Great Aunt Ada
Ada, one of my Granny Selina’s sisters, comes to stay one summer, stopping at Auntie Muriel’s in Summertown, a world away from the shadow of the power station at Knottingley.
A kind woman, plain and no nonsense, I knew where I was with Aunt Ada. The splitting image of my Granny: identical hair, same nose and similar height, if a slightly fuller figure. A genetic defect passed down through a parent, raises a round pimple on the sisters’ right cheek at the nostril, as the face softens with age. Poor circulation meant that her face and nose burned cherry red, once inside, away from the cold.
Ada, a woman who had worked with her hands in the outdoors, all ruddy and rough, and now an endless fidget. In late age she never came to accept her idle fingers and busied herself at a hundred and one things, partly through shame, mostly from habit. Her last and greatest task becoming endless knitting.
– Yorkshire’s built on wool, she would say in justification if I stared too long at the blur of her needles.
– Some of the finest.
Fixing me with her glare, somehow on the defensive.
Everywhere she went, came the little zipped bag of knitting; pattern, wool, needles and tape packed away, the knitting-in-progress all wrapped round itself and two needles, or four for a sock, the ball of wool speared safe on the end.
– Arms out, laddie, she would say, snapping the tie and placing a soft skein of virgin wool over my hands.
– Do you know I used to help my mother do this? her eyes looking at me, measuring the distance down the years as she winds a new ball. The work-worn hands move from left to right, keeping the ball turning to grow like a snowball running downhill. My arms are tired from being held up so long. I complain when we finish. With a tut she breaks the tie on a second and places it around the back of a chair.
– No time to waste, she says in explanation as I marvel at her invention, silenced by her energy.
“Our Northern climate” dictated her knitting academy so that endless pullovers, socks and bonnets and gloves poured from the click of her needles to end up in drawers back in the back-to-back, carefully wrapped in crumpled white paper bags retrieved from the Co-op.
– Softer then brown, she whispers as she packs things away.
She became so expert that she knitted without looking, reading the pattern, clickety-click, or chatting away, clackety-clack.
In a mysterious motion at the end of the row she would turn round the knitting, insert her needle in the first loop and away again; knit one, purl one, knit two together; jersey, plain stitch, cable and who knows what.
Her tension was perfect, the finish unsurpassed; she sewed up a pullover as if it had never had a seam.
Cousin Jim
Another visitor, more frequent because younger, was Dad’s Cousin Jim, our second cousin. James Ellis looked like my brother looks now, short legs, big bodied, a large-handed man. He ran a garden and plant centre, fully stocked, spending the afternoons up in the biting wind on the slopes of the valley at Darrington to nurture frail seedlings in batches of never less than a hundred.
We were his annual holiday destination, a brief relaxation in the heart of winter, prisoner as he was to the rhythm of seasons, weather reports and damping off.
But
Where are Ada and Jim now and who was there to bury them? Ma and Pa Ellis were lovingly laid in the churchyard where I finally found them after a second visit.
The cruel dual carriageway of the A1 now slices a path through the village, abandoning the ancient church to one side, obliterating its careful proportions with flying box girders of pre-stressed concrete, road sign gantries and the continuous insect whine of traffic.
My Granny Moon exiled, raised somewhere that has ended up on the way to somewhere else.
Categories: People
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