The story of my grandmother - the bits of it I know, anyway - is endlessly fascinating to me.  Partly because it's sad, and I'm a sucker for a sob story - particularly a *real* sob story; partly because every time I think I know it, think I've absorbed it, a new piece is revealed and it becomes freshly incomprehensible; and partly because I feel it goes a long way toward explaining how my father was when we were young, and thus my often problematic relationship with him.  But mostly because I just don't understand it...

I met my grandmother when I was 14.  That was, I think, the first time my father had seen her since he was about the same age.  She left my grandfather when my Dad was about 4, and in doing so left two small sons behind.  She went to live in Portugal, where she re-married, and had 3 more children.  Somehow, my father made contact with her and we all went to meet her.  By then, of course, I was a teenager - eager to distance myself from my family and everything that interested them, and make my own, much cooler and more interesting way in the world.  So, beyond a slack handful (3?  4?) summer holidays at her house in France, I never really spent any time with her and it didn't much occur to me at the time that it was an unusual situation.  After all, so much of my Dad's family was unusual, and I was too much absorbed in my own small world.

She was a little, tiny woman - less than 5' - who lived in a pile of a stone barn in a village called St Astier de Duras, in the Dordogne.  She lived with two large, bumptious and stupid English setters.  There was a vineyard up the road, to which we would take empty plastic gerry cans, and return to her house with one full of rough red vin de table, and the other full of not much more refined white.  I had a bike accident there one year, and picked up two elbows, a hip and a forehead full of gravel rash.  Ouch.  The hospital experience improved my French no end, "Tu resembles à un mommi"  ????  "Tu sais?  Comme Tutenkhamen?"  Oh yes.  Je sais.

3 or 4 years later, I met my uncle  - her son from her subsequent marriage - and his wife.  My uncle was (is) very cool.  He worked in promotions/event management.  He'd been at Uni with a bloke called Simon le Bon, and had spent the last few years stage managing his friend's band's concerts.  His wife was a freelance journalist, working on various women's feature magazines.  They came to our house in London and brought Trivial Pursuit with them.  They were icy cool. 

My grandmother moved from France to England, to be closer to her children.  All five of them.  Well four, because one was in the States.  Three, because one was in Portugal, now I think of it.  Her three sons.  But England didn't suit her, and after a couple of years she went to Spain.  I don't think I saw her after she left France, but Sissy got to know her much better.

At this point, all I knew of the story was that she'd left them.  And had another family.  And that the relationships were complicated.  No kidding. 

Then my grandfather became ill, and his illness progressed, and he was going to die.  And he began making his peace with the world in his own, eccentric way.  Which involved getting in touch with my grandmother again - a process which the children of both subsequent marriages found very difficult, and which caused ripples of pain - and rifts which have never wholly healed - throughout my father's generation.  When my grandfather died, he left his sons a letter, explaining the circumstances of their mother's leaving.  Turns out she wasn't wholly to blame.  He felt betrayed and hurt, and was instrumental in ensuring that she didn't see the boys again.  And in her hurt, in turn, she felt it better to be physically distant from them rather than close by and unable to see them.  So she left Africa.  Different continents was, for her - according to my grandfather - easier to manage.  But it did leave little room for any changes of heart...

Somehow I believe that the younger of the two boys - who had been sent to boarding school in England - had always been in touch with his mother.  I think the relatives he lodged with hadn't approved of the no contact rule and found a way round it.  But my father, who remained with my grandfather in Africa, didn't benefit from this - apart from once, aged about 12, when he was staying in England and went to a farm on a family outing, where he met his 'aunt' and 3 strange 'cousins'.  I don't know - don't recall - who arranged that outing.

When I was a very small child, we used to visit an aged relative - Great Aunt Grossie - in a house with a gravel drive and a high hedge.  She was a very, very old woman, in my small eyes.  But kindly, I remember - I don't have much more than a faint impression of her.  She sent me a card and a gift every birthday and Christmas - I remember my 13th birthday card was a cut-out paper fashion doll.  Or perhaps it was an earlier birthday than that.  Anyway, shortly after that, she died.  We were in Germany and I don't remember her death being a big deal - just an old relative who died.  After we went to meet my grandmother in France, I learnt that Great Aunt Grossie was actually my great grandmother.  

So that was it.  This dysfunctional family that separated and reunited and reformed and separated again - like continental plates and, like them, threw up volcanic eruptions, and seismic events with every reformation.  Eventually, after my grandmother's death, her children (my father's generation) all got together and there was some semblance of peace.  Reconciliation.  A number of people - including Sissy - went to Spain to clear her house and say their farewells.  I didn't go, having recently given birth, but I recall her memorial service in Suffolk. 

This weekend, I wanted to show Joy some family photo albums, and Dad gave me a pile to rifle through.  Amongst which was one of my grandmother's.  It started with wedding photos - her and my grandfather in 1939, glamorous and gorgeous at the church in Walberswick.  There were baby photos of my Dad and my uncle.  Dad looking very like Dan.  And there were letters.  Birth congratulations for both boys.  Some of them really funny.  Some really touching.  All windows into another world ("Darling the damnable news is I'm being sent to some awful place called Taveta, to a damned Abyssinian refugee camp.  I hear it is damned hot and damned unhealthy.  I think I shall be there for quite some time".)  And tucked into the back, there were letters from my father.  Thank you letters from a small child to a relative who had been generous on a birthday.  'Dear Mary, Thank you very much for the 20 shillings you gave me.'  He obviously wasn't entirely clear about the nature of this particular relative.  One letter began 'Dear Aunt Mary'.  Another said "I got a cricket bat from Mum and Dad".  I found these letters particularly affecting. 

And it's another piece of the story I wasn't aware of.  There was contact - there are also photos of Grossie, in Africa, with both boys, at intervals throughout their childhood.  I still don't understand it.  I don't know that I ever will.  But it feels like an important story. And I'm aware of its ripples and echoes in my own life.  I hope not my own behaviour, but I guess time will tell...

Comments

[Grak]

That could be the basis of a great book. I'd read it.

[Silver Lining]

I'm not sure it could; when you dig into it further, the characters become less sympathetic. It's hard to know who you'd be rooting for, in the end!

[Grak]

That's what cold make it great - the twists and turns and not knowing who is why and how. It's like a real story of human relationships if the people change the deeper you dig. I'd defiantly read it!

[Steve]

It's why you need to write your own life story, plus any other stories of your parents you remember. In years to come, your grandchildren will wonder "what did silver do". If you don't write it they will never know. When my mother died she left albums with photos in them. Who were the other people, what did they do? Write your history for your descendants.

[Trepid Explorer]

Fascinating how, as you grow up, you realise everyone else is still keeping childhood secrets - even the "grown-ups".