AFTER SORTING through the family album, I realised a pic of my smiling grandmother with infant me on her lap was missing.
It doesn't exist in paper, only in memory, which may be why it feels more permanent. She died and her death left us in the orbit of her husband and her own mother. Folk my father could barely stomach.
Regardless, every fortnight we made the trip to Audenshaw to visit my grandfather in his sombre bungalow. Every fortnight, without fail, he produced god-awful fruit polos that cemented themselves to our teeth.We, as children, couldn't speak coz he'd get snappy, so we just fumbled about with his brass ornaments until the clock thankfully said it was pub opening time. To compound the pain of the journey, the misery that was my grandmother's mother, lived nearby in a dreary block of flats, so we visited there too.
While my grandmother's brother's car was outside, we had to wait in ours until he had driven off. He'd somehow talked the old woman into cutting her own daughter, my grandmother, out of the will. My father felt compelled to continue the feud by blaming him.
I understand my father better now. The people he had been closest to, his mother and his grandfather, were gone before I could walk. He was grieving in a house full of strangers.
Things improved shortly before my grandfather died.When I was in my teens and able to pick up his News of the World and take it into his bathroom before getting way too over excited looking at its racier pages. My parents were probably sympathetic to me splodging about and, though they in no way encouraged it, they recognised it kept me quiet enough.
We had all been to his funeral a thousand times before it actually happened. I was philosophical about it, thinking, 'Grandfather is dead, genuinely sad, but I will never eat another fruit polo or set foot in Audenshaw ever again.'
My mother always stated that things would've been very different had my grandmother survived. That pic of us both represents a love denied them, so seems apt that it is missing.
Saturday, 7 March 2026
BEATS OF LOVE
173. Free Energy by Bananagun
IN THE late 1950s, symptoms of bulimia; the bingeing, the purging, were folded into broader psychiatric frameworks, misread, misnamed.
Leading to misdiagnosis or classification under broader neurotic categories, so my mother got sectioned. I never knew this in her lifetime, but I was told candidly by my sister. When I mentioned it to her surviving partner, he said, 'Your mother was in the bottom block' and moved on. The phrase has stayed with me since.
I was sad as I recalled how upset we both were leaving Horwich after my father quit his job. He took us to Middleton, unbeknownst to me, my mother's birthplace, before finally taking us back to her hometown. The draw was being with her own mother, despite some folk knowing her history. They held a silence. I think of that now and can barely imagine it.I recall my ambivalence after giving up on the Mancunian dream to return home myself and the one thing drawing me back: my mother, who understood my sadness more than I knew.
I miss that tangible love like when she knotted herself around me prior to my major surgery, so much it hurts still.
