WHEN I WAS a little girl, my gran used to tell me a story called ‘The Magic Teapot’. It was about a child who invited her friends to a birthday party, but instead of buying food and drink, her mother spent their last few pennies on a rusty old teapot she spotted in the window of an antique shop. The little girl was very sad with nothing except tea to offer her guests, but, miraculously, the teapot poured whatever drink they wished for – raspberry milkshake, strawberry cordial, pineapple fizz!
The story resonated with elements of my own life – my family lived too far away from my primary school for me to ever invite my friends over; my father had once had a junk shop, and our house was cluttered with rusty, dented old artifacts nobody wanted; the most exotic drink I had ever encountered was orange squash – but I’m sure my gran didn’t design consciously for me, she was just a natural storyteller. With grown-up eyes, I can see that ‘The Magic Teapot’ owed a lot to the story of Aladdin and the recently released film of Mary Poppins; as a child, I thought it was brilliantly original, and demanded to hear it again and again.
My gran was born at the end of the nineteenth century when Queen Victoria was still on the throne, and the stories she used to tell about her childhood were as intriguing as the fictions she made up. As a little girl, she would stand on a stool in the kitchen pretending to be one of the suffragettes she had seen speaking on the street corner, and her mother would laugh until tears ran down her face.
My gran was a true cockney, born within the sound of Bow bells, but her parents were immigrants from Germany and in the First World War, a mob came to their shop and smashed it up, and my gran was lifted over the back wall with a bag of sovereigns from the safe and told to run and tell the police. After that, the family never spoke German and brought their children up in ignorance of their origins. At the beginning of the Second World War, with a young family of her own, my gran was so frightened the mob would come again, she ruined the lunch she was cooking and forgot to put salt in the potatoes.
It wasn’t an easy life, working six days a week from the age of fourteen at the chilly counter of a butcher’s shop, bringing up three children through the war years, and married to a bad-tempered, jealous man. Sometimes my gran’s stories had a darker edge – cautionary tales, perhaps – but the underlying theme was always a determination to make the best of things. Her reward was to retire to a very modest, semi-detached house in the suburbs. Having spent her whole life in inner-city London without so much as a windowbox, my gran discovered that she was as natural a gardener as she was a storyteller, turning a narrow strip of lawn into a paradise of flowering shrubs she cultivated from cuttings, with a peach tree, bearing luscious ripe peaches, that she grew from a stone.
Like the teapot in my favourite story, my gran had the magical gift of making ordinary things wonderful. When I visited as a child, she helped me sew dolls’ clothes from scraps of crushed crepe with a floral print that had once been her best dress, and baked marble cake, every slice revealing a different swirly pattern of chocolate and plain sponge. Sometimes, I was allowed into the cold front room to wind up the gramophone and, with the door closed so my grandfather’s afternoon nap wouldn’t be disturbed, we would listen to a crackling crooner singing ‘The Isle of Capri’, and my gran’s eyes would glaze with the impossible romance of the lyrics.
She was such a sunny, attractive person that even though she was well into her sixties, she received three proposals of marriage in the year after my grandfather died, but she chose to remain on her own, enjoying her independence, and bought a second-hand piano, which she taught herself to play even though her hands were stiff with arthritis.
When I visited her as a grown up, we’d sit in her lovely garden with cups of tea, and she’d demand to hear tales of my university life – parties, travels, lovers and dreams – delighting in all the new fashions and freedoms, and laughing until tears ran down her face.
Imogen Parker’s recent trilogy of novels, The Time of Our Lives, The Things We Do For Love and This Little World, is a fictional history of post-war Britain.