In 2018, at 22 years old and four months pregnant, I moved to London. At that time, my grandmother was living in an almshouse—charitable community housing for independent elderly residents—in the plush neighborhood of Notting Hill. It was possible to walk several miles from where I lived, in Shepherd’s Bush, down a very long and busy road, to the clean and leafy streets of Notting Hill. Granny Annie’s flat had a small kitchen with saucepans and tea towels hanging from hooks, as well as a window overlooking the communal garden below. Every half hour or so, a security car would patrol slowly down the street, on account of the millionaires who lived next door.
She and I would sit together in her dark living room, drink strong black tea with milk, eat biscuits, and do crossword puzzles. All around us hung framed pictures and mementos: me in my first-ever school photo; my dad at around the same age, topless with a gecko perched on his hand; an invite to the wedding of my uncle, who died before I was born.
Once my baby arrived, he would lie on the carpet and kick his feet while Granny Annie cooed. We like babies, she used to tell him. Oo, we like babies, don’t we?
Granny Annie had always been easy company—undemanding, nonjudgmental, impossible to shock—but that year, on the cusp of 80, she seemed increasingly stolid. She moved slowly, did very little, and regularly forgot things. She had been recently diagnosed with dementia.
One afternoon, she went downstairs to knock on the door of a friend, complaining of a slight pain in her chest. Her friend insisted on calling an ambulance, which Granny Annie found embarrassing. When the paramedics arrived, they announced that she was experiencing a massive double heart attack.
Granny Annie stayed in hospital for some weeks and afterward was moved into a care home in Battersea. I was given her fold-out dining table which I put in the kitchen, placing a high chair at one end and a green glass vase in the middle. The month my son turned one, the UK went into lockdown. We moved into my mother’s house in Brighton and ate carrot cake that my aunt could no longer sell at her café. For over a year, Granny Annie was permitted no visitors.
When restrictions finally lifted, I took a COVID test in the foyer of the care home and went inside to see her. Granny Annie was in a wheelchair, her long white hair matted at the back, her eyes wet above a blue paper mask. She seemed to have shrunk. I sat at the required distance across the room. Behind her head, the television was going. She couldn’t tell me what she’d had for breakfast or the last time she’d been outside. She didn’t ask about my baby, and I suspected she had forgotten him.
Not too long after, my aunt moved to the coastal town of St Leonards and took Granny Annie with her. They lived in a bright flat with my aunt’s little dog, who could clap her paws and spin in circles. There was a commode in the bathroom, stacks of medication in the cabinets, and a walker that helped Granny Annie between her armchair and her bed. Still, that place was happy. Grannie Annie’s hair was always combed and oiled and braided into two thin braids, and my aunt dressed her in joyous clothes: a cardigan covered in crocheted fruit, or a huge straw hat that swept out around her face.
When my second son was three months old, I decided to interview Granny Annie about her life. It was the winter of 2022, late in the year. I took the train to St Leonards, my second baby in his sling. When I asked Granny Annie if she minded me interviewing her, she said, Well, sure, but why would you want to do that?
The answer I gave was that I thought her life might inspire my writing. The answer I didn’t give was that we were losing her, and I hoped to preserve what I could.
There is another answer, I think, which I wasn’t aware of at the time: Being with Granny Annie, who had been a young mother herself, was sort of like being with myself. It was a way to look at my future as well as my past.
That day, I asked her about her mother’s death and father’s remarriage, about her time at art school, about her accidental pregnancy and shotgun registry office marriage, about walking out on her husband two years later on account of his abuse. And about moving to London alone, at just 20 years old, with her infant son.
But Granny Annie wasn’t forthcoming. I d hoped she would be flattered by my project, but she seemed to find it exhausting. I remembered a time some years before, when I d asked for her recipe for her spinach-and-feta pie, and she’d simply told me to Google it. Granny Annie is not a performer. She is uninterested in romanticizing. Also, I could see that remembering made her sad, or her inability to remember made her sad, or both. I gave up after an hour. We did crossword puzzles for the rest of the afternoon.
