Nan's ninth

When I was a child our family made an annual pilgrimage on Boxing Day to our maternal grandparents.  It was the big event of the year, the tribal gathering together of all the sons, daughters, spouses and grandchildren.  We met in a small terraced house which lay halfway down an unmetalled road.

As we drove through the descending darkness, it was a challenge to avoid the potholes filled with bright sand-colour water, and to find somewhere to park in a road laid down before cars were even invented.

The house itself had a very particular smell, as do all often-visited locations for children, who retain a feral appreciation of odours, lost in the socialising process of adolescence.  It was the smell of the past, of a time before I was born, of where my mother had been a girl, an unimaginable era comprehensible only through that smell which was direct and visceral in its effect. The furniture and decorations were of a piece with this smell: chairs with stretched and baggy covers, worn and scuffed tables, massive dressers with faded photographs in mottled silver holders, heavy glass and - even more redolent of distant times and places – a yellowing elephant's tusk.

Events revolved around two main areas; the front rooms and the kitchen.  The latter seemed to embody warmth and the fundamental civilisation of the hearth.  Here the women gathered as they helped prepare the enormous meal for the twenty or so people present. Between the kitchen and the front rooms was a dark passageway, the main repository of the house's characteristic smells of wood and polish and fabrics and people.  Here small, shrieking children would run with clattering feet, savouring the cool air and the darkness and their unexpected contrast with the two islands of light they joined.  Here too were the stairs leading up to the almost forbidden region of the bedrooms.  When, daringly, we ventured there it was like entering a frozen world; everything was very still, and somehow hard to connect with the vitality below.

The front rooms had been transformed for the Christmas celebrations, chairs were packed in everywhere, and in the second part a long table stood ready to receive the turkey - carefully separated into white and brown meat - the ham, the celery sticks and the all the other ritual elements of our feast. Whether it was because it was near the food, or simply a result of our love or adventurous nooks and crannies, it was under this table that we children preferred to remain for much of the evening. 

At least, we remained there until it was time for the presents. It was the children's task to hand these out.  Often I knew in advance what my grandparents were giving me; one year it was a Hawkes Pocket Score of Beethoven's Ninth, original price 33/6d.  Despite this, I was enraptured by the score's solidity, its crystal clear printing of music I had only recently discovered and been amazed by.  As I reverently turned its pages, I was oblivious to the by-now familiar scene of the over-excited children, the flushed and happy adults; sadly oblivious too of my maternal grandmother, presiding over it all, the great and proud matriarch at the centre of her annual, and more than ninth, familial masterpiece.

(18.11.89)

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