One story house
Crail harbour, Fife
When news of a family bereavement arrives during lockdown, a writer is taken back to her childhood, and to visits to her granny’s house in Crail that are seared on her memory. By Alice Florence Orr
Crail always felt like a faraway place despite only being an hour and a half in the car. Our drives there were coloured by radio hits and piglet-pink motion sickness tablets, saccharine pills that did little to settle a child’s stomach other than prime it for the cascade of gobstoppers and flying saucers she’d stuff in her wee mouth at the first opportunity. Those were the days before I could comprehend spatial distances, never mind distinguish between first and third person. My existence was distilled by an exponentially expanding series of destinations, each one completely disconnected from the other, and the car was less a vehicle than it was a teleportation device to other dimensions.
With little else to worry about on my voyage through space, I gazed out of the car window, imagining all the lives I would get to live when I was grown up. At that age, even ordinary things took on a celestial level of wonder. Every break of light through the cloud bank meant, at least to my small brain, that a soul below had perished. I was not a zealot. Those Sunday services at school never got to me, I swear. And yet, I was convinced that a sunbeam must signal something, and that thing, I concluded, was death. So when we finally arrived in Crail, I met my granny with the great heaviness of our shared mortality on my shoulders, the only antidote for which was a trip to buy sherbet.
‘I hovered by the door, waiting for the tale-tale signs of departure: the tinkle of keys, a sigh of acquiescence. Then we’d be off, emerging from the gloam to greet the lambs quaking in the field’
Even then, I could remember every step of the stroll from my granny’s bungalow to the local newsagents, since it always felt so far for my little legs, the anticipation of the sugary phantasmagoria messing with my already warped notion of space and time. I hovered by the door, waiting for the tale-tale signs of departure: the tinkle of keys, a sigh of acquiescence. Then we’d be off, emerging from the gloam to greet the lambs quaking in the field opposite the house, just back from their winter holidays. The Beehive sold multi-coloured sweeties and balls of wool. At least, those are the only wares that registered for me. But this little shop embodied a paradise that the rest of Crail merely cradled, as if the salt air and quaint harbour were the shiny wrapper enveloping a piece of sticky rock candy, the epitome of my sugary desires.
My granny never seemed to fit in around town. I’m not sure she ever tried. She always had a new yarn for my parents to endure while the kids obliviously scoffed ice cream sundaes we’d assembled ourselves, with whipped cream and squeezy strawberry sauce. My granny moaned about the frumpy do-gooder who dared to offer her a biscuit at the weekly coffee morning. She groaned about another intolerable visit from her sourpuss sister, waxed lyrical about a contractor with absolute cheek, whatever that was. There was also the increasingly frequent news that another soul she’d known for forty years had died in their sleep. Out of all her displeasures, this was the heftiest weight on her willow-thin frame.
‘She groaned about another intolerable visit from her sourpuss sister, waxed lyrical about a contractor with absolute cheek, whatever that was.’
Jean, as I came to know her, eventually took up the Fife equivalent of a “stiff upper lip”, which manifested as a permanently raised brow. The bungalow she shared with my grandpa was mostly brown with occasional grey accents, but we never paid the decor any mind. My siblings and I were enthralled by the swinging chair in the garden; the large apple tree that we’d all fallen out of, one year or another. We hid in the heavy, patterned curtains and took turns operating the reclining chair, which at some point became permanently vacant. We broke some of the ugly porcelain animals and blamed each other when mum got angry. We relished our monthly trips to Crail, counting down the days until we could run around the beach again, mouths still numb from popping candy. After a while, we started visiting every six months, then every year. And inevitably, after we grew out of our old car and went off on other adventures, we didn’t visit at all. Not once.
When the pandemic arrived and our lives went online, my sight grew increasingly poor, until most things beyond a few metres were completely out of focus. My life took on the diffused lines of a memory, with little to distinguish reality from my dreams. At the time, I couldn’t think of many things that were more depressing than the prospect of a Zoom date, or a Zoom wedding. But I was wrong. The worst thing in this new world, as it turned out, was a Zoom funeral.
‘Across her avatar, my granny had marked four vertical lines with an expiring biro pen, then the word help enclosed inside a speech bubble, floating free an inch above her ink-clad bars.’
