My Secret Sister: Jenny Lucas and Helen Edwards' Family Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

at the other end for you,’ she’d say.
    Grandma was a legend in our family. She would take to her bed and have a death scene whenever she had a cold or the flu. Of course she had witnessed the deaths of many in the 1918 flu epidemic. She had lost her husband young, and her first-born too. She had seen illness and death as a commonplace all around her throughout her life, since this was before penicillin and antibiotics. Serious chest conditions were the norm in Seghill, especially ‘miner’s lung’, caused by the coal-dust that polluted the air we breathed. Superstitions surrounding illness were rife. I was always warned not to sit on the ground because ‘The cold will strike through!’ I didn’t really understand that. ‘It will strike your kidneys.’ I was bundled into a vest and liberty bodice, even in warm weather. The spectre of illness lurked everywhere.
    So whenever Grandma felt ill, she would call the whole family to the ‘wake’ before she died. One of the cousins would go round announcing, ‘Grandma is very poorly’, and all the family would dutifully appear at her house. We crammed in somehow, taking turns to sit with her in her bedroom, while the others would have a raucous time with tea and biscuits in her front room or on the stairs. My uncles Sam, Jack, Marcus and James were full of fun and quick-witted jokes. It was fast and furious when they got together, so they always brightened the mood, and Grandma would sit up in bed with tears of laughter rolling down her cheeks when it was their turn to sit with her. Even my father, if he was at home, didn’t complain about going round to see Grandma. He was fond of her and teased her, which she loved. I was always surprised about this when I was little, but I suppose he recognized her seniority as the matriarch of this extended family.
    I used to go too and see her lying in state, muffled up in a vest under her warm winceyette nightie with its elasticated cuffs and a high neck tied with satin ribbon. Over the top she would wear one of her hand-knitted bed-jackets in a pastel colour. She had a vast range of them in lemon, pink and powder blue. She kept her best bed-jacket for when the doctor came.
    Her bed always had crisp white sheets and pillowslips, and was piled high with blankets, a bedspread and a matching quilt, which she straightened every now and then after one of us had sat on it and sent it askew. Her little wrinkled hand with its blue veins and the thin gold band of her wedding ring lying on the white turnover of the sheet fascinated me. I could almost see the blood pumping through those veins.
    I was intrigued by the array of tablets and cough medicines on her bedside table. ‘Don’t touch those, hinny,’ she would say. All those of us who could squeeze in would sit around her bed and take turns to hold her hand. I can feel now the stifling heat in that room with the roaring fire in the grate and the thick curtains closed ‘to keep out the draughts’. The lamp, lit dimly on her bedside table, cast a warm glow over the proceedings.
    Grandma brightened as each group dutifully trooped into her bedroom.
    ‘How are you getting on, Mother?’ Uncle Marcus would ask. ‘Do you want a glass of water?’
    ‘No thank you, pet. Nancy just brought this one. It’s as fresh as can be.’
    ‘Let’s plump up your pillows,’ Auntie Dorrie would say, leaning Grandma gently forward.
    ‘That’s champion,’ she would say in a weak-but-trying-to-be-cheerful voice as she settled back again. ‘Now, sit down and talk to me. How are the bairns?’
    Even my mother would join in. She was always bright and witty in company, like a different person. She smiled at everyone . . . except me.
    Grandma’s wakes seemed like joyous occasions in some ways, but there was always an underlying fear – an anxiety amongst the aunts and uncles that this might be Grandma’s last. But I don’t think we children realized that at the time.
    I always tried to sit near