Grandmothers by Helen Elliott

Author:Helen Elliott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2020-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Judith Brett

My Grandmother’s House

I became a grandmother last year, at sixty-nine, to a lively girl born to my youngest daughter. My grandmother was forty-eight when I was born and when she died I was thirty-seven, pregnant with my granddaughter’s mother. People say that seventy is the new fifty, but it’s not true. My grandmother had held the hands of my first two children. I doubt I’ll do the same for little Helena. There is a relentless logic to generational succession.

A grandmother for barely a year, I have thought a lot about the gifts I might bestow on the newest member of our family. Inevitably, perhaps, these are the gifts my grandmother gave me: love and a visceral sense of the past.

My grandmother lived on a farm in the Goulbourn Valley, where she kept chooks, helped with the milking and cooked on a woodstove for my grandfather and uncles. Twice a year, our family spent a week at the farm. She was my father’s mother, and my brother, sister and I adored her, as did our cousins. And we all loved the farm, which seemed to exist in its own self-contained world, barely connected to the bureaucratic rhythms of schools and trains that governed our house in the suburbs.

The past was everywhere: iron bedsteads, old farm machinery, a tumble-down blacksmith’s shed with a huge pair of bellows, my grandparents’ wedding portraits, my father’s old schoolbooks, a cable tram from the North Carlton line converted into a sleep-out, my grandfather’s rambling anecdotes about his exploits as a water diviner, my grandmother’s more contained stories of my father as a child and her short time as a teacher at Cummeragunga, an Aboriginal settlement on the Murray, before she married. There were remnant middens too, where patches of charcoal and broken mussel shells interrupted the furrows, and a canoe tree standing on the edge of what was once a swamp. With little sense then of the horror of Indigenous dispossession, to us this tree was just one of the things that made us feel like special children. I pitied my friends whose grandparents lived in neat Californian bungalows on quiet suburban streets, even if their grandmothers were better cooks than mine.

The first of my grandmother’s gifts was unconditional love. My parents loved me unconditionally too, but they also had to bring me up and rein me in, and I had to find out how I was not them. Some ambivalence is necessary in our feelings for our parents, but there’s no need for it with a grandmother who makes no demands and is interested in everything you do. This is the ideal grandmother, the one celebrated in the many sentimental grandmother quotes on the internet, who ‘remembers all of your accomplishments and forgets all of your mistakes’. Of course, many grandmothers are not like this at all, but I was lucky. Once I was old enough to travel alone, I would take the train up in my school and university holidays and stay for a week.

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