Notes - Waste Not, Want Not

'Waste not, want not'

My grandmother, the eco-warrior

Oh, how we laughed. My mum and I had called in to see my grandmother, and caught her doing some ironing. What she was ironing – carefully, under a layer of tea towels so they didn’t melt – was plastic carrier bags. She wanted to re-use them, but also wanted them to look fresh and new.

‘Nan!’ I remember shouting, wiping away tears of laughter. ‘You don’t have to re-use them. They’re free! You just throw them away.’

My nan loved to see me laugh, so she smiled. Nonetheless, she didn’t approve of such profligacy. ‘There’s no such thing as a free lunch!’ she said, primly. Which was a cliché, of course. But also, I realise now that there is more plastic than fish in the oceans, completely correct.

In the car afterwards, I was still fretting about a woman over the age of 90 wearing herself out by ironing carrier bags. My mum just rolled her eyes. She had tried to remonstrate with her mother, over the years, about her frugal ways. ‘Now I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s what’s keeping her alive. It gives her something to do.’

It’s only with hindsight that I see my nan for what she was. With her darning of socks, her make do and mend, her inability to buy anything new unless the old one was worn beyond any feasible repair, she was Green before we even had attached a colour to environmental awareness, an upcycler before that was even a word. My gorgeous gran – like many women of her generation – was an eco-warrior.

She and her two sisters lived through two world wars and learned to live on little and bear losses that are hard for us to imagine. My great aunt Lillian married well, but then her only son was killed at the front. Her husband was overcome by grief, and took his own life a year or so after. When I was a child, Lillian would read me a book I loved, about a white rabbit. As she turned the pages, she would whisper into my ear that I could grow up to be anything I wanted to be. Her late husband was a writer, and so am I. I very much doubt this is a coincidence.

My great aunt Hilda lost her fiancé during WW1, and never married. She became a nurse, and later in life she and my nan shared a council fl at on the ground floor of a tower block in Smethwick. She worked for the NHS until she retired, making the long trip to the hospital every day on foot, and walking home weary after her shift. She was an austere lady, who would violently brush my unruly hair 100 times before bedtime when I stayed with them. She also taught me that women can go to work just like men, that they are strong and capable.

My grandfather died of tuberculosis not long after my mum was born. There was no welfare state then, no one my nan could turn to except her sisters. Lillian lent her money to open a shop so she could support her three children, but it wasn’t a success. There were war-time food shortages, and my nan couldn’t say no to a hungry child. She ended up giving far too much of her stock away.

Still, she muddled through. She kept chickens, so there were always eggs to eat. She grew veg. She could fillet a herring with her tiny paring knife so there was no meat at all on the bones, then make it into a feast using vinegar and newspaper. She had a stew that somehow transformed cheap dried peas and a bit of bacon into something so delicious that the memory of it still makes my mouth water, even though I haven’t tasted it for years. And if all of this sounds unbearably grim, I haven’t yet told you about Annie Fray’s super-power.

My nan was magical. She was joy personified. She had a gift for turning everyday events into celebrations, rituals, adventures. My mum was very ill when I was a child, so I spent a lot of time with my nan and her sisters. I remember them as busy ladies who were rarely still, always making something, or fixing it up, or helping the neighbours.

Odd things remind me of her, like the smell of bread fresh out of the oven. We would walk a couple of miles to queue at a bakery where the bread was freshly made, ‘because it stays fresher without putting rubbish in it’.

'With her make do and mend, she was green before we had even attached a colour to environmental awareness...'

When the bread got stale, she would wrap it in a damp cloth and put it in a warmed oven to bring it back to life – and there was somehow always enough left over to feed the ducks in the park.

After dinner, she would reach into a cupboard and bring out a rustling brown paper bag of apples. I could choose between a green one or a red one, and we would sit and polish it until we could see our faces in the skin. Then, and only then, the paring knife would appear and she would deftly chop it into seedless crescents, arranged in a circle on a plate, to be eaten slowly and savoured, slice by slice. (An apple, cut this way, is still one of my favourite desserts. )

Sugar remained rationed, in my nan’s world. For a special treat, she would bring out a box of her beloved Thornton’s toff ee with great ceremony. She’d let me break the slab with a little silver hammer and choose a piece – just one each, which we’d masticate slowly while watching her favourite TV programme, Crossroads. And then the box would disappear, till next time.

At Christmas, the whole family would gather at the flat for sherry. It was a running joke that, a decade after decimalisation, the dusty bottle still had a price tag in shillings and pence. Everyone got a thimbleful, in dainty glasses we only saw once a year. It was absurd. And yet we all turned up to drink it together, year after year. After I turned 14, I was finally allowed to join my older cousins in a half thimbleful of my own. I was so proud. It was the most adult I’d ever felt.

My nan never bought me toys. Instead she would give me a shoe box, tissue paper, glue and paint, and I’d spend hours at her kitchen table creating a miniature world inside the box. She’d then sit patiently and listen while I made up stories about that world and its imaginary inhabitants. She had time, which is the greatest gift to give any child.

She repaired clothes. Or altered them. She redressed hats to make them look new. She knitted jumpers. And if they went out of style, she unravelled them and turned the wool into something else. Late in life, she discovered trousers, though she wouldn’t go outside the flat wearing them, because it wasn’t respectable. She thought buying from Marks & Spencer was an outrageous extravagance, but she did it because she also liked quality, things that would last.

She believed that electricity leaked out of sockets, so everything was turned off when not being used. She and her sister wouldn’t put lights on until it got so dark that they could barely see each other. Nan filled their fl at with lush houseplants, most of them propagated from gifts her grandchildren had given her, then redistributed around the family potted up in yoghurt cartons and food tins. I still have the descendant of one of her spider plants, in my study.

One of her favourite sayings was ‘Waste not, want not’, and she never spent a great deal of money. Nonetheless, if one of her many grandchildren needed something, there would be a discreet handover of cash. ‘This is what you save for,’ she told me, after giving me money to spend on a school trip abroad. ‘So you can enjoy the really special things.’

My nan died in 1985, at the age of 84. Lillian was already gone by then, but Hilda lived to the age of 98, her good health a testament to all that walking. I miss them, and I wish I’d let them pass down more of their hard-won skills. I’m not sure I’d ever darn socks, but I’d like to be able to repair the moth-hole in my favourite cashmere cardi. I’d love to be able to fillet a fi sh as skilfully as my nan did, and to sew. But most of all, I wish I’d asked for the recipe for that brown pea and bacon stew.

WORDS SHERYL GARRATT