My maternal Grandmother would have been eighty eight on Sunday, were she still alive. My Mother told me this over the phone and I blithely kept speaking about the trivia of my life brushing over this comment as if it were another dust bunny in the path of my broom. As often happens, the comment stayed with me after the phone call, and is with me still, three days later.
Hazel, I have her first name as my second, so does my Mother. I like to think that Hazel started a new tradition in our family, a family with precious few traditions. I will gift my first born daughter with the second name Hazel, and she will do the same for hers and so on and so on until we run out of first born daughters. Hazel is a cumbersome name for a young girl, and I am relieved that it was my second name and not my first. As it was, "Hazel nut" was always a favourite with the teasing boys. Although I am sure that my daughter will suffer less, what with names such as "Apple" and "Tullulah Belle" hanging around. Although I must confess to secretly being a little jealous of Tullulah, it rolls of the tongue so conviently, and yet, how do you teach a small child to say her name when it is that complicated for the mouth to form?
My Grandmother, my namesake, was an incredible woman, she told me that she became a teacher at age 13. To this day I am sceptical of the tale, I cannot imagine a 13 year old girl controlling a class of sniffing, whining and bored children, and then managing to make them learn something! I have stood in the front of a classroom, between the desks and the blackboard, chalk in hand, and there is no place more terrifying and exhilirating. Well teacher or not at age 13, I do know that she was a teacher, and even a Headmistress, and one of the first Coloured women to be head of a School in Apartheid South Africa.
Which segues neatly to more of her incredibleness. Like many women during that era she was fighting her government for every part of her life, her right to marry the man she loved, even if he was white, the right to work where she wished, to live where she wished, to travel where she wished, and for the same for her children, and thankfully, for her grandchildren. She did this by supporting her husband in his rebellion, cared for her four children and gave something invaluable to the children that she taught.
To me she was a strict maths teacher on my school holidays. She was the smell of baked bread. It was almost the only time in our house when the bread was not store bought. She had brown hands with long fingers, her skin smoothly soft and you could slide it around on the back of her hand. Her hands were so strong, and even close to her final sickness and death, she could hold your hand so tight.
My favourite memories of her are when she visited us in Namibia and we would lie on her bed, while she smoked and drank her brandy slowly, slurping slightly and enjoying the flavour thoroughly. That is when, if we begged suitably, she would tell us stories. I have always wished that I remembered them more clearly. I could never perfectly guess what type of creatures the stories were about, but I do remember that they lived under a tree, and they had a wayward son called Timmy and that every story had a moral to it. Like Aesops fables, but smelling of brandy, cigarettes and Oil of Olay, and, if we were lucky, granny smith's boiled sweets. Mr and Mrs Snodgrass. Of course I now know that my well read and well educated Grandmother must have picked this name out of a Dicken's memory the first time she told the stories. My Mother's favourite author is Dickens. I wonder if this is because she was taken to enchantment in a meadow under a tree with Mr and Mrs Snodgrass's troubles with Timmy.
Thank you Granny for warmth and discipline and thank you also, for my Mother.
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