Goldsmiths - University of London

"It's a special drink, it'll make you better," Jan says again, leaning in, brandishing the sickly-coloured liquid under her mother's chin.

"The nurses said you need to drink, Mum," adds my mother.

"Come on Grandma, it'll do you good," I say.

We're all watching her, the three of us, her two daughters and her grand-daughter, and we all know what's coming.

My grandma can sustain a polite face to visitors and friendly relatives. She can put on an acceptably posh voice when required. She's made it to 98, the matriarch of a newly mortgaged and newly moneyed middle-class family, "Through sheer bloody-mindedness," my mother often likes to tell me, "and don't I know it."
But now here she is, in Hope Hospital in Salford, bedridden by two falls and a chest infection, exercising her final outburst of sheer bloody-mindedness by refusing to eat or drink, because this time she's had enough, because this time she just wants to die. And the acceptably polite face is slipping away.

Jan is still trying with the beige beaker. "Come on Mum," she says.

My grandma turns her head to her younger daughter and looks her full in the face, her blue eyes shiny and fierce.

"It's good for you," Jan says again, the drink spilling a little.

And Grandma says, in her fullest Lancashire accent:

"Bullshit!"

Here she is at the door, in her pressed blouse and smart red cardigan, black pleated skirt and shiny black shoes, walking solidly with her stick, welcoming me into the home she still manages alone, at 92.

"Hello, love," she says with a smile. "Come in, ah, it's lovely to see you."

"Hello, Grandma," I say. She kisses me as I squeeze past her, straight into the front room, straight into the heat of the blazing gas fire.

She looks me up and down, and I know what she's about to say.

"Look at the state of you!" she says, "Have you had a wash today?"

"Of course I've had a wash, Grandma!" I laugh nervously. But I know what she's saying: you haven't made an effort. I wish I'd at least put on some jewellery or a flash of mascara.

I look around the room at the display of my former properly-turned-out selves, as if hoping for an instant transformation into that young woman in red lipstick and a black graduation gown, or into the slightly older version in a posh frock for someone's birthday. Scrubbed up and showing off.

"Let me fetch you a cup of tea," she says, "You look like you could do with one. Have a sit down."

She's back soon enough, before I can finish the front page of her Daily Express, carrying two china mugs of tea. She settles into her chair and looks around the room at the rows of us, gowns and mortar boards and scrolls.

"I loved school," she says, although there are no pictures of her in this gallery of family achievement. "I begged my Dad to let me go to school with our Lena and our Dora, even though I was only four."

I nibble politely at my custard cream. I'd like to talk to her about my son, her first and so-far only great-grandchild, but she's off, telling stories from the time of the First World War, telling them as vividly as the tales I want to share of his recent crawling antics.

"There was this time when our Lena had missed a few months of school," she says, "she was always sick and she'd had another of her illnesses. She was a very shy child, very delicate. The other children used to torment her."

She always uses a narrow range of adjectives when describing her three sisters: our Dora, our Lena and our Ella, always weak or sickly or delicate.

"The headmaster gave us an essay to write. Our Lena was completely at a loss, she still wasn't well and she was almost in tears. The headmaster was very cross and he shouted at her but I was having none of it. I butted right in and told him off for picking on my sister when she had been so ill."

She sips her tea. I sip mine and wait for her to finish the tale. There is to be no interrupting.

"Well, he let her off. He saw my point of view in the end. He knew I was right."

She must have been about six or seven years old when she tackled that headteacher. Never mind the rest of the sickly, delicate family members, what adjectives would she apply to herself?

Fearless? Determined? Straight-speaking?

"Anyway," she is still talking, "I've decided to go to college, to do a computer course. I saw it in the paper. I fancy learning about email and all that."

She looks up at me. I'm smiling at her in approval and admiration.

"Ee, love," she says, "Your hair looks like it hasn't seen a comb in months."

"Hello Grandma, it's me."

"Sorry, love, I was in the kitchen."

"I can't believe you're in the Manchester Evening News! Dad just told me."

