My Grandmother's Clocks - memoir

My paternal Grandmother had spent a large part of her later years writing stories, mostly for children. We all hoped she would live to see something of her work in print, but she never finished them. Although my mother had taught her to type and to use a computer when she was in her 80's so that she could get them all in an editable format, she was never, ever, finished. Update after update of every story would be produced, (always without punctuation, because my Grandmother never quite got that part of typing).

My mother and my aunt would spend hours and hours editing and formatting a final, final version of something or other only for my Grandmother to announce she had changed the ending or added a subplot. So it would all have to be done again, from the beginning, with no I's dotted or tee's crossed. And of course no one had the heart to take all the files away to stop her from driving them nuts.

A few months before she moved into a care home for her final weeks, she had told me about an idea for another story, not a children's story, a murder mystery, set in a huge old manor house with many, many, rooms. The kind of house we had imagined as children when she used to get us to draw endless pictures and floor plans of the place we would like to live in when we grew up. The kind of house my Grandmother imagined with pantries and attics, antiques and four-poster beds. And we Grandchildren imagined with water slides and swimming pools, games rooms and cinemas, (but she and I were always in agreement about the stable yard and the secret passageways.)

The murder mystery was based around the idea that every room in this grand old house had a clock, and the clocks were telling the story, as the action moved from room to room. But the story was not necessarily told in order, I'm not sure exactly how she planned to mess with time, but that was clearly the plan. Perhaps the grandest clock would speak first? Or the loudest? Or maybe the narrative would move from the bottom to the top of the house but the story line wouldn't? We may never know, because as far as I am aware she never got to write any of it down.

The Christmas before she died my brother and I went to see her and I tried to get her to tell him the story of the clock-mystery-house (my description, not hers). But she was very frail and very tired by then and all she really managed to tell us was that the story was very sad, and that what she really wanted was a fresh tomato.

We phoned my aunt as we drove back from the care home to ask if she could take tomatoes with her when she went to visit later that night. It was the last time I saw my Grandmother. I'm so very glad that we both told her how much we loved her. It was an opportunity I had regretfully missed with my Grandfather some years before.