THROUGH A TIME tunnel now I see her, in the fading colours of my recall, at her piano. She sits among her family and plays boogie-woogie (far from the piano repertoire, as we knew it, of school hymns and century-old Northern songs). There is ham for tea. I don’t want any of it; shy of the angel cake, the swarm of Sunday cousins, this dark house.
Her hands, performing lively callisthenics, are old but strong. Her grey hair is sprung with the frizz of her ancestors, her jaw set unevenly from her Yorkshire side. Her smile challenges. I fear her wet kiss at the end of the afternoon. I was told, with some pride (when she died), that as a young woman she performed at the local fleapit to silent films.
My gentle grandfather – shrunken with age in his cardigan and polished black boots, his eyes unembarrassed in their love for her (‘Jenny! Jenny!) – watches with satisfaction from his chair as she plays. He sucks the flame from a match into the bowl of his pipe, knowing everything I don’t.
Phil Hogan, the third of four children, grew up in Yorkshire before moving to London in the 1970s. He is a journalist and novelist and has four children of his own.