[DanaC]

WARNING: This is a long post :P Decided to adopt Ghost's strategy for catharsis. It's a long time since I lost my maternal grandparents. I loved them a lot. And still miss them. They held the family together. We only really started to split off into our separate little units after they died. Don't feel you have to read this. It was more that i wanted to write it. Talking about their names made me think about them.


My maternal grandmother (Nellie) and my maternal Grandpa (Sam) fell in love, but this was a problem as Sam was a catholic and Nellie a protestant. They eloped and married in secret. Nellie's family were strict. She wasn't allowed books: they were a waste of time and inappropriate. A sympathetic teacher used to let her sneak to her house and read the books in her library. She always loved stories. She was clever and creative. Sam was a dreamer and a romantic. Always had a tall tale to tell.

Though both were from comfortable families, they had a hard time. Sam spent some time in the merchant navy. After the war Salford was poor. They raised six kids (and an adopted child who was killed in a road accident when he was 11). One of the kids was epileptic: a dirty family secret at the time. For much of that time they lived in a two bedroom flat. The kids bedroom had a sheet hung down the middle of it to split the boys from the girls (for decency). Very little food. Nellie used to take in piece work. Sam was a dreamer who always had some scheme on the go. They could ony afford a few cloth nappies and had to be sparing with the fire. Nellie sometimes dried the clean nappies by wrapping them round her waist to dry with her body heat.

By the time Ma was hitting her teens they'd moved into a house...with actual carpets. But she remembers winters using coats as extra blankets. A sofa that had collapsed but couldn't be replaced, stuffed with newspapers to propr up the seat.

When Sam and Nellie were first married and she was expecting their first child, Sam made her a stool to sit on when she was doing piece work. He used pieces of tea-crate and some stool legs he'd found on a tip. I have it now in my bedroom with a lamp on it. He made it in the 30s.

Mum remembers sitting out on the steps with her sister Stella and their best friend. Their best friend was a little better off than them, and used to have fruit. She'd eat her apple and then let Stell and mum share the core.

They were pretty open minded. When Ma turned up with her new boyfriend (aged 16) and he turned out to be a black guy, they didn't blink. Just invited him in for tea and nothing was said.

Sam and Nellie loved each other, but tough times made for a tough life. They had their troubles. Later when thngs eased off, and when the kids began to fly the nest they rediscovered their love. In later years they took a trip together to New Zealand. They were closer than ever. Sam was gentle and funny. Nellie a good humoured woman who always had time for grandkids and always had a book half-read on the arm of her chair. But their eldest child never left the nest. The epilepsy drugs had sent him a little strange. Agorophobia from his 20s onwards meant he never left the house. He got in between them a lot.

When I was little Nellie was the undisputed matriarch of the family. Every Boxingday we'd all go there for a big family get together. All us kids would do a 'turn' and she'd give us all prizes. The girls all got the same thing (I remember a brush and mirror set) and the boys would all get a boy-gift. One year my 13 year old cousin Shirl shocked everybody by doing a 'striptease' to music, down to her bikini.

They were devastated when their youngest son died of a brain haemmorhage weeks before his 39th birthday. After that Nellie often saw a seagull in the skies above her. She said it was Daves spirit watching over her. He'd been a merchant seaman like his dad.

Uncle Al was still living with them when Sam had his first stroke. And then his second and his third and his fourth. Speech therapists tried to help, but the fourth stroke robbed him of his ability to talk. A story teller silenced. Then came the heart attacks. Sam was in a bad way. Nellie began to get forgetful. She was diagnosed with Alzheimers. She had lucid times and not so lucid. She described it like looking at the world through an ever lengthening dark tunnel. She was very scared. They still loved each other.

Years followed with the grown kids taking turns at the house. Nellie always loved the seaside. Even when she was so far gone she barely registered the journey, she'd calm when she saw the sea.

Eventually she cuoldn't live at home. She'd turn on the gastaps on the cooker and then wander off without lighting them. She kept re-reading the same Catherine Cookson novel; only ever getting a little way in before she'd forget and it would be a new book to her again. The kids found a home for her. And visited every day. Nellie had taken on that preternatural strength of dementia. She wandered in the night and one time ripped a radiator from the wall of the home. When mum visited she pleaded to go home. Said men came in the night and took her to a room to be tortured and raped. Begged and screamed. Shouted vile insults. Sometimes recognised her sometimes thought she was her mum. One night she went to sleep and didn't wake up. She had a slight smile on her face. We believe a kindl;y nurse may have helped her on the way.

Sam went downhill fast. He had another two strokes and went into hospital. Another heart attack followed. Then another. He was at deaths door three times. The priest was called for the last rites on each occasion.

He was so frightened. He'd never been back to church after he and Nellie had eloped. He hadn't been welcome at first. After that he'd been angry. he died convinced he was going to Hell.

Nellie had been cremated. And the ashes kept. We'd been told we couldn't bury them together. When Sam was buried we put Nellie's favourite teddy bear, the one she'd kept with her during her last years in the home, into his coffin with him. Nobody but us knew that Nellie's ashes were in that Teddy. She has no gravestone. No record of where she's buried. But we made sure they were together at the end. As secretly as they'd married.