Yoda

A couple of weeks ago spring exploded through the ice sheet of winter. It was almost as though Mother Nature knew how badly we were all in need of reminding that there is a season called Summer, and it’s on its way. It feels as though I have been watching a time-lapse sequence through my window. Seemingly, within moments, the pavements were dry and bathed in sunshine, blossom covered the avenue trees, and almost instantly started to fall. We had three glorious weekends in a row, followed by some far more traditional English springtime weather, which has now rained off a picnic in Richmond and day punting to Grantchester meadows.

Looking back on the past few months now, it feels like everything has fallen into place. Tomorrow is the first day of my new job as an editorial assistant, and consequently the first day of the rest my career. After what seems like a lifetime of aimless flailing, I seem to be heading in the right direction at last. If the vigorous arrival of Spring wasn’t enough to signal that a new chapter was beginning, then the closing of a chapter in my own families story certainly was.

Everyone has at least one family member, usually outside of the nuclear family, who informs the person they have become and aspire to be. Parents and siblings do this by being omnipresent throughout your upbringing, but when members of your extended family play a big role in your life, it’s usually because you have subconsciously chosen them to. I think there are probably two of those people in my extended family, and one of them, my grandmother, is now sadly gone.

I could not have written this entry two months ago when it first began to seem that the end of her nine-decade epic might be drawing to an inevitable close. Despite her having lived in Cairo for almost three years, I could not accept that she might not be coming home. My parents, siblings, cousins, uncle and aunt warned me that I should be prepared, but I choose to maintain faith in her recovery rather than accept the only likely outcome.

Oddly, faith is not something I’m much affected by on a daily basis. No one who knows me well would describe me as an optimist, so piling all my hopes on the best possible outcome was most out of character. I can only explain my feelings as having been entirely for her and informed by her. My grandmother was a devoted Catholic. Like most Catholics her age, I’m sure she was not so devoted out any inherent saintly leanings, her devotion was in-built and unwavering because she was raised that way and never deemed her hardships reason enough to turn away from it. Over the weeks that she was ill, I found myself drawing a strange comfort from her faith, it was as though I could borrow it to support her while not really having to entirely take it on as my own. “She’s spent almost a century making friends with God”, I thought, “So he’s bound to listen to me praying for her, she’ll have told him who I am”.

I was never baptised, both my parents are Catholic, though my mother’s family are a little less overt in their relationship with God than my Grandmother was. My father, being my grandmothers son, was of course also raised a Catholic (with all the baggage that such an upbringing entails, namely; guilt, guilt and more guilt, subtly deflected by a disproportionate helping of forgiveness). This being my parent’s provenance, you may be able to imagine my Grandmother’s horror when I was born and they revealed that they had decided not to have me baptised. They had some new-age, new-fangled, liberal notions about me being allowed to choose my own faith, and thus it was left up to me.

Grandma was appalled. Firstly, my great-uncle had already purchased the obligatory gold christening bracelet with my name and date of birth etched into it. Secondly, did my parents really want to risk me floating about in Limbo with all the other dead babies if, god forbid, the worst should happen? My grandmother’s fear of me ending up in Limbo was not in fact such a wildly irrational one.

One of the most amazing things about this women, and trust me there are too many to go into in one blog entry, is the stoicism with which she faced one of every women’s most feared eventualities; the loss of a child. My grandmother didn’t lose just one child, but five. She was originally from the middle east and was living in Libya when she married my Grandfather and they settled down to start a family. For reasons that I suppose she may never have fully understood herself, and I never asked about, she suffered a staggeringly high number of very late miscarriages, which today would probably be survivable premature births. Despite this, she soldiered on to discount medical advice to the contrary and endure nine months in hospital, and daily penicillin injections, to have her first surviving child, my uncle. Five years later, she took the risk again and my father was born.

