Being a grandmother is rarely a role without precedents.
There was only one grandparent in my own childhood; all the others had died long before I was born. Grandma, my father’s mother, occupied a special place in the family. Long widowed, she lived in a small, dark, one-storey, turn-of-the-century brick house in Mount Lawley, a respectable inner urban suburb of Perth. With her lived Dorrie, her eldest, childless daughter, and Jim, an ex-seaman from the north of England, whom Dorrie had married in her forties. Uncle Jim, a pipe-smoker, had a jolly face with fleshy jowls like a Toby jug and a voice so deep as to be almost indecipherable. His bed was on the back verandah, behind a partition—a ‘sleep-out’, as these spaces were called. Auntie Dorrie was known to be ‘sensitive’—in fact, terribly touchy. She slept, with her hair in crisscrossed bobby pins, in the bedroom across the hall from her mother, to whom she was deeply attached. The line in the old song ‘Billy Boy’—She’s a young thing and will not leave her mother—always reminded me of my middle-aged Auntie Dorrie.
‘Ma’, as her children called my grandmother, was a quiet, dignified woman, an excellent cook and prodigious knitter, who knew how to hold her tongue and was deeply respected by her children and grandchildren. Long after her death, my father liked to quote her. He would preface his remarks with: ‘My mother, a very wise woman, always used to say…’
A photograph of my grandmother’s calm, thoughtful face hung on a wall in my parents’ bedroom. ‘Now, there,’ said an interior decorator whom my mother once misguidedly consulted, ‘is a woman of character.’ During her brief visit to our house, these were the decorator’s only words of praise.
We visited Grandma on Sunday afternoons. It was an occasion of clean clothes, washed face, tight plaits and, for me, a solid, greedy child (‘such a plain little thing’, I was mortified to overhear Auntie Dorrie say), the anticipation of cake and homemade lemon cordial, licorice allsorts and sugar-coated Aurora Jubes. Memories of the visit to Grandma in the early fifties now seem like a ritual set in Victorian times.
Because of her quietness and dignity, there was no doubt that the whole event centered on Grandma, even though she said very little, sitting in her chair, her knees covered with one of the rugs she had crocheted. In her presence, none of her grandchildren would dream of giggling or fighting. Even with my sister who was three years older than me, for whom I was the eternal enemy, we kept our spats down to a few hissed nudges and glares.
Grandma had been widowed during the Depression and all her four children had to find work, including my father, the youngest, who left school at fourteen and worked as an office boy to help support the family. My father often said he didn’t know how his mother had managed in those years, and marvelled at her skills.
Grandma died when she was eighty-four. For some weeks after, my father was even quieter and more serious than usual. I don’t remember feeling sorrow—Grandma was too distant, too old and quiet for that—but I’ve never forgotten her. She was a link to an older Australia. Born in the nineteenth century, a Victorian in her dress and manners, she was unforgettable in her poignant silence and self-possession.
My mother, Maisie, was five years old, with three younger brothers, when her mother died. Their father, an asthmatic, took off by himself to live in the north-west for his health, where he worked as a bookkeeper for a pearling firm in Broome. Who knows what adventures he had there? Decades later, my sisters and I were contacted by cousins we did not know existed.
Maisie went to live with her grandmother, also in Mount Lawley, and was later sent as a day student to Perth College, a private school for girls. Her three brothers, however, were brought up by a housekeeper in a distant part of the city. For the rest of her life she hardly knew them. Class—that bogey inherited from the English—came into it. It was a crippling legacy for my mother.
Whenever I asked my mother about her mother, she did not want to talk about her. It made her sad. She always spoke of her grandmother with deep respect. ‘Gran was strict but very good to me,’ she said. Her story reminded me of the many tales I had read about lively orphan girls sent to live with relatives—Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Seven Little Australians—old-fashioned books that had been written in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, which I inherited from my mother and older sisters. The loss of a mother, the orphan-hood of children, the role of grandparents in their upbringing were not uncommon stories then.
I remember lying in hospital, my newborn first child asleep in a bassinet beside my bed, and hearing the footsteps of my parents-in-law running up the corridor to my ward. My own parents, already grandparents nine times over, were more laid-back about the whole miracle, but this was the first grandchild for my parents-in-law. Immediately, my daughter was picked up, passed between them, family likenesses pronounced, As she was patted, rocked and spoken to, she lay very quiet, her eyes firmly closed. Soon, I knew, she would grow restless, bewildered, begin to cry, and I, still not at all sure about what to do, would be offered advice. I was beginning to learn that anyone who’d ever had a child was always ready and eager to give advice.
