Jessie
I’m told that around 16.30 she moved her head to one side and breathed her last two breaths. Two months ago she told my mum that she was “frightened of getting better”. This was my gran, Jessie who died yesterday.
I don’t feel sad. I feel glad for Gran. I feel relieved for her because she didn’t want to be here anymore without Tommy, my Papa. She didn’t want to be moved into a nursing home, unable to see, unable to walk, far away from the house she’d lived in for over 50 years.
She would have made friends in the nursing home, I’m sure. She was a right good laugh. She was cheeky, and opinionated, and animated, and always had good chat. When I would visit her from University, we would go shopping in the precinct and you couldn’t get ten yards without Jessie meeting someone she knew. She knew everybody. She had lots of friends. She would have definately made an impact in the nursing home she was due to be moved to today. Finally up to Aberdeen beside her family from her home in Glasgow. If she hadn’t become seriously ill on Saturday.
She had decided that if she was going to be denied release from her increasingly long life that she was going to have to do something about it herself. She made herself ill, she ran out into the garden and made a lot of noise about getting an ambulance. She had a complete and utter strop about being 86, widowed, blind and bored. She lost her temper and made a complete fuss. That was what she was like all her life; throwing strops, being a madam. She couldn’t just pick up the phone. Where’s the fun in that? Where’s the drama? By her own admission she had been a spoilt brat as a child, running rings round the older sisters who brought her up when their own mother died when Jessie was only 14 months old.
“All my sisters died when they were in their seventies. Why not me?”
She went into Gartnavel hospital at the end of January with a largely made up complaint. She admitted to my mum that she had “lost her temper”. She wanted something done, but she didn’t know what. We had been trying for years to convince her to move up near us. She was having none of it.
In the hospital, she let me and my sister into a secret that she hadn’t been taking her medicine. She showed us a handful of pills that she had stashed in her dressing gown with a wee smile. We also found some under her bed. Ever the cheeky madam. We knew she was giving those nurses and doctors hell. But apparently yesterday a few of them were in tears when it was all over.
Within a week of seeing her and laughingly declaring, “There’s nothing wrong with you gran,” the hospital-bred MRSA and Dificil viruses found their way to her and she got her wish; she became ill for real. She began to see her long dead sister Margaret, the woman who had effectively brought her up, sitting beside her.
She also had to be reminded that the reason Papa hadn’t visited was that he was dead.
“Oh, I thought that must be why. Or else he would have been up” she’d say, very matter of fact.
When I last saw her, she was small, angry, rude and nasty to everyone. She didn’t even take me on. In fact she was horrible to me and my mum. The cheeky, funny lady who would give you a “big squeeze” til your eyes popped out your head had gone leaving someone else in her place that I didn’t recognise.
Last night when I fell asleep I smelled her scent and felt her jumper against my chest as she gave me a “big squeeze” for the last time.
I really felt it.
I don’t feel glad anymore, I feel so sad.
There’s to be “no fuss” at her funeral on Friday, says my mum. But Gran liked fuss, so we’ll just have to see about that….
Raging Bowl and Other Stories…
So now that Jessie has gone, our family has lost its last remaining blood tie to Clydebank, where we originally came from.
If you Google Clydebank, it’ll probably come up with “the Clydebank blitz” as it’s most famous for the worst Nazi bombing raids outside of Eastend London. Except they rebuilt Eastend London, they left Clydebank as it lay, or so it seems. The place had its heart ripped out and no real attempt has been made to give it a transplant. Clydebank was heavily targeted as the town made ships for the navy and had munitions factories during the war. Both sets of my grandparents met one another working in those factories.
The John Brown shipyards in Clydebank made the QE2. They also gave Billy Connolly years worth of comedy material. Our family left Clydebank to move to Aberdeen, leaving the dying shipyard industry for the new oil industry. Transferable skills you see. Even today the rigs in the North Sea are populated with Glaswegians who did the same thing.
To us, though, Clydebank meant the grandparents. And now that Jessie is gone, we realised that yesterday could easily be the last time we ever have reason to set foot in Clydebank. We ended our possible last visit at one of the places that me and the other two siblings have the most memories of; my Gran and Papa’s bowling green.
