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| My Nana, and me. |
I'd like to introduce you to my
Nana.
Her name was Trudie Lough. She was (and is) the
bedrock that my whole life is built on.
She died 25 years ago
tonight.
She was as close as I got to a real mother, and she
was the strongest, and kindest, woman I've ever known, so I'd like to
share some of her life with you. It's mostly a series of anecdotes
she told me over the years.
She was born Gertrude Foster in
Scarborough, on the Yorkshire coast, in 1920. She never knew her
father. He disappeared from the family when she was young, having
drained the family finances.
As a little girl, my Nana spent a lot
of time at the beach, and danced and acted – one of my great
grandmother's friends was Charles Laughton's mother.
Nana was
always one of those annoying girls who could see a film on Friday
night, knock up a copy of what the star was wearing on Saturday, then
wear it on Saturday night. Eventually, it was natural that she
became an apprentice tailoress.
Her mother became sick when
Nana was still a teenager, and with all the family money gone, they
had to take in laundry, including the Dr's shirts, to pay the medical
bills. She finally lost her mother when she was 16. Her mother was
48 years old.
On her mother's death, Nana had to leave their
rented rooms. Her job wasn't enough to pay the rent on her own, and
her brother (Ronnie, two years older) had already joined the
army.
She packed up her things in her trunk, including the
books she and her mother had won as school prizes, and the oil
paintings of her mother as a girl, and her grandmother, and
moved in with the family of her best friend. All her life she
considered them as her second family. She always called her friend's
parents Mom and Pop Hume.
Eventually, Nana got a job in
service as a trainee cook, and graduated to cook in her own right.
She moved to London, and got engaged.
Then the Second World War
started. Her fiancé joined the navy, and the family she was with
decamped from London and moved to Hitchin in Hertfordshire.
In
1940 or 41, her fiancé, whose name she never told me, was killed.
His ship had been somewhere near the coast of Italy, (or possibly
between Spain and Italy), when it was sunk.
One day, while
still with the family in Hitchin, she apparently became despondent
because her brother, who she had not seen in several years, had one
day of leave in Liverpool. The man of the house liked to hang around
the kitchen, because he always had as a boy (his wife didn't
approve). He asked Nana why she was so sad, and Nana explained she
couldn't afford to go to see her brother, even if the leave had
coincided with her day off. Her boss gave her the day off. He also
gave her the money to get the train to Liverpool to see Ronnie. On
that trip, she met a friend of Ronnie's, a tall thin soldier who
also had a day of leave. He was called George.
She left the
family she'd worked for, because she'd been called up to work in a
munitions factory. Her walk home from the factory involved crossing
a field, with a style, in the blackout. She heard somebody coming up
behind her as she got to the style, and a man tried to grab her. She
stabbed him in – er – a delicate place, with the tip of her
umbrella. It was the same umbrella she had when I knew her, and it
was sharp – that will have hurt a lot!
Nana and George got
engaged. They had the wedding all planned. The church was booked,
friends and Mom and Pop Hume donated their rations and got hold of
some eggs for a cake, another friend had got a worn out parachute
on the black market for a dress. George's leave was cancelled.
He managed to get
a short leave a few months later, at hardly any notice, and they got
married in a registry office – George in battledress, and Nana in a
dark blue suit. Three months later, George jumped into
Arnhem.
George always said he 'got out without a scratch',
which he attributed to the good luck charm of my Nana's photo in his
pocket. He wasn't killed, wounded or captured, so he became one of
the survivors, known as evaders, who had to escape from occupied Europe. I don't know the
story of how he did, but he made it home safely (lucky for me, since
I called him Granda).
After the war, Nana found herself in the
north east, and by 1951, with three kids under 7, and married to a
fireman (Grandad). She wasn't content with that though, because
through the 50s and 60s, she and Grandad fostered around a dozen
other kids for varying lengths of time.
She used to take in animal waifs and strays too - she couldn't resist, hence my childhood preventing the cats chasing the budgies, and preventing the dog chasing the cats...
She also had double pneumonia three
times and a major thyroid condition, but the woman was a force of nature,
and nothing kept her down long.
Till in 1977, Grandad died, at 57,
from lung cancer, and she never got over it. She couldn't even bear
to hear his name. Little over a decade later, her youngest son, my
Dad, died at 37. And four years later, without warning, at 9.02pm,
she just stopped breathing. And everything I'd ever known was
gone in front of my eyes
I try not to think of her that night though.
I
remember us sitting by the fire watching Fred Astaire films together;
of her cooking – baking with her, and her making mushy peas using
tablets of bicarbonate of soda; of her teaching me to sew and forcing
me to unpick it **again**; of the horror stories she told me about
nearly sewing through her finger, as she was teaching me to machine
sew using the same machine; of her taking me to Newcastle every
Tuesday (pension day); of her teaching me to read, and taking me to
the library every week; of how she used to tell me 'no you can't do
that, because it's not appropriate, dear'; of her taking me to the beach; of her reading while she watched TV, and knowing exactly what was happening in the book and the show; of her dressing me up as
Shirley Temple, because she always wanted a daughter of her own, and I happened to have natural blonde ringlet curls; of
playing her Bing Crosby 78s; of how she had a summer wardrobe and a
winter wardrobe, and they got swapped over every autumn and spring;
of how her hat and coat ALWAYS matched; of us doing the Polka and the Charleston together round the kitchen
like mad things...
It's hard to think it's been 25 years since
I saw her last. In some ways it feels like yesterday; in others it
feels like knowing her was a dream that never really happened.
So,
Trudie Lough, 24.10.1920 – 29.8.1992, this is how I'll remember you, coat and hat matching, shoes matching collar... and with Grandad.
.
