21st-Century Yokel

you’d be famous one day.’ This gave me a unique feeling of combined warmth and unease that increased exponentially over the years, all the way to her death. Warmth, as I became more and more grateful to have the love and support of a nan like my nan. Unease, because, having inherited a combination of my nan’s desire not to be the centre of attention and Tom’s dogged autodidactic desire to forge a career a little bit different to the one expected of him, I was becoming more and more aware that being famous was something I would definitely never want to be. My nan might once have told me, ‘You’ll be famous one day’ – perhaps during the outlining of our plans vis-à-vis the Lamborghini and Derbyshire – but all I can remember are numerous instances when she said, ‘I told you you’d be famous one day.’ This uncharacteristically self-congratulatory reference to her own soothsaying ability usually came after reports from me of personal achievements that could be optimistically perceived to hint at some miniscule notion of future fame, but not exclusively.

ME:

I beat a boy three years older than me in a competition at the snooker hall down town on Saturday!

NAN:

I told you you’d be famous one day.

ME:

I got sent some free records from a record company this week!

NAN:

I told you you’d be famous one day.

ME:

I’ve been offered a music writing job at the Guardian. I think I’m going to take it!

NAN:

I told you you’d be famous one day.

ME:

I’m going to New York in a few weeks!

NAN:

I told you you’d be famous one day.

ME:

I just bought some cheese. It’s marginally more expensive than the cheese I bought last week and has a fancy foreign name!

NAN:

I told you you’d be famous one day.

OK; so I made the last one up, but you get the idea.

Another of my nan’s catchphrases when talking to me was ‘You’re getting ever so tall,’ which she said to me regularly from around the time of my fourteenth birthday until she died. In fact, if you overlook her enquiry about how I was and our actual goodbye, my nan’s last words to me were ‘You’re getting ever so tall.’ I was thirty-four at the time. In my nan’s defence, during her last few years of erroneously informing me that I was getting ever so tall she was getting noticeably smaller. Almost impossibly so by the end, to the extent that, if you happened to be wearing a decent-size parka at the time, you might have looked at her and genuinely wondered if she would fit inside one of its pockets.

I remember being aware that my nan struggled with her health from the moment I was old enough to understand such a concept. I knew that you couldn’t jump on her and ask for a piggyback, like you could with most adults. She couldn’t come on country walks with the rest of the family and you certainly wouldn’t even think of trying to involve her in a game of football. I knew that the problem was somehow connected with the cigarettes she smoked but also that it wasn’t so simple that all you needed to do was take them away for her to be better. In fact, she’d had a small heart attack not long before I was born, and the doctor had said that her clogged arteries were down to years of chain-smoking. From that moment on, my mum, Jayne and Mal lived in constant awareness of her fragility. They’d lost their dad suddenly and unexpectedly, and it seemed eminently possible that they could lose her too.

Like a lot of working-class family get-togethers in the mid- to late seventies, those of my relatives – even those where children were present – were conducted in a thick miasma of cigarette smoke. But by the early eighties almost everyone save for my nan had given up. She had smoked constantly since she was thirteen, when her mum had handed her her first cigarette and taught her how to inhale and the best way to hold it. One time when I was doing some drawing at her house when I was eight or nine I asked her why she needed to smoke fags. Were they like food? ‘Not exactly, son,’ she said. I handed her my felt-tip pen and asked if she could pretend that was a fag instead. She said it wasn’t that simple and, besides, it was far too late now. Who could deny her that one pleasure, when she’d lost two of her primary others, her soulmate and the sea? But the nagging of her offspring and their offspring finally paid off: directly after her sixtieth birthday, for which the family bought her a precise total of sixty presents, she found the willpower to give up. For the final couple of decades of her life she did not touch a cigarette and lived almost exclusively on the healthy diet of a pescatarian chaffinch. All that oily fish appeared to have a positive effect on her brain. She still nearly always went through the roll-call of almost all her children and grandchildren when addressing one of us – ‘Can you pass me my specs, please, Fay, Jack, Jo, Jeff, Tom . . . ? Oh dear!’ – but she’d been doing that more or less for ever. She began to read more, devouring the novels my dad passed on to her until reading got too much for her failing eyesight. Her awareness of news and politics was more razor sharp and up to the minute than ever. As I became a hungry reader of novels myself and started to spend time with people far more educated and wordly than me, nothing I talked about was intellectually beyond her, even though she made a good job of pretending some of it was. Because she underrated herself so