I wince because I can’t remember and I’ve always wished my was memory better, especially of those years. I have that sharp digging in my stomach again. A stitch, trapped wind, a claw in my gut.
“When you were very small we took you round the park. Your little face pressed against the back window. Your dad was going mad because the filthy baboons were jumping all over the bonnet, pulling and twisting at the windscreen wipers. Your mam just laughed and laughed. She threw back her head and laughed until the tears rolled down her face, she was always like that. Screaming at the monkeys’ pink little things sticking up. We were held up by one of the rhinos standing right across the road. Ten minutes and it wouldn’t budge, wetting all over the tarmac. Imagine wetting for ten minutes! It scared us. Your mam said it looked like it was made out of rock.”
I could picture Nanna Jean as she would have been then, unseeing and buttoned up hugely in her thick winter coat. We would have had to describe to her everything she is describing to me now.
She says, “What you loved best was the big cats.”
I flinch.
The train is whispering and clunking into South Shields station.
“How big they were. You kept telling me, in ever such a serious voice, ‘Nanna Jean, the big cats are as big as this car.’ They came right up to the windows. And you gave a yell, I remember, because this one pushed its face up to the glass. A big cat’s face filling all of the window, your mam said. And you howled that it was staring right at me, its nose inches away from my nose. Of course, I couldn’t see a thing then. I just stared back. That stuck in my head, that story. I thought you would remember.”
“No,” I say. “I’d forgotten completely.”
We get out. The passengers around us are mostly old women who get to travel anywhere on Tyneside for five pence daily. Whenever I have been in London it surprises me how young and busily energetic all the commuters are. Nervously watching stations notch by. The ladies on the Tyneside Metro system spin their train journeys out. They want to miss their stations on purpose for the fun of going back the way they’ve been. Sometimes they have their knitting with them.
We walk about town. All my muscles ache they feel the lack of exercise. I feel stretched and then left alone, not knowing how to relax. And my pockets are full of crumpled toilet roll. This miserable cold, expressing itself in a stream of snot as we go round the shops. We look at ladies’ slacks in Marks and Spencer’s because Nanna Jean wants something comfy to wear on the plane to Corfu. We have coffee in Minchella’s, an ice-cream parlour that’s been there for years. The sugar cubes are wrapped in twists of white paper. I go to the loo to get new tissues. All my old ones are like papier-mâché. Some bloke in the loo is looking at me sideways. I hurry out.
It was funny to see Nanna Jean like that — indecisive and
fluttery. We spent an hour walking the streets while she ummed and aahed, trying to talk herself out of seeing Iris, her friend.
“We know what each other looks like. Why do we need to see each other? We’re both on the phone.”
I gritted my teeth and wanted to ask, Why did we come out, then? Why did you dress up, lilac gloves, best shoes and all, if not to go and see your best friend?
“They reckon she’s turning yellow. Her skin has turned yellow all over and she has to sit by the phone, ready to ring out.” Nanna Jean shuddered. “I couldn’t abide that. When it comes to my turn, Andrew, don’t let them let me deteriorate.”
With that she trotted into the Shields museum, where she thought we might waste another hour or so. Inside it had been made into Catherine Cookson Country, a sign said. It was all reconstructions. Waxwork people dressed up as the 1930s on Tyneside. Milk carts and horses and kids with whips and tops. Nanna Jean clicked about on her heels with a glum expression. It was echoing and cool inside and we talked in reserved tones. There were racks of Catherine Cookson’s novels on sale. Nanna Jean had read all eighty.
“They say she’s a wonderful woman,” she whispered, gazing at a blown-up photo of the author in a bed jacket. “Ah, look at her wrinkled old hands. She gives every penny she earns to charity.”
The main attraction turned out to be an indoors recreation of Hyde Street and how it was in the 1930s. This was news to Nanna Jean. She turned the corner into a dimly lit hallway and her feet scraped on cobbles. “Well, you bugger,” she gasped and instinctively drew her hand-bag in under her bosom. “This is like being on This Is Your Life.”
Beyond the street there was a cross-section of a house: the back parlour, the scullery. “Look at the old stove,” she said. “We had a cat die in ours. Oh, look!” It was her house before it was modernised, before she had gone blind.
After that, emerging blinking into the street, we decided to head up the hill at the top of the town. We could have a poke around the Roman remains. I was interested in that kind of thing, wasn’t I? She was harking back to a school project I did at twelve, but I didn’t let on I wasn’t interested.
The Heritage people had downed tools for the winter and the half-remade fort was quiet and still. We got up to the top with no bother. Looked out at the town. The view of the sea and the docks still took my breath away. I said, “Imagine being a Roman soldier, the wind here shushing up your leather skirt.”
