Hanging Out With My 'Grannies'

By Stephanie Theobald, The Guardian

May 22, 2010

United Kingdom

Stephanie Theobald with Olive and Connie (left) at Blackfriars Settlement. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian

I always assumed I would die at 64 because that was when my grandmother died. I was eight, and the words "breast cancer" meant nothing to me, but I accepted that 64 was old. My main memories of Grandma are of travelling from our flat above a chip shop in Cornwall to visit her country house in Suffolk in the early 1970s. I'd sit at her dressing table, prod around in her jewellery box, occasionally sneak a glance into the mirror to try to understand the scene going on behind me. Mum sat on the bed (where Grandma always seemed to be these days) and they talked – sometimes with strange expressions on their faces that reminded me of the new piano chord my grandfather had recently taught me. I knew something intense was happening, even though I was too young to experience that sadness yet.

Then there was the breakfast, a few months later, when Mum announced: "I've got something very sad to tell you. Grandma died last night." Suddenly I didn't feel hungry for my Frosties and I watched round the table, as, like a circle of skittles, everyone went down.

First my older brother cried, then my twin brother cried, then my dad looked awkward – this was a special occasion indeed because he was usually downstairs frying. "It's all right," I said, thinking of donkeys and clouds and stables with straw in them (the nuns at school had done a good job). "Grandma will be in heaven by now." And I couldn't understand why she burst into tears.

Looking back now, I realise that I don't have many memories of Grandma when she was well. And yet I keep her picture on my desk: 22-year-old Grandma standing sturdy and happy in a swimming costume and a pair of men's slacks (very liberated for those days) outside a Norfolk village pub in 1932. She's about to go boating with her friends and seems the very embodiment of health.

I'm always glad to learn new snippets from my mother, such as how Grandma worked as a personal secretary in Ipswich – again, very advanced for those days, though she had to leave when she got married.

My grandfather lived longer. He had been an English master at Northgate grammar school in Ipswich. He was the one who made me curious about words. He'd have a bonfire down by the cornfields at the bottom of his garden and quote Tennyson.

But about a year ago, my life suddenly started to feel too modern – all stupid blogs and Twitter, hollow virtual friendships where people have hundreds of "followers" but feel too embarrassed to say to anyone, "I feel lonely, please can we meet up and have a real chat." I have a twin brother I've never had a great relationship with. Everyone assumes twins get on but being a twin is a drag – you don't even get to have your own birthday. And when he developed mental health problems at the age of 14, the relationship got even worse. Embarrassment, fear and guilt built up, and for years I haven't been sure how to go about making things better. I felt nostalgic for old-time stories.

It was a few months later that I discovered an Isolated Elders befriending scheme, just down the road from me at a community centre in south London. Sophia Appleby, a project worker in her early 50s suggested that, as I was a novelist, I might like to do some creative writing classes for the Sunday group.

I wasn't sure how to go about teaching a class of ladies with an average age of 85 (I don't think of them as "elders" but, affectionately, as "grannies"). But I agreed and on the first day arrived at the centre with a page of Proust's madeleine story, which I thought might get the ball rolling. I was greeted by a room of about 40 elderly people who were just finishing off their bananas and custard. Most of them left afterwards. Of the five women remaining, one – Sally – gave me a friendly smile and said, "I don't read books. I'm more for bingo."

I decided to skip Proust and go straight to a passage from Barbara Windsor's autobiography, All Of Me, which I'd taken out of the library as a precaution. This turned out to be a good move because in the middle of reading the passage – about what a temper Windsor's dad had – 80-year-old Vera announced that she'd known him in the 1940s. "He was a right one. Foul temper. Had a stall on East Street market. He'd rip a dress up in front of you if you didn't like it!"

The liveliest pupil in the class is 81-year-old Connie who started to talk about how, after Sunday school in the 1930s, they'd go to the South Bank and buy Eldorado ice cream. When she mentions the word "lemon ice", all the ladies utter a collective sigh of nostalgia and relief: "Aaahhhh."

