My grandmother's legacy

I usually think most about my maternal grandmother at Christmas, when I’m wrapping my presents. When I was at high school, we had a Xmas custom. I would sit at her kitchen table, while she went round the house finding all the presents she’d collected over the year, and wrap them for her.

But I got to thinking about her earlier this year, because of a heart breaking post I read the other day by @ats-david

Amongst my earliest memories are those of my brother and I getting the bus “over the hill” to Petone after school, to stay with Grandma and Grandad. Our younger brother, still a baby, would have been there all day, and we would all be there together till our parents came for us after work.

Although this was in the 60s, they lived, with Grandad’s Aunty Cora, in a house with an outside lavatory and an outside laundry, complete with wringer washing machine. Between the house and the vege garden was a prefab building split into three stand alone rooms, each with its own front door. This is where “the boarders” lived – single men, who Grandma cooked and washed for.

I remember two things about the garden. Grandad used egg shells for fertiliser and if I found any that weren’t already crushed, I loved to jump on them. The only thing I remember of what he grew was blackcurrants – maybe that’s why I have a fondness for them to this day. See my Chocolate blackcurrant smoothie recipe here.

Inside the house were a few oddities. The indoor bathroom only had a bath in it, where we sometimes bathed in about one inch of water. Off a corner of the sitting room, behind one of the comfy chairs was a tiny room, only big enough for a single bed, where my cousin used to stay sometimes. In the other direction was the main bedroom, Aunty Cora’s room and the front room where Grandad sometimes taught piano or violin.

When I was about 10, the house was pulled down to build flats and Grandma and Grandad bought a house in Wainuiomata, only 5 minutes walk from our house. Five days a week, Grandma would walk up to our house, first thing in the morning. After she got us all off to work and school, she’d make the beds and tidy the house, then take our washing to her house. Back it would come the next day clean, dry and ironed.

I had a baby sister by then for her to care for during the day. By this time, the rest of us were old enough to look after ourselves at home till Mum & Dad got home from work. But we still often spent time at their house.

Every day she would walk down to the mall to do her grocery shopping. Along the way, she would stop to talk to anyone she met, so many people knew Mrs Clark.

Whenever we had clothes we had outgrown, she always knew “some poor people” who could use them, so nothing useful ever got thrown away.

That had a profound effect on me, and to this day I hate waste. For years, we have nearly always had a box in the cupboard for things we don’t need any more. Every few months, that box would get taken down to the local Salvation Army shop and donated.

Now that box lives in our porch. We have a lot of people coming to our door – people collecting raw milk or organic veges that have been dropped off for them, customers wanting to pick up from our online store, couriers and my clients. The most obscure things have disappeared from the freebie box. We love the exchange - more space for us and someone else gets something they need.

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Grandma and Grandad, along with my mum and her older married sisters, came here from Yorkshire, in England, in the early 1950s. She was in her 40s then and never really acclimatised to New Zealand. Often she would bemoan something she missed. But then she’d go “home” for a holiday and to visit relatives and be reminded of why they’d left.

One of my aunts also lived near us, and many were the weekend afternoons that my sister and I sat round Grandma’s kitchen table with her, mum and Aunty Sylv. There were usually her homemade jam tarts to enjoy, and often an apple pie or rice pudding to take home.

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Those days seem so carefree and leisurely now, so different from the pace of life we now know. My mother remembers those times often, and feels a loss because my brothers, my sister and I all live away from her – three in different parts of NZ and one in Dubai. Those family afternoons are no longer part of her week.

Grandma was a constant in our lives. She was always there. Even when she went on holiday, postcards came regularly, and she always brought us back sticks of rock from Blackpool and tubes of Smarties, with lids that came off with a satisfying pop.

She got a lot of joy from having a grandchild or great grandchild to hold and sing to. She loved to tell us stories from her childhood, and we especially loved to hear the adventures of her sister Hilda, who was always getting into scrapes.

She was only 79 when she died and it was a great shock to us all. Although she’d had Type 2 diabetes for a couple of years, she’d never seemed sick. But one day she was feeling a bit off colour and went to bed. She passed away overnight and left us all bereft.

She wasn’t a religious person. She often referred to the others at Grandad’s church as “a pack of hypocrites”. So she might have approved of the service held in a funeral home instead of a church.

Her religion was more about doing for other people. I sometimes heard little whispers that if things had been different, her voice was so good that she could have been a singer. But that wasn’t how things worked out for her, and her family became what was most important to her.

We’re not so inclined these days to put aside our own aspirations for other people, and I don’t think we should. But there is still a lesson to be learnt about service to others. Now the question is – how can we serve, but also be true to ourselves?

In my clinic room, I have two photos of Grandma (the ones in this post), to bring her spirit, and her values, into the room where my primary role is simply to be present for somebody else.