In the seventies my brother, sister and I spent a lot of time there, as my whole family were champion bowlers…and the bowling green bar was the cooling off station after games. So we had to entertain ourselves quite a bit as we kids were not allowed anywhere near the bar.
Each of us said yesterday, independently of one another, that we distinctly uneasy about being in the club bar, expecting at any moment my Papa would catch sight of us and chase us out. The nearest we got was standing at the door, waving frantically to catch the eye of my Dad or Papa, with one of two pieces of info:
1. We’d run out of crisps and coke
2. Our little sister had done something that warranted a telling off. That’s called “cliping” in Scots. I believe it’s similar to the phrase “to grass on someone”.
When our parents and grandparents were in “the club” as it was called, there were a few recreational activities on offer to the three of us. They fall neatly into two sections; Fairweather and Rainy
Fairweather
1. If weather was good we could play outside. We might even watch Jessie absolutely gub some other lady at bowling. She was that good. Papa was also a great bowler, and we nicknamed him “Raging Bowl” after watching him take someone up on some rules transgression or lost point. I think we were teenagers at this point. The name stuck. Not that we ever called him it to his face.
2. We could look for tennis balls in the abandoned tennis court next door.
3. We could try and move the massive ton weight roller for the green, dicing with death by crushing. If only our parents knew…
4. We could slide down the silver painted railings at the steps. Or do gymnastics round them. Until someone shouted at us. Or a head got cracked.
5. We could put chuckies (little stones used for paths) down stanks (drains) for hours at a time. Magic fun, for some reason. We may be responsible for recurrent drainage problems in the Clydebank area.
6. We could fight with each other.
Rainy
1. If the weather was bad (and we’re talking the West of Scotland here, folks) we had to sit in the “TV Room” in the basement of “the club”. A stale-smoke-smelling window-less dungeon with a wooden TV up on the wall.
I don’t know if any of you remember television in the 70s. There were 3 channels. Crappy programmes interspersed with periods of time called “Close Down” where nothing was broadcast and this little girl appeared.
You may have seen her recently on the excellent “Life on Mars”. There isn’t one seventies kid that doesn’t know her intimately.
I remember that if a cartoon came on, it was like flipping Christmas! Five minutes of “Bugs Bunny” or “Tom and Jerry” before endless hours of flaming Grandstand on a Saturday afternoon. A double bill if you were lucky and Grandstand was running late. (Producers frantically searching the vice clubs for Frank Bough could be a reason for a late start. We didn’t know then, but we sure know now! Cups of black coffee poured down his throat, a bit of slapping about, a production assistant trying to get the lemon Pringle jumper on over the nipple clamps…am I taking this too far?)
“Uncle” Frank Bough
Pre- vice scandal expose ….
2. The “TV room” was also a locker room. So when there was only horse-racing on (i.e all the bloody time) we would entertain ourselves by rifling through people’s lockers. We never nicked anything, but we did tamper with stuff. We would run around with other folks glasses on, or their club blazer, that kind of thing.
I remember my brother putting a lady’s tan pop sock or stocking over his head and me and my sister peeing ourselves laughing.
3. We would play with the bowls. In an ideal world we would all have grown up to be champion bowlers and I would be reminiscing about my early days in the TV Room with Hazel Irvine on BBC 2 after winning some big game. But since we were more into shot-putting them, or throwing them at one another, our bowling skills were never discovered.
4. We would eat snooker chalk.
5. We would dare each other to run into the loos of the opposite sex.
6. We would sniff the pineapple ring shaped toilet cubes in said loos. We were kids, give us a break!
7. We would draw on each other’s faces with snooker chalk.
8. We would perform acts of wanton vandalism.
9. We would fight with each other.
Yesterday in “the club”, a million little old dears that I didn’t know or recognise came up to me to tell me how much I looked like my mum, or how they recognised me straight away, or talk about Jessie. They were all called Bella, Ella, Isa, Minnie and Jeannie and wore their bowling blazers festooned with badges.
If they only knew about the pop socks…..
