MY GRANDMA LILLY was the world to me when I was very little. Sadly she was only in my life till I was five years old but she had such a profound effect on me. She was larger than life and always smelled beautiful and dressed immaculately and wouldn’t be seen dead outside the house without hat, coat and gloves. She was a true lady and everything that surrounded her was beautiful and elegant and a little European. She also made me feel special and loved and adored.
My other grandma, Grandma Fay, was around for a lot longer in my life although sadly not now for over fifteen years. She was a homemaker, always in a pinny, frying fish, or making fairy cakes, peeling a pear for my sister and me, or boiling up the world’s truly best chicken soup. She had a little red docile dachshund called Whiskey.
I remember having sleepovers in my mum’s old bedroom and then having a delicious breakfast of fresh hot white toast (perched in a rack) and honey and then during the summer holidays spending hours with my sister Debra running in and out of the sprinkler in the garden in our knickers and vests.
Grandma Fay may have been a homemaker but she also had a killer sense of humour, an eye for a bargain, and an innate sense of the stockmarket. When she died it turned out she had a keen portfolio that no one knew about.
Both sets of grandmothers were survivors, from pogroms, the slums of the East End, fathers lost in the Great War, cousins and loved ones obliterated in the concentration camps of Europe. These young girls dragged themselves up from nothing, helping their new husbands form market stalls to later opening clothes shops (‘The first in the East End to sell jeans,’ Fay would boast proudly). They ran their homes and families with military precision, making sure that their children had everything that they had not.
I admire them now more than I can say and I wish that I could have the chance to meet both my grandmas now just for an hour to honour them, to ask questions and talk woman to woman, mother to mother. Their wisdom would come in useful. Grandmas serve a huge familial purpose.
Now I am a mother I see my own mother in a totally different light. She is a wonderful grandmother: patient (far more now than when I was little), adoring, kind, and entranced with my little girl. Anoushka, for her part, sees the light of the world in her grandma Issy. Sadly no grandpas for my little Anoushka but Grandma Issy more than makes up as her role of matriach to our little family with her endless time, cookery lessons (I only peeled the plastic off the cooker the day I bought my baby home from the hospital), love and patience and advice. She carries on the grand family tradition of strong, memorable, warm, embracing, intelligent grandmothers who live long in the heart.
Tracy-Ann Oberman is a well known theatre, TV and radio actress, most recognisable for her portrayal of Chrissie Watts in Eastenders and Yvonne Hartman in Dr Who. As a writer she originated and co-authored 3 Sisters on Hope Street for the Hampstead Theatre, winning the BBC2 Greenlight Award. She has been a columnist for the Guardian and the JC.