I am sitting on her knee, sucking my thumb with my finger hooked over my nose. With my other hand, I am playing with her enormous earlobes. We’re in her sitting room, which is cluttered with knick-knacks and lace doilies and a yellow bird in a cage in the corner called Joey. He scratches and whistles.
At home, I am wearing Mum’s silk nighty and a pair of her high heels. The silk is dragging on the floor and my feet slide inside the huge shoes. I am singing along to Manfred Man’s ‘Angelo’. Nannan says, ‘Come on, our Becky. Give us a show. Sing up.’
I took some chocolate without asking from Nannan’s side table during a visit. A Yorkie bar. I have to return it and say sorry. I hated doing that. I really wanted that Yorkie bar.
I am watching Nannan knit. Her needles click as they move in her hands with lightening pace. I can’t tell what’s going on as it’s all happening too fast. Back, forward, wool under and looped around. She talks as she knits, and rarely looks at what she’s doing. I am amazed.
My grandmother, Nannan to us, died of an aggressive cancer when I was five. I started school and then she was gone. My mother has never recovered from the loss. Those are the only memories I have of the strongest woman anyone could ever meet. She was a single mother of an illegitimate child after the war, a time when single mothers were considerably more vilified than we are today.
Her American GI love, whose nickname was ‘Lucky’, sent her money to fly her and the baby to New York to live with him. She’d heard all the stories about how the soldiers were being treated back home in America, and how trailer parks were homes to many of the English girls who went to live with the American soldiers, young men who were trying to rebuild their lives after fighting. Instead of airfare, Nannan spent the money on a cot, a pram and cloth nappies, deciding that she needed to stay at home.
Lucky was apparently heartbroken. Nannan broke her own heart too, making the decision she felt was best for the baby.
Was it?
But if another decision had been made, there’d have been a different Becky singing for her grandmother.
Becca Joyce 
Wow that was quite a ballsy decision of your grandma! Especially as you say, at a time where single mothers were vilified! Did she ever see ‘lucky’ again? He didn’t try to come find her in the UK?
I’ve no idea. Nannan married when mum was three and all evidence apart from one letter and one photograph of Lucky got hidden and subsequently destroyed. Hang on, I feel a novel coming on…
That reminds me of the situation in The Rosie Project in a way, have you read it? Definitely novel material!
Haven’t read it yet. On the list now. 🙂 cheers.
Let me know what you think when you do – it’s a phenomenal book, I read it in two days. Really well written and so touching!
Will do!
Everything for a reason, right? Your Nannan was a strong individual who made some very tough and unselfish decisions. Who knows what may have happened if one choice was not made.
Totally – who knows? This is the great thing about this challenge, bringing up the past as I am. I’m finding all these stories. Would love to fill in the gaps with fiction one day.