It's my mum's birthday today. I went down to see her and take the dog for a walk. I gave her gloves, socks with dogs on them, two bottles of bath soak that she loves and some chocolate. She was more than happy with that. My step dad is treating her to an indian takeaway tonight, which is pretty daring for her as she is a very unadventurous eater.
She also has an identical twin. She lives in a village in he central belt, almost two hours drive away. Her accent is totally different now, but other than that they are extremely identical. I remember when I was a little girl I would find it difficult to tell them apart. It's a very strange feeling to not know who your mother is. My mum is not the most reflective person so when I've asked her what it's like being a twin she just says she doesn't know any different, which is fair enough I suppose. She says it was nice because she always had someone to play with as a child. Maybe that's why she's so dependant on others as an adult.
Mum is the oldest twin, five minutes older than her sister Patricia, who goes by Patsy. Patsy was a breech birth. I can't imagine the worlds of agony for my grandmother, having to give birth not once but twice in a row, with the second one coming out feet first. That kind of birth would kill a lot of women. They joke that Patsy stomped mum out of the birth canal. I never heard granny speak about it.
My mum never knew her dad. He was called George and he was from Aberdeen. I found his and my granny's wedding certificate when I was looking for Fran and Mark's wedding certificate online. Granny was twenty when she married him, but I don't know how old he was. I know he was a cinema projectionist, back in the day when people didn't have tvs and went to the pictures for news and cartoons as well as films. Pingley doesn't even have a cinema any more. It had two back then, one sat empty for years and was rat infested until it went on fire and was redeveloped into flats. The other was turned into a Mecca bingo hall and more recently a Wetherspoon's style pub. I'm not sure which he worked in.
They had four daughters. Sally, Audrey, Patsy and Margaret. There is ten years between my auntie Sal and my mum and auntie Patsy.
Sally is very quiet and prim. Painfully so. I'm pretty sure she has some kind of social anxiety. She drowns it with copious amounts of brandy which she used to be friendly and less inhibited. Nobody ever says anything about it to her but we all talk about her drinking. Her social life revolves around drinking. It's her hobby. It's pretty ironic considering she worked in the drying out clinic of our local psychiatric hospital for a long time. She was a nurse for many years, training when her two sons were old enough to be independent. Her husband, an electrician, was the unreconstructed kind who left all housework to her, despite them both having full time jobs. Fortunately for them, he died aged sixty, leaving her free to find someone who actually respected her. She soon after got back with a teenage boyfriend of hers and they are still going strong almost twenty years later.
Audrey was considered the family wild child. Two years younger than Sally and eight years older than mum and Patsy. She was very friendly and outgoing. My granny was paranoid and controlling and rather than buckling under I think Audrey rebelled a bit and was sent to live with relatives in Bristol. She said this was actually really good for her as she was taught basic life skills like cooking, something my granny never taught her daughters. Audrey returned to Pingley and in a disco met an American man who was in the Navy and lived on the base a few miles out of town. She was only seventeen but they were quickly married. They had two daughters in quick succession and a son a few years later. The family lived all over the world due to her husband's naval career and stayed in Morocco and Japan as well as various destinations in America. They eventually settled in Pensacola, Florida. Audrey was probably my favourite auntie. She was very outgoing and laugh a lot. It's easy to love someone you only see every few years though. I imagine if I saw her every week she could become grating.
The UK is a very secular country, but Audrey adopted christianity. In fact she adopted everything about america. You would never even know she was from here. She had no trace of her old accent left. She was loud (sorry americans, that's how we stereotype you). She was in complete denial of her son's homosexuality. My cousin Kevin has been living with his 'friend' Brian for what must be around thirty years now. He hasn't had a girlfriend since he was in high school. Nobody ever mentions it, but we all know he's gay. Nobody here cares, we just want him to be happy. Audrey and her husband seem to be willfully blind to it, which is very sad for Kevin.
Audrey developed dementia quite early and died in a care home last year. Her husband took care of her for as long as he could but in the end he wasn't able to any more. He visited her every day in the home and fed her her meals which is a beautiful thing. He met someone else whilst Audrey was in the care home, but the Audrey we knew and loved was long long gone. As a result his oldest daughter hasn't spoken to him for several years. I understand her feeling that he betrayed her mother, but he did everything he possibly could for her and loved her til the end. He deserves some happiness for himself and all of Audrey's family her in Pingley support him.
Sometime after mum and Patsy were born, my granddad left. The subject has been shrouded by complete mystery and silence ever since. No pictures of him even exist. Granny told her daughters the blatant lie that she gave them photos of him to play with when they were small and they tore them up.
Single mothers are still stigmatised today, so for my granny to have been a single mother in the 1950's must have been really looked down upon. Granny worked extremely hard to provide for her four girls. They had to pick potatoes to pay for their own school uniforms every year, although that was a very common thing around here. Sally claims their father wrote to her for a while after he left, but she is known for her flights of fancy, getting things completely wrong and sheer invention so nobody is really sure if it's true or not. She has an old black and white framed photograph under her tv of a man in military uniform, she claims it's their dad. Nobody recognises him or the uniform he's wearing. My step dad and I joke it's like that episode of Friends where Phoebe has a photo frame with her family in it, but it turns out to be the generic photo that's in the frame when you buy it.
I feel bad for Sally though. Her father vanished overnight when she wad ten years old, never to be seen or mentioned again. Granny used to tell people a variety of stories, such as he was working in London to explain his absence. She was terrified the authorities would take the girls from her and flipped her lid when they took part in a radio competition that gave our their names and where they lived. She didn't want people to know where they lived. I'm not surprised Sally turned to drink. Mum and Patsy told her to leave it in the past and he didn't matter any more. Sally's voice cracked tearfully as she said it mattered to her. Sally was incredibly buttoned up and this was the most emotion I'd ever seen from her. Of course it mattered to her. She hadn't seen her dad since she was ten. They didn't remember him, had never known him, but she had her childhood with him and then he vanished. Granny was a determined, secretive and I know she wouldn't have discussed it with her. l'm not surprised Sally turned to drink.
In the late seventies when I was a toddler the department of social security contacted granny. They told her her husband had died and she was entitled to part of his pension. She sent them away with a flea in their ear. She told my mum, 'I dinnae want nothing fae that cunt.' This was surprising for two reasons. Firstly, granny whilst being no lady had never been heard to drop the C-bomb. Secondly, she was meticulous about every penny she had. She lived with a man for more than forty years after all her girls grew up and left home. They never married and she charged him rent to live in her house. She kept a note book of her expenses under the cushion on her armchair and we often saw her whip it out and note down everything he owed her or everything she had spent. She was a notorious penny pincher and never let Charlie away with anything. (We speculated if she was like this in her marriage and that's what drove him away, or if being burned so badly by her husband led to her being like this with Charlie.) For her to turn down money that she was entitled to after she spent her life in her knees scrubbing floors to put food on the table was absolutely mindblowing. Granny still carried a massive hurt all those years later.
I still don't know where my granddad went. I'm pretty certain he fucked off with another woman, but who she was and what happened in his life after that I've no idea. He was obviously a piece of shit, I'm glad he's dead as I'm not looking for some kind of reunion. There's this permanent itch there that I'd love to be able to finally scratch. All my grandparents are dead now and have taken their secrets to the grave.