By this point – the late nineties – her shell grotto was really starting to take off, spreading out, covering all four of the interior walls of the stone shed, which a hundred years earlier had been the outside toilet of a brewery worker. In this small, glittering, unlikely fairy wonderland, in a town smelling of beer, pappy white bread and chips, were shells of almost every size and colour, every one of them once containing a life. Limpets, cockles, whelks, shark eyes and ponderous arks, none of which, if they’d had the brainpower to imagine their own future, would surely have pictured themselves so posthumously exalted. Ever since I had reached that height my nan defined as ‘ever so tall’ I had been able to get across her backyard in any direction in not much more than three strides, but in that tiny yard space were packed as many plants as it was physically possible to fit. Soon the shell grotto at the rear of it would be the same: a vast, multi-faceted universe squeezed into a modest space without fanfare. You’d think she’d done all that she could with it then it would expand some more, shapes within shapes appearing within it. I missed this peak period of the grotto’s development and, not travelling to the sea for a long time, due to the location and somewhat nocturnal nature of my new job, failed to contribute any raw material to it.
In 1999 I had accepted a job as a full-time, contracted music writer and relocated to London. My nan was suspicious of the south of England as a whole, but truly hated the capital, spitting the name of the place out only when she had to. I only saw her more venomous when she was talking about Thatcher. She never went back to the capital for so much as a day trip after her brief move to its outskirts with Tom, my mum, Mal and Jayne, as part of a council-house swap with a family in Pinner, when Tom found himself working for a chronic bully at the Confederation of Shipbuilding and Engineering Unions. I did not hate London and had a high time there for a while, but like my nan I often found it icy and insincere, and after a little over two years realised it was not for me. To her credit, my nan never for a second tried to dissuade me from going and knew I had to find this out for myself.
For me, living over a hundred miles away, first in London, then in Norfolk, it would have been unthinkable to return to Nottingham to see my parents and fail to visit my nan as well. As always, I’d walk without knocking through her front door and invariably find her in her favourite chair with a cup of strong tea next to her, watching the news, the backscratcher and big seashell on her mantelpiece as ever, and she’d not seem remotely surprised at my arrival from several counties away, even on those occasions when I’d not warned her with a phone call. If you knew my nan and her general relationship with unheralded occurrences you might find this curious. She disliked shocks intensely – understandably so, since her life had been defined by a huge, terrible one. It didn’t require a burst balloon or crisp packet or smoke alarm to set her off. She’d jump out of her skin at the smallest abrupt noise. At the sound of her phone, she would levitate to a height of between two and seven inches from her seat, dark orange tea splashing the upholstery. I like to believe that this was simply another way that she was slightly hip and ahead of her time: loads of people get excited by phones nowadays but my nan was already all about that way back in the early 1980s, before anyone even had text or the Internet.
When I was younger I laughed at my nan for being scared of the phone and for calling me by my cousin’s or uncle’s or mum’s name by mistake. I also laughed – and still do – at her habit of clutching her house keys for up to an hour before returning to her house on any day when she’d been away. Wasn’t it silly, that key-holding thing my nan used to do? I was remembering last year, about twenty minutes from home, on the walk back to my house from my local supermarket, silently chuckling to myself. So premature and ridiculous of her! I thought, looking down at my own right hand and noticing my front-door key clasped tight within it.
It was probably inevitable that I would become parts of my nan as I got older, but what was strange was how abruptly I became some of them immediately after her death: the premature key-clutching, the tendency to jump at the buzz of my phone and other smallish technological noises, a sharp increase in the strength and volume of my tea intake and, finally and perhaps most noticeably, a visceral, all-consuming need to have the sea in my life. I could have started doing any of these things as a tribute to my nan, in the same way that I began to wear the small green terylene scarf I inherited from her, but that wasn’t it. It felt almost as if,