Forced to change tack, I lined up conversations with people who had known Granny Annie when she was young. I planned to build the story of my grandmother from the outside. I spoke to my aunt, who told me how Granny Annie had been as a mother, cycling around west London with bike clips on her flares and children hanging off the back. She told me about Granny Annie’s work as an art teacher, about the drawers at home filled with glitter, toilet roll tubes, ribbons, and buttons.
My grandfather (Granny Annie’s second husband) told me about their year living on a commune in Philadelphia, which they left when everyone got paranoid and started buying guns. He told me about the macrobiotic restaurant he opened with his brother, where Granny Annie baked unleavened bread and designed labels for fruit-juice-sweetened strawberry jam. He told me about their open marriage, about the girlfriends who’d moved in for extended periods, and about the hardcore punk-rock boyfriend that Granny Annie fell in with when the children were teenagers, who’d send a postcard through the letterbox every single day begging her to leave her marriage, which she eventually did.
Granny Annie’s best friend, Alex, a regular feature of my childhood, told me of Granny Annie’s attempts to drive so drunk that she couldn’t even tell which parked car was hers, of her reputation for getting handsy with men in the backs of taxis, and of her penchant for Long Island iced teas. This was in the years after her second divorce, and after the death of my uncle, her first son, from a heroin overdose.
I went to meet an ex-boyfriend of Granny Annie’s, still living above the antiques shop in Notting Hill that he owned when they were dating, and he told me about the kiln Granny Annie kept in the back room of the flat she lived in, and about her business fixing broken pottery. I learned how Ibiza—where she moved in the 1990s because it was socially acceptable there to have a beer at 11 o’clock in the morning—brought with it nature, sunlight, and a sense of healing.
Then I stopped with the interviews. There were still plenty of people with whom I could speak—my dad, my great-aunt Brenda, a handful of Granny Annie’s friends—but the project had begun to disturb me, and I needed some time away from it. The recordings sat in my laptop. The thought of listening back made me nervous. In them, Granny Annie was not the gentle, unruffled grandmother I knew, but a series of disparate characters. The discovery was painful, as if I’d been lied to all my life. At the same time, I knew I had sought it out. I’d been intrusive, and here was my punishment.
It took me three years to listen to the interviews. Someone told me I could download a transcribing app, but I didn’t want to miss anything. One detail I noticed was that everyone—including me—alternated, when referring to Granny Annie, between the past and present tense. There was a sense in the recordings of Granny Annie as both here and no longer here.
All those disparate characters were there too. But I was no longer alarmed by them. Instead, I became attuned to the way that I change all the time as well, depending on who I’m with. I came to understand these changes not as deceptive, but normal. They seem the reason why our most important relationships can feel revitalizing and depleting, essential and impossible, all at once.
I had thought of Granny Annie as a reflection of me, but there is no mirror for the self. It won’t surface in an interview. It is the silence; the time spent totally alone; the words left unsaid. Perhaps Granny Annie was most herself when working on her pottery, or painting, or pouring a strong drink. I’m not to know.
The last time I saw Granny Annie was in her home, parked in her wheelchair, watching my sons play. My oldest drew a cow for her on a slip of paper, and she drew one for him. It is a very slow loss, with dementia, and I can see now that what I was doing with my interviews was fighting against the fade. I wasn’t trying to form a whole, objective portrait of my grandmother, as if that could ever be possible. I was seeking out life, in all its vividness and mystery.
Here, to end, is a favorite image of mine from the transcripts, via my aunt: I went to New York when I was 17, and when I got back she was waiting for me at Victoria Station. I got off the train, all in leopard print, my face powdered completely white. I remember her expression when she saw me at the end of the platform. She didn’t kiss me or anything. But how happy she looked, just to see I was there.
Saba Sams is the author of Gunk, which is out this week.
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