They had a telly quite early and they were proud of it. The programme he was on about was, of course, Coronation Street. I never saw my granddad. My mam used to call him ‘my dad who would have been your granddad’. He died at the end of that week. When he called Jean about the telly, he started to cough, and when the fit passed he heard Jean wailing in the kitchen and saying she’d turned blind.
They got the doctor straight in — doctors were different then, they came out. Jean said she sat on the chair in the scullery and wouldn’t move. She could smell the nicotine, the thick yellow of the doctor’s fingers as he waggled them in front of her face, but she couldn’t see them. And she could smell the kippers, which, it turns out, were off. She would never shake the idea that offish kippers had robbed her of her sight. While the doctor was there, all she could think about was the awful smell. “I worried he’d think I’d wet myself in shock.”
She stopped seeing things until 1979. She was at her daughters’ weddings, five of them shared out between three sisters. Never saw a groom, a gown or a flower spray. She couldn’t look at her grandchildren, whose number steadily multiplied over the years. She sat in her stiff-backed armchair holding baby after baby, staring straight ahead, smiling a funny smile. In 1979 I wasn’t quite ten. Mrs Thatcher had come in and we were living in Darlington, my mam and dad and me, in a beautiful Victorian house in the terrace by the park and the Arts Centre. We had space for a granny flat downstairs, which my parents argued about. Living in that house, my mam said, was one of the only times in her life when she felt she had arrived somewhere. Set into the wail up the stairs we had fish tanks brimming with exotic fish, which Dad collected.
One day in 1979 Nanna Jean turned up in Darlington under her own steam, which was unheard-of. She had come over thirty miles in a taxi and had to pay a fortune. But, unflustered, she stepped out of that cab all dressed up in a new suit, fashionable and pastel blue, with a ruffled collar. Her hair had been eased out of its usual bun, coiffed up and dyed amber like Mrs Thatcher’s. When we opened the front door and stared, we realised that her eyes were wide open and she was looking straight back at us. Twinkling, even.
“It came back! My sense of sight!” she shouted. “It’s like the scales have fallen from my eyes! Look at your faces!”
The years had dropped off her, too, and it was a sprightly, somewhat raffish Nanna Jean that inspected our house and ourselves. She cast a quick glance around the granny flat we’d hoped to convert for her, sniffed and said it would be impossible. She could never live with us. We needn’t worry about her.
She spent the eighties having her home in Hyde Street modernised. New windows, inside loo, bit of a conservatory. The yellow wallpaper went in favour of big, cheerful floral prints, borders and dado rails. She even took the nets out of the windows and fitted venetian blinds. Then she took a big interest in the new colours that had come in for make-up. Almost cruelly she ribbed her daughters for not keeping themselves up to date. For letting themselves go as they headed for middle age.
Nanna Jean started going out. She got herself a gang of cronies she went dancing and gambling with and the next thing was that they all went on holiday together. She went all round the world. She started in Marrakesh at the age of sixty and she’s still going strong. Trogging round bazaars, having continental breakfasts in places I’ve never heard of. She’s filled that little house with knick-knacks from all over and you can tell each one has a story behind it. Every jade sculpture, every pot and carved little effigy.
After Mam and Dad died when I was eleven, Nanna Jean took me in and set busily about looking after a teenage boy. Feeding me up, jollying me along. As it turned out, I never took up that much energy in the looking after. I wasn’t as demanding as some.
I’ve still got a lot of stuff at Nanna Jean’s. I wake in the back room, look around, and it surprises me, the stuff I’ve got. It’s funny. Photos of school friends on the walls in little frames, which she has left up. There’s even a picture of Vince with me in about 1987. We’ve both got hair with streaks, gelled up. It was taken here, that picture. She used to let him come and stay at weekends. She must have known what we were up to.
I moved out to my uncle Ethan’s shop when I was eighteen. Back to Darlington, to live alone above a taxidermist’s. It seems wherever I live I’m surrounded by exotic things.
Nanna Jean didn’t miss me, I don’t think, when I moved out. She started travelling for longer periods to ever more far-flung places. Then, on a white sandy beach in Australia, she did her hip in. I didn’t ask what she’d been up to. She had one hip replaced and then, a year later, the other one followed. “That’s cooked my goose,” she said to me, sitting up in her hospital bed. Bupa, of course. She voted Tory all through the eighties; it was the only note of discord between us. She went through this again that day on her Bupa bed. “What you don’t understand, Andrew, is that they’ve sorted things so that ordinary people like me can buy our own houses and do what we like with them. It’s free enterprise. It’s a very important thing. You’ll see that. And, actually, I do think the pendulum’s swung
