Hello,
Today is a my grandma’s birthday, she would have been 86 if we’d had the 15 extra years with her. It’s only natural that I have been thinking about her more in recent months, in November last year my grandparent’s home was sold. The family home. It was known at “21”, owing to its door number but I just called it Grandma’s because to me she was the heart of that house, the matriarch who ensures things ran as they were supposed to. I had a strange relationship with my grandad and so, in my world, she was the authority. I have written previously about my grandma and her house, specifically her ability to know what you were doing even when you thought she wasn’t watching, she was, she sees all! And her nuggets of wisdom one of which is the name of my novel (thank you, Grandma). But today I want to tell you about a potato. It’s not exactly a story about my grandma, but goodbye to her home. I was supposed to write and schedule this for a January post but things got in the way, namely, myself and it just so happened that when I finally finished it and scheduled, it landed on her birthday and I don’t think I could find a more fitting date.
My grandparents home was a terraced house in Sparkhill, an area at which at the time they moved in was home to mostly black and Irish communities, during the “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish” era. My mom has told me stories of neighbours that lived on their street, most of whom were gone by the time I was old enough to remember. The house had three bedrooms upstairs, three reception rooms (one of which was my grandparents’ bedroom, a galley kitchen and a bathroom and toilet at the back of the house which was always freezing cold but miles better than the outside toilet they once had as my mom liked to regale me. None of this is important but the galley kitchen which like my grandma was the heart of the home. It was the room she spent a lot of time in, I have many memories of her sitting on a stool, a smoking cigarette poised mid-air held up between her elegant fingers and witch-long nails as she sat by the open back door, a coffee steaming before her. One of my favourite memories is staying the night at my grandma’s and coming down after bedtime for a drink. The kitchen was closed for the day, in dim light all the sides were clear save for the general accoutrement, bread bin, toaster etc. to the right an expertly wrung out cloth hung over the mixer tap, to the left in the far corner the oven light fanned along the stove, across the work surface and landed on the book my grandma was reading, a coffee beside her, sat on her stool. I was loath to disturb her so I stood and watched from the hallway until she saw me.
The kitchen hosted friends and family, birthday parties and weekly Saturday soup cooked by my cousin Shamine or my Aunty Cheryl. It served as a place for congregation in which children were to be rarely seen and most definitely not heard until you come of age. A rite of passage to be asked if you would like a cup of tea made from the stove top kettle and invited to sit on the kitchen stool and converse with the adults. It was, a mecca.
For us children my grandparents house was not child friendly in the sense that there were no toys, no colouring pens and books, and the TV was allowed if neither grandparent was using it. You had to make your own fun. Boredom breeds intrigue, something I feel is lost for kids these days but thats for another Substack post. I would use my time for curiosity and adventure, going about the garden and inspecting every inch of it. Staring adoringly at the mahogany display cabinets in the living room and the figurines placed above the fireplace. One day I realised the baseboard of the cabinet under the kitchen sink was missing and a dark hole assumed its place it might have been like that for a while but children only notice things when there is nothing else to occupy them. Of course I needed to peek into the abyss and in the darkness a small potato had rolled into the space, stuck right at the back. My first instinct was to tell Grandma about the potato, for her to be able to keep her ship shape but I didn’t. I don’t know what it was about this potato, that I wanted to keep it a secret for myself but after that each time I went to my grandma’s house I would peek under the sink to check it was still there. It grew knobbly eyes and eventually it sprouted, little shoots that had grown every time I conducted an inspection. I told nobody about the potato. If someone asked what I was doing on the floor, head tuned, fixated, I’d say I’d dropped something. The shoots died off and the potato began to shrivel. Then we stopped visiting. My grandma died a couple of years later.
After my grandad passed away in 2023 I went to the house for the first time in over a decade (it had been so long for reasons I won’t go into here). The house was different to how I remembered, not just in its physicality, it lacked the warmth and order my grandma imbued. I found myself alone in the kitchen at one point, I lowered myself down onto my hands and knees and looked under the sink cabinet. The potato was, of course, gone. I knew it would be, so much time has passed, but I had to look, see for myself.
That was a couple of years ago now but I was reminded of it this January when I was reflecting on the house, it had been sold by then and I never went back to say goodbye, though I honestly don’t believe I needed to. There are many memories that I hold in my heart of the house, material objects, events, but there is something about that inconsequential potato that is significant in that it provided me an experience of my grandma’s home that is wholly mine to remember.
Before you go, if you have a little tipple this evening, please have one in Susanna’s honour.
Happy Birthday Grandma, I hope things are warm and orderly wherever you are.
Jordan x