I’ve been thinking about death. I took this photo at a party back in December. I offered to give an annoying girl a lift home because she lived round the corner then changed my mind. She offered to pay me. Ha ha. You wanna hire Blag Cabs? A bit like the Boosh’s Death Cabs but the ticking meter clocks up years off your life. Needless to say she wasn’t quite up to the job of a full-scale haggle with La Blag so we decided to leave it at that. Anyway, I digress, that was where I got the photo.
The reason I’ve been thinking about death is because my grandad died on 1 January. He was 89, still had a full head of hair and possessed that rare quality – the gift of the gab. He was a true Cockney, born and bred in Hoxton, who was relocated out of a four-storey Georgian in Islington in the 70s to a brand new house built by the GLC in Bognor Regis, so the great gentrification could begin. He never owned his home and he was never in debt.
He was 10 in 1929 – the last time the market CRASHED – and his mum nicked jumpers off washing lines and wrapped his feet in newspapers when he didn’t have shoes in winter. He went out to work at 14 – first as a messenger in the City and then joined the Post Office where he worked until he retired. He met my nan when he was 17 and she was 15. Her story is that she thought he ‘had money’ because he was wearing a coat on their first date – little did she know that he’d borrowed it off a mate. They stayed together for 72 years – marrying in 1940 and receiving a telegram from the Queen to celebrate their Diamond wedding in 2000. You don’t get anything after Diamond – people simply didn’t live that long.
Grandad was a born storyteller. He could tell a joke that started with ‘Heimy goes to the tailor to get a new suit…’ in a synagogue and still get a laugh. He was an oral custodian, not just of his own family history but of life in working-class London before the War. He adjusted to his eldest daughter becoming an unmarried mum with a ‘brown baby’ (me) when mixed-race children were still a cultural taboo rather than a hue in the Benetton rainbow. He was a father figure to me as a little girl and a constant (if neglected) presence in my adult life. He was a big man and a big character with a big heart and I loved him.
Last night I went to Literary Salon and talked about poetry, memory, collective versus individual memory, history and the role of the bards, the griots and the poet. We considered how political power skews the creation and telling of history. I said that ceremony and ritual are acts of formalising memory: weddings, funerals, bar mitvahs…that’s how we create individual historical narrative: where history is constructed by event, occasion, facts as opposed to emotion and matters of the heart, which is the realm of the poet. To my mind, that’s where we interact with the collective memory, we fill in the gaps – or wrap our words more tightly round the gaps that constitute the real meaning of what is said and done.
We also discussed how memory is the world of the living and history is the world of the dead. One of the things I always wanted to do was to take a tape recorder and get some of grandad’s stories down. We knew that even with two writers in the family (my mum is also a poet) we’d never be able to tell it like he did. It was in the voice. In the BEING of him. But we never did: for my part because I could never admit to myself that one day I’d see him die. I still wanted to live in a world where everybody I ever loved was immortal. I think mum will write some of his tales down. The rest will have to be committed to memory. Those stories will probably be inaccurate and shine in some of the wrong places: we will remember them at family gatherings. My aunty will keep some of their spirit alive as she too knows how to spin a yarn. They were oral and what survives of them will be fragments that surface in stories, poems and scraps of conversation.
A quote from Salvador Dali caught my eye on the handout last night: ‘The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.’
Even now I hesitate at the photo: is it right and proper to include a rubber skeleton rather than a picture of him as a living man? That would be the tradition of a tribute such as this. But this is my story. Death is nothing if not the end of flesh, blood and tongues. I believe the soul is eternal even if I can’t begin to imagine eternity (see the Mighty Boosh/Death Cabs if you want an approximation). I was thinking also of using the photo to announce another death: the death of Blag Lady, as I’m not quite sure what the future is for us, where we’re going and how often I’ll post as my attention turns to new projects and preoccupations. But it seems, for the time being, that Blag Lady still lives to tell a tale.
