To this day I can picture the scene sixty years after sitting at my grandmother’s feet as a log fire roared in the grate. As she recounted tales from her childhood that kept us grandchildren spellbound with little appetite to go outside and brave the elements, and sit on the chair.
All we wanted was the cosy warmth and the companionship of the lady who was the stalwart of our family who we called Nana.
The Setting
As she prepared to speak an ancient grandfather clock struck the hour in the hallway. The tea she had just prepared in that comforting green pot that matched the chair furniture was brewing under the tea cosy to keep it warm. The ribbed green cups with a splash of milk were ready to be filled and there were home-made biscuits just waiting.
All was set for Nana to start talking as she poured the tea and dropped in the cube sugar that we never had at home. It somehow tasted sweeter than granulated. I wonder why. She took granulated “just a few grains”, sipped her beverage and leant back in the upholstered wingback chair. And then she began to talk.
The Essence of Memory
It’s funny how certain things stick in your mind forever. Maybe it’s the feeling of safety. That eternal, yet misplaced childhood certainty that things will never change, that they will always remain like this forever.
Nana had lived an unusual life in many ways though we were to learn far more about her days when we asked others as adults and pieced together the parts that were left out of her wonderful stories that so enthralled us as children.
A Life Unveiled
She had been born into a family of butchers and farmers around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in rural France in a village called Teille in Sartes not too far from the city of Le Mans where the famous 24-hour endurance car race is held to this day.
She was one of three children. The eldest was a boy called Arsene who later would be imprisoned in Auschwitz after heroically helping the French Resistance during World War 2. His wife never returned and both were awarded the legion d’honneur. Our holidays as children were always spent in Sartes with my father who was a native French speaker.
But Nana preferred to stay home at her rented house and never joined us in the old Vanguard as we ferried across the channel or took that new-fangled flying thing called a Hovercraft!
A New Beginning
She lived most of her life in a quaint terraced house not far from the famed Epsom Downs horse racing track in Surrey, southeastern England. The area of her home was known as Tattenham Corner, the steep left-handed bend on the racetrack where many a Derby was won and lost and where Emily Davison, a suffragette fighting for women’s right to vote, threw herself under the King’s horse in June 1913.
A plaque has the odd flower left there to this day in memory of another special lady who lost her life for what she believed in.
Nana never did anything so dramatic but she once featured in the Daily Mail of the 1930s because of a period in her life that would seem mundane today but was something of a major scandal the best part of a century ago.
A Time of Transition
She had married an Englishman who hailed from Battersea in south London. How they met was a mystery but how they parted was displayed for all to read in the newspaper because they had divorced – shock horror! – and he was refusing to pay maintenance for the three children.
Nana had left France, maybe because of the scandal to settle in England and had brought up her three children, my dad, his brother and a sister who later emigrated to Canada.
Looking back now as an adult with a separation under my own belt it must have been a traumatic time. The world was heading for war once again and the personal turmoil must have been intense for a woman and her children moving to a new country with all the uncertainty that entails.
Enduring Comfort
She had a new language to learn and mastered it with aplomb though she always said “pardon” in a French accent when caught off guard. A throwback to her upbringing all those years ago in the prewar years of rural France.
But now in the late 1960s, all seemed calm in that charming front room by the fire as she handed out the tea and biscuits and prepared to tell us a story as she leaned back in her green wingback chair in Australia today and we waited on her every word.
I have one of those cosy chairs in Australia today.Along with my memories.
