Jim Granter

Feeling a bit like a refurbishment / refreshment / renewal session myself after three greatly enjoyable days refurbishing, refreshing and renewing the condition of a bookcase-cum-display cabinet. The residential care home across the road had a sort of yard sale on Sunday and £5 seemed a small price to pay for a piece of 1930s furniture that looked quite grimly knocked about a bit and heavily varnished but oozing potential. I was unaware whilst de-dooring,

Nitromorsing, scraping, cleaning, sanding, re-assembling, polishing and filling with books how tiring it was and so I  just kept going and here it is in its new life.

I may have mentioned before or elsewhere, I like a project.

Just ten days now to the start of a week when two potentially life-changing events take place for two people in my family – one hip replacement operation and one job interview. This morning the traffic outside is very quiet as it’s some kind of national holiday in recognition of another event that could be somewhat life-changing for a couple of people getting married in Westminster Abbey. I remember the street party in Middlemarch Road, Radford, Coventry in 1953 when the current old-girl-rent-free-resident of Buckingham Palace had a fancy hat put on her head in the same church by a bloke in a nice frock. We had cakes and jelly and our own fancy hats and everything, including running races for us children, up and down around the long row of tables in the middle of the road. I wonder if there are any photographs anywhere.

A jogger has just gone by for a second time, lapping our block I guess. We used to have races back in the fifties ’round the block’ formed by Middlemarch, Villa, Grangemouth  and Lanchester Roads. That was a long way to run or skate or push a trolley our Dad made out of pram wheels and scrap wood. Haven’t seen one of those lately!

Not a leaf is stirring on the trees and bushes I look out on now since I’ve moved the desk to the window. All a bit pleasantly eerie, as if something is going to happen any minute as we dreamwalk through the still day unaware of what is going on round the corner. Mind you, that’s not particularly unusual for me on any day, let alone today. Which is not completely a problem as innocence and wonder can feel alright when they meet or discover or go along with or even arrange events.

This morning Irma Kurtz did Something Understood on BBCRadio4 which she called Happy Accidents.  Having just woken up when it started I pricked up my ears and consciousness because I knew I had a book of hers downstairs called The Great American Bus Ride, which I had enjoyed very much, having traveled a few thousand miles on Greyhound buses myself back in the 1990s. When the programme was over I found my copy and sat with it over breakfast. After traveling with her for a few bus rides or so I found the receipt between the pages, from when I had bought the book. It was from Dillons in Oxford Street, 17 years ago in 1994, on 20th March, which is today’s date. Serendipity? Coincidence? Irma says this in the programme blurb:”Serendipity differs from mere coincidence – it doesn’t knock at the door and you can’t go out to look for it.”

My mother, Louisa Jane Granter, nee Tranter, was born 100 years ago tomorrow, 16 January 1911, in a small terraced cottage in the White Lion pub yard in Bedworth [probably not the White Lion Yard where the library is now, but the one off Market Place where the old White Lion Pub used to be, now demolished; information on the old yard from my cousin Margaret on 9/4/15 from her memory of her Dad’s history. Image of the cottage might still be accurate], West Midlands (as it is now).

She was the last child of Louisa Tranter, nee Green who had had seven sons survive up to then. Most of them were underground coal pit miners and by all accounts my Mum was a bit spoilt by all those quite well off working young men.

The cottages and the pub are no longer there [see note above about this probable confusion of mine], replaced now by a pleasant town library. The librarian there was delighted to show me pictures of the cottages when I called in a year or two ago [but she didn’t know there had been an earlier WL Yard up off Market Place].

As a child I used to go on the bus with my Mum to visit these uncles and their families in Bedworth and Bulkington. Their children were all older than me so they didn’t relate to me much, as I remember, that is, we didn’t “go out to play” while the grown-ups gossiped. I sat quietly looking at books or something. Can’t really remember that part, though I remember all their faces.

After I got to be a teenager I didn’t go to see them much any more and eventually lost touch with every single one of them and their families. [Reunited March 2015 with Margaret Sainsbury, nee Tranter, my cousin, daughter of Aunt Doll and Uncle Herbert].

For years we, my brother and I, thought our Mum was born in 1910 but when she died in 1985 we discovered the truth. She was born in time to be on the 1911 Census aged 3 months. We also found that her Mum was born in Darjeeling, India in 1872, while her Dad was in the Army.

I shall visit her grave in London Road Cemetery, Coventry either tomorrow or very soon after. It’s a good grave, close to a big yew tree, with a headstone we had made a few years ago, showing her with our Dad, Alf, his parents Elizabeth and Alf and his little sister who died in the 1918 ‘flu epidemic.

She was so proud of her two sons. I hope she had a good life in spite of my miserable grumpy Dad who was usually ill with respiratory trouble, though he was rarely off work with it. She had a good friend to talk to, Mrs. Stone as we knew her by, who also had a son, Raymond; she had to be gone from visiting before Alf got in from work!

I remember rubbing my Mum’s frozen fingers when she came in from hanging out the washing in the winter or from getting it in, with shirts and everything keeping their shape, frozen stiff.

I’m glad she got to see her four grandchildren for a few years before she died.