thinking about inheritance

or green beans

Recently, my children have started to ask if they can help in the kitchen. Anyone who has children or who’s encountered young children, will know that help probably is the wrong word in this context. Involve a child in making a meal, and you’re left with double the amount of cleaning up to do. I read a writer writing about subtext once, they said, no one ever says what they mean, and a lot of writers get this wrong. I think this is what’s happening with my children, they don’t want to help, not really, they just want to be with me. I said, yes, they could help to one of them, and because they are competitive children, they all wanted to help.

One night with the evenings suddenly longer, the sun setting at the end of the garden, a fox trotting around sniffing things, the window open to the breeze, my eldest son and I stood topping and tailing green beans. I always buy untrimmed beans, it’s cheaper that way. A chicken was roasting in the oven, I’d shown him how to stuff its cavity with garlic, taught him to rub butter on its skin to catch the salt we poured over afterward, how to use the big knife to chop rosemary, neglected oregano, thyme, he rubbed those in too, told Alexa to set a timer. He wanted to cut the end off the beans, but I showed him how to flick the end off between his index finger and thumb before putting them in a steel colander that once belonged to my grandmother. We stood side by side for a while until the beans were done and he wandered away to find something else to do.

The whole thing felt like an echo. I’d stood at my grandmother’s side when I was his age as she taught me to do the same; all summer we’d pod peas, hull strawberries, scrub potatoes, all of them from her garden. Whenever I’d thought about inheritance, I’d thought about genes, or about things; gold, pearls, satin; strawberries, peas, potatoes, less prosaic.

When I was young, I did not want to be like my Grandmother. I loved her, but didn’t want to be her. Every morning, even relatively late in life, she woke early, went to the pool and swam before her husband woke, she walked with a walking group twice a week, went country dancing every Thursday, each morning she read the paper, held strong views on much of the latest news and all politics, canvassing locally for the Lib Dems, read at least a book a week, donated to Amnesty, Oxfam, Save the Children, and whoever else sent a heartrending enough mailout, changed before dinner every night, gardened avidly, knitted when forced to sit down, entertained every weekend, drank at least one wine glass sized glass of sherry a day, never forgot a birthday, ate blue cheese daily, volunteered at the local citizen’s advice after retiring as a doctor, pops up in the archives of the BMJ haranguing the editor for his inability to take climate change as seriously as the nuclear threat back in the 80s, smiles proudly in the local newspaper as part of the team who identified trends in childhood obesity, holidays in Norway, Africa, the Caribbean, returns to work after her four children when women disappeared into kitchens and nurseries, and was the only woman my father was ever scared of, which in itself is a feat alone; no, I did not want to be my Grandmother, how do you live up to something like that, how tired would trying make you?

I never felt like I really knew her. There was always some part of her reserved, just for her. She didn’t laugh much. There were rules. We were polite. We didn’t swear. We didn’t argue. We didn’t shout, slam doors, or make a fuss. When my aunt died, we didn’t cry much. We weren’t given to expressing emotion either positive or negative. We kept to the middle of everything, apart from when it came to grades; the higher the better then. Because she kept something back, as a child, I became intensely interested in her, and as an adult, still am. She looked after my mother and she looked after her husband and when I was ill as a teenager, she looked after me. I thought she was the strongest person I knew.

And then, five years short of her death, something in her refused to work any more. Was it because she losing her mobility? Her eyesight? That she was forced to slow down, and when she did, the memories came back? I don’t know. I feel uncomfortable writing about the dead. It is not the same as writing about the living, at least they can refute what you say. But the dead, that’s different. I cannot say then with the degree of accuracy I’d like, what happened with my grandmother, other than she was unwell for a long time before she died, things caught up with her, and I realise now that what I’d seen as strength was something else; I’m not sure who ever looked after her. I researched her family after she died, and found her mother died in an asylum, as had her mother before her. This inheritance of strength as weakness, of madness and absence - this was her inheritance and is my inheritance too; is neither pearls nor silk nor strawberries or peas, is something much harder than that to quantify or undo or unknot.

She never told me about her mother. When I say this I mean exactly that, she told me precisely nothing about her. Or about her grandmother. Her German grandmother, the source of much shame. She spoke plenty about her father and her father’s family, the land they owned, the trips round the Scottish islands on their yacht, about school and university, but like is the case with all unreliable narrators, I was drawn to her silences and who lived in them.

As all good writers know, people never say what they mean. In many ways, my grandmother taught me more about subtext than anyone else, and as I stood there teaching my son how to top and tail beans, what was it I really taught him; children, with their senses fully alert all the time, taking in the lessons we least want them to, and me, thinking it was about beans, chicken, salt.