If we tried to coax Granny into a phone box, she would back away as though it were full of ravaging beasts. Press Button A? Button B? She couldn't. She just couldn't. I know now that that familiar mist so well known to me was descending before her eyes, and she knew that she couldn't deal with anything so complicated.
Brought up in a house full of servants, where people wrote letters, real letters, that arrived the same day, and in a world of horses and carts, she lived through two world wars ( she spent the second one hiding under the piano).She successfully mastered the wireless and the telephone, and would watch other people's televisions. Phone boxes were a step too far.
She spent her later years, widowed and alone, sleeping in a bed which has two items under it: a chamber pot and a truncheon. How she proposed to reach, never mind wield, a truncheon in the event of an intruder I have no idea. I'm not sure how she even managed the chamber pot (Granny was not small, living on bread and cheese and sweet milky coffee). Now I shall never know.
But I finally understand about the phone box. I just wish I had understood at the time.
(I may have posted about this before, but no matter...)
I always felt I missed out on grannies. My dad's mother lived miles away, so visits were infrequent. I never really got to know her. My mother's mother died when my mum was only 21, so I never met her. I'm not on the doorstep to all of my own grandchildren, but hopefully they will have happier memories of me one day.
ReplyDeleteMaggie, I'm not on the doorstep of any of my grandchildren. Sounds as though you have at least some near you.
DeleteA house full of servants? Now I am impressed!
ReplyDeleteNot unusual in those days, Meike. I'd like a butler!
DeleteWhen I was a child my maternal grandmother (my paternal grandmother having died when my father was a youngster) lived in a rambling house fuelled entirely by gas (and coal, of course) but she embraced modern technology and the radio was fed by an accumulator and the vacuum cleaner was powered by human strength (hers - the housekeeper having been let go when the slump took its toll) pumping the bellows. Later in life (she lived into her 90s) many of her attitudes were very modern and I think if she were alive today she would have revelled in the advances made since her death.
ReplyDeleteGraham if my grandmother taught me one thing it was never, ever, to compare grandchildren. Mine did, and its effects were lasting.
DeleteMine didn't and neither did my parents. In fact the scrupulous fairness with which my mother, in particular, treated my brother and I until her death caused some amusement to my brother and I on occasion. We are fortunate that we have inherited our parents' ideal of fairness. We have also been fortunate in being very close and never having suffered from sibling rivalry.
DeleteWhat you call 'the mist' I call 'the shutters coming down'. It happens every time my husband tries to explain how to turn on the tv using the Sky controller.
ReplyDeleteWendy, I see it as similar to the safety curtain at the theatre. Impenetrable.
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