"Beth yw dyn?" What is a man asks the poet Waldo Williams: and part of the answer is "Cadw ty mewn cwmwl tystion" - housekeeping in a cloud of witnesses.
After my grandmother (on my father's side) died, a friend of hers asked if she could have her bowls. She'd always admired them when they played together at the bowling club, and she'd like to have them, to remember her. This is crown green bowling, by the way, not your cop-out southern variety.
A couple of weeks later, this friend of my late grandmother, dropped into my Aunty Olive's shoe shop to buy some new shoes for Whit. "Those bowls are amazing" she enthused, "When I use them, it's as though there's someone behind me, egging me on to play better."
"Aye" replied Olive, "That'll be me mother".
The eldest girl in sixteen children, Grandma Bradley had really been a mother all her life. Born in Tipton in the Black Country in the 1880s, she and my Grandad Bradley moved to Sheffield at the turn of the century, where my grandfather plied his trade as a vice fitter. I have a photograph of them in their back yard from about that time. Two young people, my grandfather standing in his best suit with sleeves too short, and my grandmother slim and pretty, sitting with her back ramrod straight on a kitchen chair.
They had three children. Olive and Ruby were born in 1905 and 1906 respectively, and my father came along as something of a suprise in 1920.
Things went fairly well up until the depression in the 1930s when my grandfather lost his job. He was out of work for seven years. To pay the rent, my grandmother worked as a midwife (before there were such things as midwifery exams), took in washing, kept a lodger and ran whist drives in the evening. My father learnt to play cards by making up a foursome if they were a player short at any table. It must have been a hard school, judging by the player he became. You did not want to play cards against my father.
The lodger told my parents he'd never see them wed. On the morning of the wedding my grandmother went up to him to say she was off to the wedding, and found him dead in his chair. She closed the curtains, left the house, locked the door and never said a word to anyone until the wedding was over and my parents, newly wed, were gone.
Some years ago, I found myself, with my children, on the road where my grandparents used to live. The house is long gone of course; sacrificed on the altar of "slum clearance".
"This is where my gran lived" I said to them, and described the house. Two up, two down, gas lights and no electricity, no hot water, one stone sink in the kitchen and no bathroom, a Yorkshire range and a gas ring for cooking - and a toilet at the bottom of the yard. That gas ring nearly killed me.
We were visiting my grandma and she asked my father to do some job for her that involved him crawling under the sink. I don't remember why. I was only three years old. My mother and baby sister had gone down to the corner shop and some baked beans were cooking on the gas ring next to the sink when I crawled in after my father. I must have caught the flexible pipe to the gas ring because the next thing was that the gas ring, saucepan and baked beans were down on top of me. My mother was walking up the passage at the time and swears to this day that she can still hear the scream.
My Grandad Bradley died when my Grandma was seventy-six. Within eighteen months she'd remarried - to my Grandad Ransom. She needed someone to look after, people said.
They were moved, when the slums were cleared, to a ground floor maisonette on the edge of Sheffield. I remember visiting them. My grandma must have been in her eighties. "Sit down, love" she said, "I'm just popping up to look after the old lady who lives upstairs." The old woman upstairs was twenty years her junior.
As she grew older, and as my parents got a bit better off and rich enough to own a car they decided they'd do my grandma's shopping for her once a week. Proud as anything with his £50.00 car (1954 Morris Oxford), my father drove my mother to the shops to get my grandma's groceries. When they arrived back, my grandma lifted each item out of the box one-by-one and asked, "How much did you pay for this?" and to each answer, she retorted, "I could have got it tuppence ha'penny cheaper at so-and-so's." She did her own shopping after that.
Grandma Bradley and Grandad Ransom lived together for nearly twenty years, and I really believed that they were indestructible. But the habits of poverty claimed them in the end.
On Sunday, my Grandma cooked the Sunday dinner - as in breakfast, dinner, tea; none of this breakfast, lunch, dinner business - and then left the bones from the joint to boil overnight to make stock. It must have boiled over and put out the flame - more than one flame - because when the postman called in the morning he smelled gas. Failing to get an answer when he knocked, he broke into the house. Grandad Ransom was lying in the hall where he must have fallen trying to reach the kitchen. My grandma was still in bed. Asleep. Never to wake.
