21st-Century Yokel

without neighbours who took air rifle potshots at birds and cats. But I think in her truest heart she would have liked to have ended her life on the edge of the country. As someone who did not believe herself to be remotely important though, and liked to be anything but the centre of attention, she would never have expressed this desire to us in any assertive way. Instead, as she drifted off to sleep at night, she liked to imagine that the hum of cars behind her house, heading along the A610 towards Ripley – harmonising with those on the M1, if the wind happened to be in the right direction – was the sound of the sea. On the same side of the house, in the stone shed at the back of her tiny backyard, she also made a quiet monument to her longing: a grotto containing hundreds and hundreds of seashells, which she glued to the shed walls using tile cement.

There’s a photo of my nan and me walking hand in hand, from a family holiday in 1987, taken on Blackpool Sands beach on the south Devon coast not all that far from where I live now. With hindsight it strikes me rather sadly that, although it was over twenty years before her death, this would have been one of my nan’s last handful of visits to the sea. It is also almost certainly the trip during which she collected the first batch of shells for her grotto. It was around this point, while she was cooking Supernoodles or Findus Crispy Pancakes for my school lunches every weekday, that she would have been clandestinely beginning her grand project. Soon word of it got around the extended family, and if anyone was going to the seaside, they knew what to do: collect some nice shells for Terry’s shed. Terry – that was what she was known as to those not related to her by blood, short for Theresa. To everyone else she was mum or nan, never – never – grandma. The distinction was very clear from as far back as I can remember: a grandma, while technically the same relation to you, was a much sterner and less relatable character than a nan. A grandma might knit you a jumper just like a nan would, but it would be less comfortable. You could talk to a nan about a girl you liked at school, but never to a grandma. My nan carried off her nanness well, possibly partly owing to the fact she’d had it thrust upon her so early. She was still a year shy of forty when she first became a nan, which strikes me now as a dizzying bit of worldly-wise-before-its-time artistry, like finding out that Cat Stevens was just twenty-one when he wrote his Mona Bone Jakon and Tea for the Tillerman albums. By the time her second grandchild – me – came along, six years later, she was in possession of all the classic accoutrements of 1970s nanhood: the fluffy-toed slippers, the pension, the false teeth, the hair curlers, a plentiful and magical supply of cake and wool beyond her means. Look at photos of her from the mid- to late sixties though, with her beehive hairdo, and you get a sense of just how swift a transformation this really was: 1968, possible lost member of the Shangri-Las; 1975, full nan. Dependable. Timeless. Classic. It wasn’t that she seemed old as such, more that she suited the paraphernalia of oldness.

Some of my nan’s nanness was a reflection of the era – a period when young people transformed into old people at a very early age and made less effort to kick against it – but there was also no doubt that it had been hastened by having her soulmate snatched away from her in the prime of life. Her husband was called Tom, and it is in memory of him that I am named. When my mum was very small, Tom worked at the English Electric factory in Liverpool. My nan looked after my mum and my auntie Jayne and auntie Mal at home and worked part time in a sweet shop. When my mum was five, the family moved from a three-bedroom Victorian villa in the Anfield region of the city – where all five of them had been living in one room, sharing the house with my nan’s parents, three of her sisters and their families – to the vast new Kirkby council estate, which had been created as a place to rehouse families living in the Liverpool slums created by the Blitz.

In my nan’s dreams of returning to the north-west coast of England, I doubt it was this house in particular she was thinking about. I drove to Kirkby to see it not long ago, and it looks not dissimilar to the pebbledashed council houses I used to walk past on my way from school to see her. Since 1972 the M57 motorway has roared along only a hundred yards or so from its front door, meaning that had my nan returned the sounds she would have heard at night would have been louder, more obnoxious versions of those in Kimberley that she creatively recast as waves in her sleepy mind. These days Kirkby is an eerily silent zombie apocalypse sprawl of three-quarters-empty sports pubs, illegally dumped waste and lonely bus stops, whose crime rate is rarely out of the local news, but in the 1950s Terry and Tom’s house on the edge of the estate looked out onto a country lane and fields which, in August and September, were full of stooks of corn: a scene an old master could could contentedly render in oil as long as he was careful not to turn his vision more than ten degrees to either side.

My nan made all my mum’s, Mal’s and Jayne’s clothes from fabric she’d bought in the sales at T. J. Hughes in Liverpool, and – in