of the game they preferred was auction Rummy, in which even if it wasn’t your turn you could offer to buy the card that had just been thrown away from someone whose turn it would be before you.
Most of the time the two of them played between themselves until one of them shouted ‘rummy’ and my mum got up to make a pot of tea.
“The Beatles are good writers,” she confided as if it was top-secret. Then, she started singing. In the town where I was born, lived a man who sailed to sea..”
It’s a fun song, but I think you’ll agree, it’s far from their finest lyric.
Died in the church and was buried along with her name, is much stronger.
My Grandmother died at home but was buried in a churchyard, not far from the street where she had been born and grown up.
It is unlikely that anyone from her street sailed to sea and certainly none of the people at her funeral had.
I was there, but still a landlubber; my family hadn’t even crossed the English Channel to France, as some were rumoured to be doing, for day-trips to buy cigarettes.
It rained, clearing the smog that was probably as safe as the cigarettes and since no one in our family had thought to bring an umbrella we were as damp as a sailor’s midships by the time we got back to granny’s house with her death ,which we confined to the submerged remains of the Anderson Shelter.
Death, I realised, was another reason for not growing up.