GRANNY LOST IN TIME

 

GRANNY - LOST in TIME

Granny had been getting on a bit without us noticing it really. We put it all down to bad luck rather than bad handling. There was no such thing as Alzheimer's in those days and when mother came home from war-work to find the pudding was still cold in the pan, it was just put down to too much overwork in our kitchen. So, given a second chance, she messed it up again, and we blamed it on the kitchen clock, when we found a charred mess stuck to the bottom of the pan, quite unlike the one that had been prepared earlier, weeks earlier actually. Well, when she finally set the curtain on fire by turning up the light on the gas water-heater, it was decided to take her on holiday.

The digs were less than satisfactory and not the ones my mother had chosen personally during our reconnoitre of Southport. The landlady had thought our need for a room on the ground floor meant one with just five steps up to it. It would have killed our other holidaymaker, an old aunt with heart problems. So, this lady, with a lack of grace, told us we could keep our bags at her front door but without any responsibility for them, whilst we made off to find new lodgings more suitable to our needs.

We had forgotten that we were supposed to meet Dad later in the day. He was always busy in the Co-op shop on Saturdays, and could not manage to get to Southport before seven on the Saturday, and he would be arriving anytime... and he didn't know we had had to change the address! He would, by now, of course, have had the pleasure of meeting the earlier-mentioned landlady with the massive chip on her shoulder, and he might be needing an appointment at Southport Hospital by this time. He needed rescuing. We walked from end to end of Lord Street several times, from railway station to the old lodgings, and nowhere could we see Dad.

In despair we left Granny under the clock at the railway station to wait for trains to arrive and pick out my Daddy. Then we moved off with elderly Aunt to do the tour of the main road again. When we got back, we had managed to find Dad unscathed by the way, but there was no sign of Granny, underneath the clock or anywhere else.

And so, the long search for Granny began. When we found her, she didn't look herself at all, and said she had been somewhere-or-other and then come back in the aeroplane or something. She probably meant a taxi man had found her wandering. She said her watch had stopped. She repeated this a couple of times and we were starting to wonder about her ageing mind by now. Still, we had our disrupted holiday and Dad finally got back safely to work by Monday.

But then, when we got back to Granny's house, a strange thing had happened there. Jim, her husband, said,

“Ee Doris, oo's not the same, isn't Polly, and her watch isn't reight eether? Well, that's a funny thing, tha sees, because every clock in't th'ouse has been telling t'wrong time over this weekend. I didn't know what day i'd wor misell.”

“Tell us about it,” said Mum.

“Well I've hed some strange dreams...” And we had to laugh at first, as he liked a drink, but then he said he'd dreamed he'd been up in a plane. Well, he was getting elderly, too. He must have heard Polly's story and got it all mixed up. Who can say? The Doctor said it was galloping memory loss.

We checked all the wall clocks and pocket watches, and they'd all needed adjusting, which was a bit rummy. But, yes, the old folks were perfectly correct in saying that none of the clocks was right. So we straightened things up as best we could. After all, Gramps had been on his own all weekend and might have been messing about with them. He'd have been lonely on his own, perhaps, and been wandering… but we never got to the bottom of it. Who knows..?

It's just when you come to think back on it... Well, you hear about all this flying saucer stuff nowadays... Close encounters... and things like that... Best not to think about it, really... or you'd never dare to drop asleep … and you'd never check the clocks again...

Edna Leach

Riverside 22.02.21

edited since the rough scribbles shot off via Mike's screenshare in Zoom experiment.