"Oh right, I was gob-smacked when they called me ..."

"And a huge photograph ..."

"They came to my computer class and took lots of photos of me in front of the computer. Anyway they must have liked me because they've given me a full page, second page of the paper. It says, 'Ethel Joins the Fast Lane at 92.' It's right there when you open it up, a big picture of me doing my typing with a big article underneath. Haven't you got a copy?"

"Not yet, but ..."

"Why not? Haven't you got it there?"

"No, you can't get it in London ..."

"I suppose it is a Manchester paper. Bit strange though, I thought you could get everything in London."

"Dad's put one in the post for me, so I'll get to see it. They must be really proud of you at college, the oldest person on the course!"

"Well, I did have to make a complaint on that issue."

"Oh no, what happened? Is the course going OK?"

"Oh, nothing to do with the teacher. She's a lovely lady called Sue. No, I complained to the college. You'll have to stop that advert, I told them. It says Computer Courses for Ages 8 to 80. That's age discrimination, I said. What about those of us in our nineties?"

"So what've they done?"

"They've changed the advert, of course."

"Ethel's Story."

It's the life story that my Grandma has been writing since she finished her computer course, and here it is, two years in the typing, 100 pages of nearly 100 years of Lancashire life landing solidly onto my London doormat.

It is 2005 and my newborn daughter is asleep in the pram. My older son is at playgroup. I've got an hour or so before I have to pick him up, so I sit down and start to read.

Immediately she's at school, the "star girl pupil" and very quickly she's the winner of one of only five bursaries for Leigh Girls' Grammar School. And she's listing her prizes and commendations, her new friends (Edith Flitcroft was "like me, rather clever and would gloat if she did better than me"), and her new subjects ("Botany was boring with all the Latin names which I could never remember"). But within a chapter the flush of school life is over and it's 1926 and: "The results of the School Certificate Exam were a great shock to me and I walked out of the school absolutely devastated and I never went back."

A pass in French, not a credit, and now she can't go to college and train as a teacher. She'll have to go to the mill and work as a charge-hand, like everybody else, except Edith Flitcroft, who has six credits and is off to training college, "so you can imagine how she crowed."

It's a shock, but she won't give up. All through the Depression my grandma is still working. She leaves the mill and gets a job as a dental assistant, and when she's made redundant she helps out her sister in her new shop, and with each job she lets us know her wages and her exact responsibilities. She is proud to be a working woman with a School Certificate to her name.

And then it's the Second World War and here he is: Ernest Timperley, my Grandad, delivering milk from the farm to our Dora's shop and taking a shine to the shop-girl.

Ethel and Ernie get married and move quickly into the workman's cottage at Malkin's Wood Farm. The snow is so bad they need a snowplough to clear a path for the furniture van. But Ethel's still pushing her bike across the fields every day to work at the shop, through the worst snow in decades, and within six months they've saved up enough money for "a new dining room suite and two fireside chairs, carpets and rugs."

Aha, the two fireside chairs, the side-by-side chairs, still there in their latest incarnation in Grandma's bungalow. She sits to the right, near the dresser. The other chair is for guests, because my granddad is a decade dead.

I sit back in my leather armchair in my London home and wonder if she still thinks of that time, of the fireside chairs and her husband waiting for her as she cycled home across the fields, the sirens wailing?

She's on the trolley bus at Sale Lane when the air raid is sounded. They all have to get off the bus and crowd into a shelter and now she's cramped in a brick box with a bus-load of people and a paraffin lamp stinking of fumes. She feels sick. Outside the guns are shooting, shooting at the incoming planes, and nobody knows how long until the all-clear. And then a woman says, "Is anyone going to Boothstown?" and Ethel volunteers a "Yes, I am," because she can't stand the fumes anymore and even though the warden's telling both of them it's too dangerous, the two of them leave the shelter and set off. It's a moonlit night and she knows the German bombers are using the Bridgewater Canal as a guide into the Manchester Ship Canal and the docks. The farm is near the canal and she's worried about Ernie and wants to get home quickly. Her companion is with the fairground camped at the back of the Conservative Club, so Ethel has to walk on alone to the newsagents where she's left her bicycle. Mr Broadbent, the newsagent, is standing outside his shop, watching the guns fire their rounds into the shapes in the sky.