Thank goodness she did, or perhaps I would have always been in a kind of Limbo; not quite me, not quite here and certainly not a part of her. So, it must have been with all that in mind I guess, that not long after I was born my Grandmother decided to quell her Hannah-Limbo fears once and for all. I had been left with her for the day, while my mother did whatever chores needed to be done. When she came to collect me, Grandma was mid-ceremony, sprinkling the contents of a plastic Virgin Mary shaped bottle of holy water on my oblivious little head. That was my Grandmother, determined, defiant, full of boundless love for her family, and quite frequently caught in the act doing something she really ought not to be, like secretly performing DIY baptisms.

She used to tell me stories of the trouble she got in to at school. “Oh I was mischief,” she would say with a tone that suggested “mischief” barely begun to describe it. She was mischief all her life. She was mischief when, as kids, she took my cousin and I out for meals and to get the waiters attention she would raise her arm and click her fingers while shouting, “Garcon! Garcon!.”

We would shrink into the backs of our chairs as the waiters rushed over to be told that the pile of chips, she had accidentally dropped under her chair earlier, had been thrown there by “that fat women”. She would gesture at an unsuspecting neighbouring diner with an indignant jab of her tiny little finger. Then, somehow relieved by having got that off her chest, signal her renewed satisfaction with the situation by brushing her hand through the small cow-lick at the front of her short grey hair, lean towards us kindly and softly say in her beautiful French-middle eastern accent: “Qu’est-ce que tu veux, darlink? Do you want anything else?”

When Grandma moved to Egypt, almost three years ago, it was to be with her ailing younger brother, Nick. He had been ill for years, but was now getting far worse and my Grandmother was determined to fulfil her duty as his older sister and take care of him to the last. I can’t pretend I wasn’t selfishly hurt by her decision to go for so long. I realised, as you often do, too late that I had not made as much time as I should have done as a grown up to see her and spend time with her, and now she was out of reach completely.

In 2008 I was lucky. My uncle decided to take me with him to see her and I went to Cairo for four days. We spent almost all day, every day with her and my great-uncle in their apartment in downtown Cairo. It changed the way I viewed my heritage and my Grandmother. I saw her a little as she must have been before she moved to England, before she had to do everything around the house for herself and before she was extricated from the patriarchal limitations of her heritage. She was still mischief, but it was a different kind, it was almost accentuated by her new situation. She was no longer mischievous with the goal of asserting herself as the head of the family, as perhaps she was with my pseudo-baptism, but instead was rebelling about the fact that, in Cairo, she was always going to be second to her brother.

On the first day, we arrived with suitcases full of gifts and supplies that they each had requested from England, as apparently Cairo is entirely devoid of shopping facilities. Grandma had demanded my uncle bring her 100% cotton sheets from John Lewis “because they do not have them here”. No cotton, in Egypt? These are the lines over which madness and wisdom clash. Being utterly irrational is a privilege that every descendant of my Grandmother abuses frequently, myself included. I have no idea whether it begun with her, I imagine it goes back generations, but she certainly championed its continuation, and why the hell not!? To banish it would be, well, rational!

This blog is not the place for a biography of my Grandmothers life. It is, however, the place for me to express my love for her in the only way I know how. These stories are by no means the sum of the women we knew as Grandma, Mother, Nanny, Meme, Yoda. I’m not sure I could fit her into a novel, a trilogy of novels even. She surpasses summary or explanation for me because she is me. She is the reason I am so proud to be a Gannagé-Stewart, instead of just a Stewart. She is the reason that “settling” has never been good enough, because I know she visualised me doing something fantastic with my life, and that thing being whatever it was that I wanted it to be. Mary made mistakes, but she never let them break her. I know that is why, when I last saw her, as close to the end as it was, she fought to see us one more time and to hear us one more time. To maybe even miraculously recover and waggle her finger at us jokingly one last time, jab us in the ribs and tickle us one last time and ask us “now girls, tell me please, what do you want to eat?.”

Mary Stewart (née. Gannagé) 1918 – 2010