It was Easter when I heard about the first stroke, my chocolate egg freshly broken into a dozen irreparable shards on our dining table. My hands shook so that I could hardly hold my phone, and I pressed my knuckles into my thighs, trying to feel my bones through the skin. Two worlds were rupturing, globally and privately, and somewhere in between I could no longer stand the sweetness of chocolate. Tastebuds deadened. Flavour long gone. Sherbet and gobstoppers became part of a language I deliberately unlearned.
Eight months into lockdown she sent her only letter. My eyes didn’t take in any of the scrawled words. Instead, they settled on the small, amateurish drawing at the bottom, scratched into the paper with a blunt pencil. It was of an old woman sporting a cartoonish bowl cut. She had little grey specks for eyes, harshly pressed into the paper. Her mouth gurned in displeasure. Across her avatar, my granny had marked four vertical lines with an expiring biro pen, then the word help enclosed inside a speech bubble, floating free an inch above her ink-clad bars.
I didn’t read the rest of the letter. Better to place it back on the table, next to out-of-season plums in their cracked bowl. I slumped into a chair, watching the dreich day make a mockery of all our free time. There were bars across our window too, penned in biro ink. It might be a long wait for the fragrant damp of spring. She picked up when I finally called my granny, but she had no memory of the letter or her drawing.
“I heard you have friends on the continent,” Jean interrupted, her voice fainter than before the stroke.
“Nah,” I replied. “The Schengen.”
“So you aren’t still abroad?” If there was even a small chance she’d forgotten about Covid, I wasn’t about to remind her.
Jean forgot a lot of things towards the end. But she always remembered her husband, though she tended to forget that he died ten years before. She remembered my dad, and his visits during lockdown, even if they were never in order. She also remembered my brother’s new pronouns when so many able-bodied people seemed to forget. This is how I’d like to remember her.
‘Just like bread, I loafed. Unlike bread, I did not rise. My thoughts were placeless, lacking form, and I existed within a bleached world where emotions could be turned up or down at will.’
Crail felt even further away after she died. It happened very slowly, then all of a sudden. As a consequence, I began noticing other endings, no matter how inconsequential. Mum stopped getting her bread from the artisan baker in the slightly fancier town up the road. Considering this was, ostensibly, the highlight of an otherwise stagnant week, I tried to convince her otherwise. When she told me she didn’t think her coat was “nice enough” to stand in the queue, I stopped arguing. Just like bread, I loafed. Unlike bread, I did not rise. My thoughts were placeless, lacking form, and I existed within a bleached world where emotions could be turned up or down at will. I wandered through my parents’ house, opening doors, looking absently in cupboards. I’m the sort of person who measures people by the contents of their drawers. There’s no malice, rather a simple fascination with half-opened bottles of hot sauce, multi-coloured packets of supplements, and cosmetics from other parts of the world tucked away under the bathroom sink. I can piece together lives using these details. I tell myself stories.
During those empty months, I tried to remember how I felt about my house when I was little, the way that I could so clearly remember my granny’s bungalow and its glorious, morbid wonders. But all I could see around me were house prices and gentrified bakeries, and that’s why I decided to visit her house, one last time, even if it already belonged to another family, another narrative.
When I finally stood in her old driveway, two years after Jean died, I realised that Crail had always been close by, that it was only now it felt far away. I recruited the help of a nosy neighbour, the daughter of one of Jean’s old friends, and she blagged her way past the builders and landscapers systematically digging my granny’s presence out of the gravel.
‘When I finally stood in her old driveway, two years after Jean died, I realised that Crail had always been close by, that it was only now it felt far away.’
“Don’t mind us!” Janice yelled over the noise. “We’re friends of the family.” She didn’t say which family. Her lack of specificity was one of the reasons I’d brought her along.
The bungalow had been gutted, walls torn out and carpets lifted. With white walls and pale floorboards, the place oscillated between heavenly realm and bathroom showroom. I gasped at the sight of the ceilings, envied the open-plan kitchen. I asked Janice if she knew anything about the family who bought it.
Janice shrugged. “As far as I know, dear, it’s their holiday home.”
We left shortly after. Although the lambs had returned, I felt lost without roots in a town that was quickly changing hands from one generation to another. And I knew, though it was hard to admit, that if I had been someone else’s granddaughter, I would have knocked down the walls too. With a final glance back, I noticed the apple tree had also departed. It’s easy to renovate a second home when it’s full of someone else’s ghosts.
Alice Florence Orr is a Scottish writer and journalist
