When I Had a Little Sister - Catherine Simpson

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Tricia died, a job we put off again and again for months, was a huge task because my grandparents, David and Marjorie, had moved into the farm in 1925 and it seemed little had been cleared out since; consequently generations of belongings had composted over the years and it felt as though we were unearthing an architectural dig. The process of untangling our past called for decision after decision which seemed to accumulate in weight as we progressed.

      In fact some of the clearing had been done, in 2005, eight years before Tricia died, when we sold the old barns for development. At that time the great hay barn, the cowsheds, the old stables and pig pens had to be emptied of what amounted to my mother’s ‘overspill’. My mother was a shopper. In particular she was a shopper of wool and cloth, sewing paraphernalia and gadgets. She loved gadgets for cleaning, gadgets for cooking, gadgets for sewing and knitting. My mother had an eagle eye for advertisements featuring anything newfangled that came with an instruction book – things that made big promises about saving time and labour – and she would seek out these expensive gadgets and buy them. Her idea of a birthday outing was a drive to Lakeland Plastics in its original Lakeland home to buy more gadgets.

      When it came to the clearing of the barns in 2005 we were faced with chest freezers and suitcases and cardboard boxes full of mouldy wool and bolts of cloth still with their labels attached showing the size and price – which was always startlingly high – plus baffling gadgets that had never been assembled: gadgets for cleaning windows, steaming carpets, cutting out dress patterns, assembling quilts and knitting complex designs.

      Anyone would think my mother enjoyed cleaning and housework, but this was not true; in fact she despised the excessively house-proud. She liked to declare that only boring women had tidy houses. I suppose her constant purchase of gadgets for cleaning was a way to make housework more interesting, or at least put it off for a while in favour of another shopping trip. But she adored handicrafts and, after packing the farmhouse to the gunwales with cotton bobbins, buttons on cards, zips in every colour and endless dressmaking patterns, as well as the wool and cloth, she set to filling the barns and outhouses with her haberdashery as well.

      In the year 2000 Mum and Dad moved out of New House Farm to a newly built dormer bungalow up the lane. Tricia was left to live alone in the farmhouse, much to her satisfaction, although she was less thrilled when she realized the house was to be left still packed with stuff because, as it turned out, although my mother had moved she still reigned supreme – now over two houses – and her possessions left behind in the farmhouse and barns (until the barns were sold) must not be touched. Meanwhile Mum set about filling her new house with stuff too.

      My mother’s mood – often low and downbeat – could be transformed by ‘newness’. She was excited by technology and innovation. She bought shares in the Channel Tunnel as soon as it was possible, went to ‘computer classes’ before I ever did, and invested in bio-tech companies, enthusiastically telling you which diseases her investments were about to cure. She was dismissive of self-appointed gurus who advised you on how to live your life (‘Huh! Who says? Experts!’) but admired inventors and scientists.

      She didn’t like to see me hand-sewing even though I found it satisfying. When I was twelve years old I stitched a patchwork quilt and she would watch me, her hands twitching, frustrated. ‘You’d do it much quicker on a machine,’ she kept saying. My needle and thread flew over the quilt in a ham-fisted front to back motion, producing stitches so neat and tiny they were barely visible. ‘Leave her,’ said Dad. ‘Let her do it if she likes it.’

      When we sold the barns in 2005 we also sold the outhouse that had been used by my Grandad David – Dad’s father – who we always called ‘Gran’. This outhouse, known as ‘Gran’s Dairy’, was Edwardian red-brick and had been used by Gran’s wife, Marjorie, to make cheese in the 1920s and 30s. Inside it was floor to ceiling white tile with a monumental cheese press. When I was growing up in the 1970s the back room of the dairy was Gran’s den and he spent every evening in there sitting in his old armchair, with his fuzzy black and white television, his wireless set, his crate of brown ale and his stack of Westerns from the mobile library.

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      David (‘Gran’) and Grandma Marjorie married and moved to New House in 1925

      The farm collie and next door’s terrier and our half-feral cats joined him in front of his two-bar electric fire and under the halogen pig lamp that shone orange on his white hair to keep him warm. Cats draped themselves about his shoulders and perched on his head to share the warmth and he didn’t mind a bit. He would chew lumps of bacca he had cut off rope-like tobacco he called ‘twist’ with his penknife, eventually spitting the stuff out on the stone floor, like some character from the Wild West, where the dog would eat it.

      Gran had retreated to his den when my mother and father married in the late 1950s. By then he had been widowed many years following Grandma Marjorie’s death in childbirth. Gran lived with us almost until his death, outliving Marjorie by fifty years.

      He was known to almost everyone as Gran, possibly because Elizabeth couldn’t say Grandad as a toddler, although in fact no one really knew, and we didn’t bat an eyelid to hear ‘Gran’s having a shave’ or ‘Gran needs more bacca’ or ‘Gran’s checking his mowdy traps’. One of Gran’s hobbies was catching moles (‘mowdies’). He set vicious claws into the ground to crush the creatures as they burrowed between molehills which ruined the grass. I once discovered a mole rooting up the seedlings in a tray of baby lettuce on the back yard. My schoolfriend and I raced to save it as Gran hovered nearby shouting ‘Kill it! Kill it!’

      He used the same penknife for cutting bacca, paring his nails, peeling apples and setting his mowdie traps. The penknife lived in the pocket of the old coat he always wore over his ancient trousers and jacket, and which was wrapped round at the waist with a length of baling twine.

      By the 1970s Gran’s Dairy was lined with Marjorie’s old cheese shelves which were packed with the flotsam and jetsam of his farming life: decoy ducks, empty milk bottles and rolls of wire, all coated in a thick layer of aged dust. Pushed up against them was his armchair, ingrained with grime and packed with newspapers where the springs used to be.

      Bit by bit Gran’s Dairy filled up with broken furniture that Mum wouldn’t have in the house: legless chairs, chairless dining tables, overwound clocks and a wooden fire surround, all dating from Marjorie’s day and too precious to Gran to throw away. The only things my mother seemed to want to get rid of were things that were precious to other people.

      When one of the cats died on a sofa in there, another cat flattened the body and turned it into a bed before anybody noticed.

      One day a barometer slid from the wall and smashed. Mercury rolled around the stone floor and we stamped on it watching it shatter and gather itself like the quicksilver it was until it finally splintered and was lost down the joins and the cracks.

      Gran came into the farmhouse to sleep and to eat his meals. He would peer through the kitchen door to see what was on the table and if it had a crust or a hard skin he’d go back for his teeth. He ate everything; fat, gristle, the lot, both courses from the same plate, wiping it clean in between with a slice of bread. ‘You don’t know you’re born,’ he’d say if he caught me wrinkling my nose at the sight of custard covering traces of gravy.

      Visiting children found Gran intimidating but he had a sense of humour – as dry as dust and well hidden. One time I remember hearing his rumbling chortle was when a caterpillar, boiled in its entirety, rolled out of a cauliflower floret I’d just chased round my dinner plate.

      On our birthdays he gave us fifty pence. He’d root through his pockets, sorting handfuls of washers and bits of straw, until he found a silver coin which he’d look closely at then hand over with a faint chuckle. Life was tough and we’d better get used to it.

      He was a veteran of the trenches at Ypres where he was shot through the shoulder. In hospital in Boulogne he learned to thank the nurses – mercy boo coo.

      When he was an old man he said little. Aged twelve I went out to his dairy with my notebook

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