The Grand Folks

Granda's anniversary today.
I wrote some prose in his honour.
Apologies if I've shared this before - old age...I can't remember.
It gets scary when you are approaching the age your grandparents were when they departed...


     Roses in the Snow
The snow lay in fluffy piles around my ankles, its melted wetness not yet seeping into the plastic bags granddad made me put on over my socks. Nanna wrapped me up so tight it was hard to bend in the middle – but she couldn’t do anything about my leaky shoes, so plastic bags it was.
 
     “It’s dark, lass – no one will see.”
 
She was a huge bulk of a woman. Her face flushed as she stood upright again. I pleaded to granda with my eyes but he looked away. My feet slid into the split shoes easily under their cover of plastic carrier bags. He rummaged in the kitchen drawer and came back with scissors. After he’d trimmed away all but a tiny sliver of white plastic – hardly anyone would see what nanna’s solution to leaky shoes looked like. Hardly.
 
     At the bus stop I pressed up against my traitor granda to keep out of the worst of the wind and resigned myself to the long wait for the Sunday service bus back home down the coast to Seaham. I hated Sunday nights. They signalled the end of my escape. Weekend sleepovers at nanna’s had become a ritual over the last few months; a brief respite from the constant bickering of mam and dad.
 
     Her questions, his silences.
    
     His drinking, her complaining.
 
     His fists, her tears.
 
     Toward the back of the bus shelter it would be warmer. But it was dark in there and smelled of pee too strongly to want to be beside. We stayed under the orange glow of the street lamp. It reflected the snow and made the hour seem earlier than it was. But winter afternoons are bleak and dull in the north east; icy rain had hardened to hail on Friday night. Saturday we woke up to a gleaming white world, and now feathery flakes of snow made their hurried sideways journey to pile on top of the frozen pavement. Walking down the hill to the bus stop had been a shriek-filled affair with me hanging onto granda’s hand and him in turn holding onto the stony wall that sheltered us from the worst of the northerly gusts.
 
     Despite being bundled up like a Christmas turkey, the cold began to reach up my legs and involuntary shivers played through my bones.
 
     “Back inside, out of the wind.”
 
He steered me into the dark corner of the shelter where the stench made my eyes water. I peeled my scarf away from my mouth to complain. “It smells over here.”
 
     “Well then keep your scarf up tight and you won’t have to smell it.” He was a practical man, a retired miner, well used to cold, but not so used to small, complaining granddaughters.
 
     The ice glistened on the road where tyres had hardened the snow into glass, but here inside the bus shelter was just gloom and the smell of men’s toilets and a litter of packets and papers plastered into the corners.
 
     I stamped my feet and tapped them against one another to shake off the sticky snow. Maybe if I kept on banging them together the feeling would come back into my feet. But then that’d hurt. I stopped.
 
     “Your nanna’ll wonder where I’ve got to.” He peered along the coast road to where the red double decker should have been. I looked out into the street. No traffic had passed for a while. The glassy tracks in the road were now covered in fresh thick petals of white.
 
     “You can go granda – I’ll be alright waiting on my own,” I hoped I sounded braver than I felt. His eyes sparkled in the eerie glow from the street lamp. The wind had made them water.
 
     “Oh, aye – and can you imagine what your nanna would say when I got back?” He said it to the road but I could tell even from the back he wasn’t really annoyed.
 
     “Or, we could just go back to yours and I could miss school tomorrow and maybe I could just stay until the snow stopped and I wouldn’t have to go back and dad wouldn’t…”
 
     I looked to his eyes for clues. He turned away and looked down the road once more in the bus direction.
 
     Suddenly a whole week of new possibilities opened up. I smiled at him from behind the blue woollen scarf borrowed for the journey home. He hadn’t said no – exactly. I burrowed my nose deeper into the folds of wool that smelled faintly of Mondays in nanna’s house.
 
     Mondays meant wash days. Wash days seemed like the whole house was stripped naked and carried by basket to the wash house across the yard then stuffed into the steaming washtub and boiled and stirred and prodded until nanna was red and cross and the ensuing miles of sheets and pillow cases and garments were hung on the line to blow like some multicoloured flag signalling to the world that all was right and well and fine in the Thompson household.
 
     If it rained on Mondays all was not right with the world.
 
I supposed snow on Mondays would mean the same, though I’d never thought about it till then. I curled and uncurled my toes in their plastic bag nests and looked down at them to see if there was any visible clue to what my secret might have been. Next to my foot a glint of gold snaked around in the darkness. I stooped to see.
 
     A chain, gold coloured even in the gloom of the shelter disappeared into a pile of dirty, grey, compacted snow. The urine smell was even stronger this close to the ground. I tried not to breathe too much as I pawed at the chain with my mittened hand, unable to pick it up.
 
     “Granda, someone’s lost a necklace over here.”
 
     He came over and crouched next to me, his brown work-worn hand teased the chain away from the frozen ground. A round, coin-sized locket dangled from the end.
 
“Too dark to see here, we’ll have a look back home,” he said, slipping the chain into his pocket.
 
     I smiled wide.  “Does that mean I’m going home with you?”
 
     “Aye, lass, if we stand around here any more we’ll be as stiff as that bus stop sign.” I slipped my hand into his and we headed up the steep snowy hill back to nanna’s.
 
     She helped us unwrap and made noises like she was annoyed but I could tell she wasn’t really.
 
     “Look at the state of you both. Set your shoes on the fireplace while I boil the kettle. And put those plastic bags in the fire now.” A glimmer of a smile played at one end of her mouth before she began to cluck and fuss at the puddles we’d made on the hallway floor. 
 
     Granda laid the locket on a tea towel on the kitchen table. I needed to stand close to the fire and warm my hands but curiosity won and I went to peer at the shiny red-gold disk at the end of the chain. He polished and rubbed it till it shone and took out his penknife to prize open the locket.
 
     “Is there a photo? Does it say who it is? What is it?”
 
     He held it up to the light.
 
     “Does it have any words scratched in?”
 
     He angled it this way and that. “It says,” and he paused just to tease me some more, smiling and winking down at me, “it says, quarter past seven.”
 
     “Hmm? No, it’s not bedtime yet – I, I…”   Nanna put two mugs of something hot on the table. “I haven’t drunk my drink yet” It wouldn’t do to complain too loudly since really I was on borrowed time anyway.
 
     “What’s that you’ve got there, you two?”
 
     “Found it at the bus stop under the snow. It’s a pocket watch.” He held it up to his ear. “And it’s still going.”
 
     “Can I see now granda?”
 
     “Well you found it, finders keepers.”
 
     Nanna looked at him, her eyebrows knitted in disapproval.
 
     The watch wasn’t just a watch. Its face was painted. Two dark red roses with golden leaves and stems wound their way around the numbers and pointers. It was bright and delicate, yet strong and sure. The gold case was engraved too – with the same rose pattern; tiny, complicated, twisting stems wrapped around each other in a tangle over the whole surface.
 
     I clicked it shut with a satisfying snap and set it down on the white tablecloth. It seemed to catch the reflections of the flames flickering in the hearth and send then dancing around the room. I sipped at the hot, sweet drink and smiled up at granda.
 
     “Roses in the snow, ‘Melie, who’d have thought it?”
 
     Melie was what he called nanna.  It was Amelia, really. But I got the idea that nanna thought Amelia was far too fancy. I also saw how she smiled at granda when he said her name out loud that way. I curled and uncurled my warming toes under the table and looked through the curtains into the night – just to make sure it was still snowing.