Back in my mum and dad’s living room after our Bog End walk, I went through some old photos from Joyce and Ted’s collection: my granddad and my dad’s uncle Ken pretending to be rally drivers in an abandoned wreck of a car they’d found on a walk; my grandparents immaculately attired at work parties; the two of them and Ken dressing up, often in very androgynous fashion; my granddad grinning in photo after photo; my grandma’s older brother Les in what for all the world looked like the promo shot for a 1940s heart-throb starring as a Los Angeles gumshoe. ‘PEOPLE LOOKED LIKE FILM STARS AT THAT POINT BECAUSE THEY COULDN’T AFFORD TO EAT PROPERLY,’ my dad said. ‘BEING FAT WAS A SIGN OF WEALTH. NOW IT’S THE RICH PEOPLE WHO ARE SKINNY.’ My granddad’s side of the family all grew their own veg. By the time they were twenty each of them had killed at least one chicken with their bare hands. In a time before unemployment benefit they found coal for their fires by waiting along the railway line for the chunks that would drop off trains. ‘MY AUNTIE IRENE USED TO PUSH A PRAM AROUND PRETENDING SHE HAD A BABY AND USE IT TO STEAL COAL FROM THE OPEN-CAST MINE IN BRAMCOTE. SHE GOT ARRESTED FOR IT.’ He passed me another photo: my granddad in a suit and tie, grinning as usual, surrounded by beer bottles and seven people I’d never seen before. ‘LOOK AT THIS,’ he said. ‘YOU CAN TELL IT WAS AN INNOCENT ERA. PRE-INTERNET, PRE-DOGGING.’ Joyce’s family, though not well off, did not suffer the same poverty as Ted’s did in the twenties and thirties: her mum, Ethel – a woman even more fearsome than her – ran a haberdashery shop and lived in a house full of buttons. Joyce went on to work in a shoe shop and for a library supply company.
I couldn’t help returning to that photo of Joyce’s brother Les, a dashing debonair figure who a stranger might be forgiven for not at first guessing was a Nottingham-based dental technician with a sideline in hypnotism. After Joyce first met my mum, she told my dad that she had good teeth, describing them as ‘like celery roots’. ‘I remember looking in the mirror afterwards to check if they had ridges on them,’ my mum said. Perhaps influenced by her inside knowledge of the dental trade, Joyce advised me that it might be worth thinking about having my own teeth out early in life, as it would save a lot of hassle as I got older. I was approaching my seventeenth birthday at the time. Much of her life appeared to be about sensibly preparing for her years as an old age pensioner. By the time she and my granddad turned forty – when they were both very healthy and active – she already had their names on a list for a retirement bungalow. In her defence it should be pointed out that when their retirement years did arrive they seemed to spend a lot of them having a very good time, which they told us about in great detail in what became a reversal of more traditional family meet-ups, where the old people listen to the young people tell them about all the fun, energetic stuff they’ve been doing.
Joyce was the only close family member I was frightened of when I was a child. But maybe that was useful: all my other close relatives apart from my daredevil uncle Tony were big softies, and one Victorian influence wasn’t such a bad thing for me. High-spirited behaviour was not tolerated in Joyce’s presence, which might go some way to explaining why my dad indulges in so much of it now. My memory of her relationships with those close to her reminds me of something the novelist Richard Russo’s grandfather once said about his grandmother: ‘With your grandmother, you always have a choice. You can do things her way or you can wish you had.’ The general line of thinking is that she and Ted did argue early in their relationship but not later on, after Ted realised that to let her have her way 100 per cent of the time led to a simpler, easier life.
As I continued to flick through the photos, I could hear my mum and dad in the kitchen preparing the evening meal. My dad then announced that he was going upstairs to the loft. My mum asked why he was doing that, and he said he wanted to fetch the electric heater for her to use during the life-drawing class she had organised for tomorrow. I heard the fridge start to beep, as it did when somebody hadn’t shut the door properly and it felt the need to warn them.
‘You don’t need to do that now,’ my mum said. ‘Do it in the morning. Dinner will be ready in a minute, and I’ve put some nibbles out in the other room.’
‘NO, I’M GOING TO GET IT DONE NOW,’ said my dad. ‘I DON’T WANT YOUR LIFE MODEL TO BE COLD. DON’T USE THAT
