A Grandmother’s Wisdom

In my column for July 2024’s Hawkesbury Parish News, I’m feeling nostalgic… 

After picking up a book by Joyce Grenfell called Nanny Says, I started reminiscing about the memorable things my grandmother used to say.

Born in 1900, Grandma spoke an English that predated the homogenisation of our language by television and the internet. Raised in the days when people had to make their own entertainment, Grandma won prizes for recitation. Loving language from an early age, she taught me to play Scrabble and other word games. When my family went to tea with her, she would read aloud to us her favourite passages from Punch, the satirical magazine.

I liked the way she used archaic words that in her youth had been the height of fashion. Instead of calling us “dear”, she called us “ducky” (first added to the dictionary in 1897). When Grandpa asked me if we’d be going on a charabanc on our school trip, I didn’t know what he meant, but when he was courting Grandma, charabanc trips were all the rage.

Whenever I got the giggles, Grandma would exclaim, “You’d laugh to see a pudden crawl,” which made me laugh even more. I never discovered that saying’s origin. Perhaps it was a music-hall comic’s catchphrase.

She also had some memorable phrases of her own. At the tea-table, if the milk-jug ran dry, she’d say, “I’ll go and ask the cow”, before taking it to the kitchen to refill. For years, my sister thought there actually was a cow in Grandma’s kitchen.

If something that she’d had for a long time broke or wore out, she’d console herself with this philosophical thought: “It doesn’t owe me anything.” I said this myself only last week when replacing my car with over 100,000 miles on the clock.

Catching me looking in the mirror, Grandma tried to ward off vanity by telling me, “Stare in the mirror too long and you’ll see the devil looking over your shoulder.” It worked: I still sometimes give a backward glance after gazing at my reflection, just to be on the safe side.

If I made a smart comment, her gentle reprimand was, “You’re so sharp, you’ll cut yourself”, which made me rein myself in.

If visitors were late, Grandma would say, “Let’s boil them here,” and put the kettle on. The visitors would soon arrive, as if she’d conjured them up with a pot of tea. I was so convinced that her scheme worked that I often do it myself.

Only as I’m writing this do I realise the secret behind her magic: the act of making tea simply passes the time and distracts you from boring clock-watching. So much for my being sharp.

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In Other News…

Perhaps because of the close relationships I’ve always had with older people, including all four of my grandparents, I love writing about elderly characters, whom in my books are usually portrayed as wise sources of counsel to younger characters. I’ve had particular fun dreaming up an older advisor for the protagonist of my new series, Alice Carroll, who inadvertently becomes the proprietor of a derelict bric-a-brac shop in the Cotswold village of Little Pride.

However, I don’t want to tell you any more about this older advisor, as it would be a plot spoiler! You’ll have to read the first book in the series, Death at the Old Curiosity Shop, to find out…

Death at the Old Curiosity Shop will be launched in all formats (paperback, ebook, hardback, large print and audiobook) on 11th October, published by Boldwood Books. It will be available for pre-order from all the popular online retailers including Amazon here – or you can order it from your friendly local bookshop or library.