"Heavy doing tonight," he says.

She tells him about the shelter and the woman from the fairground and asks him if he's seen Ernie.

"No, love, I've not. You best hurry on home," he said. "Moon's out. There'll be a lot of them flying tonight."

She takes her bike and starts to glide down the lane. There are no lights, but the moon leads her onwards.

"Hello, stop there!" shouts a voice, and it's a policeman, appearing out of the shadows of Vicars Hall Lane.

"I'm sorry, officer, but I'm late home and I'm worried my husband will be out looking for me, in all this," she says. She realises she's very scared. The anti-aircraft guns are rat-tat-tatting into the sky.

"I'll come with you to the bridge, at least to the end of my beat," he says. "I'm not going across the fields to Malkin's. You'll have to do that yourself."

So they ride together and there at the canal bridge is Ernie, waiting for her in the dark. She is overjoyed to see him, but he is angry and upset with fear.

They ride home in silence.

"You'll have to make that your last week at the shop," he says. "I'm not going through that again."

The next day she goes into work and hands in her notice. Maybe I'll just have to be a housewife for a while, she thinks, and cut out all that travelling.

A few days later, my Grandma writes in her memoir,

"Malkin's Wood was ... the first to receive a bomb in the western area of Manchester. It landed at the side of the Bridgewater Canal at Vicars Hall Bridge and broke a lot of windows in the houses at the bottom of Vicars Hall Lane."

There is no sense of drama here, just the straight-talking of the bare facts. But this is exactly where Ernie had met her off the bike.

I put the manuscript down. It's time to pick up my son from playgroup.

Pushing the pram up my east London street, looking at the new-builds where the stray bombs destroyed the terrace houses, I wonder: a world war, Arctic weather conditions, gunfire and German bombers, and finally my Grandma concedes, I'll just have to stay at home and make do with being a housewife.

And then I realise, thank God for once she gave in. Thank God she didn't insist on carrying on working. Because if she'd stayed in her job, that bomb might have got her and I wouldn't be here now, wheeling her great-grand-daughter up the street.

Grandma is helping my son with an animal jigsaw and I'm knitting red wool into a cardigan. We're at my mother's house, sitting at the kitchen table. My daughter is asleep in the cot upstairs.

"It was fantastic, Grandma. But I, er, I didn't get to the end," I say, a little embarrassed because I've been meaning to, really, but with two young children, I've not been reading much more than the Argos catalogue and the TV guide.

"You're too slack with that wool," she says. "You need to pull it tighter through the loops. That's why it ends up out of shape. Have you got the right needles?"

"It's called Big Wool. You're supposed to have big needles."

"I used to knit in the car on the way to the mill, when Mr Bannister used to pick me up in the company car," she says. "Did you read that bit?"

"I think so," I say, because I can't say, no, I didn't get that far, because frankly it got a bit boring after the war, and actually I just flipped forward to the section when I was born, and then, well, I didn't read any more. And anyway, I know she's going to tell me that story now whether I read it or not, the story of how at age 46 she returned to work at the mill as a general clerk and retired fourteen years later as the cost accountant. I've heard this tale many times before. I knit one, purl one, and wait to hear her tell it again.

But she says nothing. She's forgotten what she was saying. She's too busy with the jigsaw.

"Great-Grandma, here's a straighty bit," says my son, handing her a piece. "It's got the hedgehog on it."

"Good, good, that's right." She places it on the table and completes one edge of the puzzle.

She is 96 and he is 4. They are happy together, searching for pictures and pieces. She doesn't overly praise him, like I do, and she doesn't do the other thing I'm guilty of, which is to leave the correct piece under his nose for him to find. She lets him search it out himself, but if she finds it first, tough, she'll be the one to put it in the picture. He'll complain, a little, but he'll let her do it, because he loves his great-grandma very much, my quiet, patient son who loves numbers and puzzles and getting it right, just as she does.