I have good memories of my mother in her role as grandmother: she was easygoing, happy to be at home and surrounded by little children. She was named Gan-gan by her first grandchild, a title subsequently used by all her grandchildren (and, she was pleased to find out, the name Queen Victoria was called by her grandchildren). I enjoyed watching my mother with my kids, how she loved simple things, being in the garden with them, or swimming in the ocean, and how often she would laugh with them at the antics of her ferocious little cat. Found as a kitten in the bush during our ill-conceived year of rural experiment, this cat was minded by my mother during our lengthy house renovations. She would hide and pounce on my mother’s bridge-playing friends as they went to the toilet. When finally reunited with us in Fremantle, she disappeared forever into the city streets…
But there were times—there had always been times—when my mother would stay in bed, her head turned away from visitors to her room, the phone unplugged, not answerable to the world. Sometimes I reflect on the anxiety that has manifested itself in different ways in all her daughters, as if there were some existential insecurity in our childhood that we have inherited.
By contrast, my mother-in-law was the children’s Nan, a strong, contented and uncomplicated woman, and a wonderful cook. Our children looked forward to her sunny smile and her bountiful food. She had learned from her mother how to cook with confidence and to trust her intuition rather than books. Her generous meals burst with flavour. ‘First, brown an onion,’ she would intone.
She was my children’s first experience of death. After visiting her in hospital and sensing she was about to die, my husband sped down the freeway to bring us back to say goodbye.
Now that first baby of mine has two children of her own, as does her brother. The four of them are aged between three and thirteen, and I have come to inhabit that curious grand-parental emotion of instantly and deeply loving them, while being aware that I occupy a place of secondary importance. I think of us, the grandparents, as providing a sort of backup team, a well-meaning, cheerleading squad. Although we are never less than appreciative, I know that we are on the outer edge of the major drama, which is, of course, the relationship between children and their parents.
But there’s relief too in the relinquishment of that huge responsibility, in knowing that you are not and will not be their final arbiters, or most potent influences, and of being able, as the cliché goes, to hand them back to their parents. We are on the sidelines now. As the oldest grandchild is about to turn fourteen, I’m also beginning to enjoy with her a new freedom in what I say; I can be honest, listen, put forward an opinion, or decide it would be wiser to hold my tongue. I remember when her mother was that age, and I watch my granddaughter repeating the hunger for clothes and the overwhelming focus on appearance.
Our grandchildren are moving further away, into their own lives, but those years of our involvement in their early childhood are what established the link that still exists, that I can only hope will always exist, in some form, between us. How to be secondary, how to watch and be called on if needed…As they become teenagers, we are less and less in their lives. Yet something lives on, maybe the greatest gift in a family: affection, and a deep, instinctive, almost humorous knowledge of each other. Our family holidays, when we all stay together in a large house down on the South Coast, expose us to one another with all our foibles, different temperaments and intimacies.
Grandchildren observe with such acuity, such direct sight. My husband installed some horizontal bars in the bedroom to allow him to hold yoga poses for his back. Our three-year-old grandson described the assembly of bars to me as ‘that yoga thing that Buppi used to climb but now he puts his washing on it…’
I am a grandmother in modern form, in jeans and sneakers, aware when childminding of the importance of stimulation, initiating cooking projects, reading, drawing, acting games…anything to keep them from boredom and electronic devices. I know that now is the time to establish a relationship with them, before they are consumed by their own lives.
I have just come back from accompanying the youngest of my grandchildren, with his father, on a walk to the park, during which my three-year-old grandson, to the annoyance of my son, always protective of his mother, more than once affirmed that I was old: ‘You are old, your hands are old.’ How do his clear eyes see me? He is used to his parents and his aunts and uncles, and the assistants at his daycare, some of whom would be fifty years younger than I am. His grandparents must be the only members of the older generation in his life. I try to remember how I saw older female relatives when I was a child. As almost a different species, with their tight perms and corsets, large upholstered busts, bright-red lipstick and dabs of strong-smelling cologne behind the ears.
Perhaps that is one of the functions of a grandparent, to remind children of the ages of man. For them, we are the frontline representatives of what it means to be old. And, more than likely, in the future, it will be us who will furnish our grandchildren with their first experience of death.