These ladies are mainly working-class Londoners, in many ways very unlike Mum's parents from Suffolk. But they have a lot in common with my father's parents, who I didn't know so well – fish and chip entrepreneurs during the war when Churchill decided that fish and chips shouldn't be rationed.

Grandad Theobald had a big snooker table and sat in one of those big, comfy Jim'll Fix It-type armchairs that recline when you press a button and drinks come out of the arm.

As the weeks passed, the creative classes turned into reminiscence sessions and I learn about the Old Kent Road Tuppenny Rush (children's cinema mornings in the 1930s) where you might buy a penny worth of "specks" (cheap rotten fruit), then afterwards play a game of alley gobs (jacks) before daydreaming about your yearly summer trip "hopping" (hop-picking) in Kent because the white working classes didn't have holidays in those days.

The world my octogenarians recreate is harsh, yet clearly defined. There's a lot of "walloping" and kids told to "mind your own business" on a regular basis. There's "tea and a wad" [a wad, generally, being a bread roll with a hot filling] at the Lyons Corner House and the world is peopled by the likes of Clark Gable, Judy Garland, an early drag queen called Old Mother Riley and the singer Deanna Durbin ("Talk about singers!" says Vera).

I start to notice that I'm walking home with a spring in my step humming Sally's favourite song: "Put your worries through the mangle, like mother does on washing day … "

Sophia tells me that the "helper high" is all part of the job. She says you have to admit that you're not just volunteering because you're a do-gooder, but because it makes you feel good too.

A friend who keeps telling me that I should have babies has suggested that my interest in older people is down to an innate desire to nurture. This could be true. At 43, I sometimes regret not having had children, but sometimes I don't regret it at all. I think my interest in older people is not just a desire to make them feel wanted in a country that doesn't seem to like older people much, but maybe also a way of trying to bring Grandma back from the dead – of trying to get to know her a bit better.

This year's intake of volunteers at Blackfriars Settlement is double what it was a year ago, and the other volunteers have a variety of interesting reasons for wanting to be around older people. Momo from Paris is studying sports business at South Bank University and is keen to practise his English. Originally from Morocco, he says that in his culture it is normal to have older people in your life. Another young woman is training to be a social worker and feels that being with older people will give her "practice", while a thirtysomething recruitment officer for a hedge fund company says she is desperate for "some kind of meaningful interaction".

When I tell people what I'm doing on Sunday afternoons, most say, "Oh, that's a really good thing to do – well done."

My volunteering has also allayed some of my fears about who will look after me if I don't have children and somehow do make it past 64. From what I've observed, having friends of any age can be just as important as having kids. If you're lucky, your children might visit you a couple of times a week, but what do you do in between? I sense that some of them even see their children as a burden.

This generation of people in their 80s and 90s is the last generation to have lived through real poverty and war. Sally lined her shoes with cardboard as a kid. Connie wrote an essay about watching the London docks burning and hoping her mother would be all right. All the jolly stuff that supposedly went on in the war between the Yanks and the young girls wasn't really like that, she wrote. "It was a sort of desperation. Sort of … hysteria. Someone you saw might be dead the next day."

In an era that didn't really have such a thing as therapy, or not for ordinary people, you wonder how this generation can still be standing. But actually, a lot of their sadness goes beyond eras and historical dates. One of the first things that Vera ever tells me is that her daughter was run over by a milk float at the age of four. And Sally, who counted planes going out and coming back in the Battle of Britain, had a miscarriage when she was in the army. The army looked after her well, she says. They paid for the funeral but, "they never told me where they buried my baby," she confides after class.

Hanging out with the grannies has brought me unexpected wealth. Hearing so many other people's stories has taught me to listen to my own family, to try to reconnect more with my twin brother. They have taught me to move on, you could say. But my own grandma remains a constant in my life, the inspiring ghost who stands on my desk in her happy slacks

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