Grandma picks up another piece of jigsaw and kisses him hard on the forehead.

"Ooh, I could eat you up," she says, smiling and hugging him.

I stop knitting and unpick my last few rows. She's right, it's too slack.

Everyone in this ward is sick and elderly and silent, asleep or drugged or breathing noiselessly into oxygen masks. Their visitors are quiet souls, thumbing through Heat magazine or gently nudging nurses for extra pillows. And into this soft, meditative silence slams the family conference at the end of my grandma's bed.

"She just wants to die," says my Mum. "It's awful watching her go through this."

"I think it might be time to talk to the doctor about a Do Not Resuscitate order," says Jan.

"They want to give her morphine," says my Mum, "and I'm convinced that's what they did with Dad. The doctor gave him an injection at eight o'clock and he was dead by ten."

Across the aisle there is a small woman sitting propped in an armchair, oxygen tubes in her nose. The woman is looking at us, her eyes confused. Behind her, on the wall, there's a coloured circle which appears to be part of a traffic light system. Her circle is red.

"Hello?" says a voice from behind the pastel curtains. "Hello?"

It's Grandma.

We all think the nurse is with her, still taking the blood.

"Maybe we need to let them know that we're OK with whatever they do, that we know she wants to die," says my Mum.

"I wouldn't say too much," I say, "Because then they'll be worried that we're watching closely, that we might insist on a post-mortem, or an investigation," and they both nod in agreement, although I'm not sure if what I'm saying is based on any medical truth or just something from the plot of a medical crime thriller.

"Hello? Hello?" The voice is stronger now, "Is anybody there?"

Someone flicks back the curtain and the nurse has gone and it's just my grandma, propped up all alone in the bed looking at the drawn curtains and the huddle of relatives whispering at the end of the bed.

"I could hear you all outside," she says. "I thought I'd died. Why haven't I died?"

She is not getting better. We are all toasting her health and eating cake and she doesn't want to know.

Jan's husband John makes a joke about anti-biotics and uncle-biotics and my grandma says,

"That's not funny."

"How's Grandma?" I ask.

"She's still refusing to eat or drink," she sighs, "it's unbearable. She keeps talking about dying, but she's as strong as an ox. Her body won't give up."

"Is she still talking about going home?" I say.

"Oh, yes, that's the thing, she wants to die at home. She doesn't want to die in hospital."
"So maybe that's why she's still there, because she doesn't want to die in that ward. She wants to go home," I say.

"That's all very well, but they won't let her go home until she ticks all the boxes and she's just not well enough." My mother sounds exasperated. "So I told her outright. I said, look, Mum, if you want to die at home, you are going to have to get better. You're going to have to start eating and drinking and taking your antibiotics. You'll have to have a go at sitting in the chair and walking to the toilet."

"She's not in any state to do that, though," I say.

"Well, I've told her. They won't discharge you until everything's back to normal. You have to walk to the toilet. You have to go to the toilet. You have to drink."

"And what did she say?"

"You know what she's like. She won't take instructions. But she'll think about it."

We chat and she responds politely, but when I tell her about my son and my daughter I realise she is not concentrating on what I am saying. She is lucid and she is smiling but she has nothing left to spend on social niceties. She has gone somewhere else, somewhere deep inside her consciousness, where she is concentrating on expending her remaining energy on getting well enough to die.

I have to go. I kiss the vein snaking at her hairline. She is softly cold, clammy.

"Bye, Grandma, I'll see you soon."

She turns her head and opens her eyes. I look at her and she is alert against the pillow, she looks at me directly with those blue-grey eyes, the same eyes as my son, and she says, "Night night, God bless."

"Goodbye," I say. I hold her gaze for as long as I can and then I turn and walk out of the door.

She is discharged from hospital on January 10th, 2009.

She dies, at home, in her own bed, 17 days later.