Jimmy

Everyone has a fragrance and some you remember long after they have passed away.  This story is for my Granda, whose humour and wit still makes me laugh when I bring it to mind.

Jimmy

Granda was always called Jimmy.  He had played the fiddle when young and was a renowned storyteller.  His stories always had a dig to them and when he laughed he would throw back his head and open his eyes wide, eyebrows making wild dancing movements.  We all loved to hear him laugh but his stories they were the best.  He could take a simple market day and turn it into the most thrilling story and yet when he’d finish the story you were never quite the same person that you were at the start.  He sort of gave you something of himself, a wisdom, an insight but in a funny quirky way not a long rambling story that elderly aunts were prone to.  He had a habit if you were sitting quiet beside him of slapping you really hard on the knee.  This would be followed by a bellow of laughter as he looked to see your reaction.  It was your surprise he loved and no one ever minded because he never allowed life to be wasted.  His jokes would chase away the boredom of life.  He treated everyone with care and yet with a prodding humour as if to check if you were all there. 

His descriptions of people and things were as quirky as he was.  ‘Shit house rats’ was one.  The pig house was haunted by these monster rats and Granda’s expression became a derogatory phrase for all kinds of people who, like the rats, made life difficult for others.  Granda would not hear of a word being said against his daughter and once when my Dad criticised her for something Granda looked at him banefully and growled ‘You’re in the wrong shop’.  No one ever took offence that I could see. Granda could somehow dance where angels feared to tread and get away with it.  Two elderly sisters who called to visit on the farm had just left, when someone asked how old they might be. Granda shook his head and muttered ‘Ah now, they are well hung’. (Traditionally birds were hung so that the meat could mature)

My father was a teacher and the farming life was an unknown world to him but I remember him pressing Granda to sell him a bit of land so that he could farm for himself.  Granda silenced him by saying ‘Ach now Bengy, if I gave you a spade you’d ask were the seat was’.  But it was his stories that live in my mind.  He told me a story about the B Specials and how one day his sergeant interrogated a women with himself and another officer.  She was tied to a chair and the sergeant hit her across the face repeatedly.  I was shocked when he told me and I remember asking him in a desperate voice ‘but you didn’t hit her, did you Granda?’  He replied in a very sad voice ‘No, but I didn’t stop them either’.  The fact that 50 years after the event he still felt bad about it drove the message home to me stronger than 50 years of Sunday School classes.  The reason he told me was to learn from his experience and his painful memories drove home his barbs of wisdom to depths the smug Sunday School teacher could never hope to pierce. 

Granda never went to church on principle.  His mother was left a widow with seven children at the turn of the century.  A proud woman, she was forced in desperate conditions to ask the local church fund for assistance.  They refused, and to rub salt in the wound shortly after bought, out of the same fund, a huge oil painting of the former minister.  She never stepped inside a church again and neither did her children, nor did most of her children’s children.  Granda’s spirituality came from a love of life not from dusty dead buildings containing sometimes even deader minds.  He treated people with honesty, humour and large margins of error.  One elderly aunt of mine remarried at 82.  Her new husband was a doorstep preacher always handing out his latest tracts.  He was 89 and they had their honeymoon in Dublin.  She said she had more love from him in 7 days than she had from her previous husband in 40 years!  Anyway when I was visiting them in Coleraine as a student this uncle objected to a sports blouse I was wearing and tried to button it up at the collar.  I resented not only his suggestion that what I was wearing was improper, but also his attempts to touch my clothes seemed to me much more improper.  I physically removed his hand and made clear my displeasure.  The visit continued and they both walked me out to the car.  As I said goodbye Uncle William refused to shake hands.  I was telling Granda about this later.  Uncle William was no blood relation to Granda and his behaviour was eccentric, surely Granda would agree.  When I finished my story he said, head lowered ‘You know what you should do?’  I answered ‘No’ waiting for some witty put-down for Uncle William that I could put to good use next time I saw him.  Granda said ‘the next time you see him, go and make him shake hands and don’t give up until you do’.  I was so shocked that he didn’t take my side; his words really clashed in my brain.  Then when I thought about it, that was just like Granda to call upon you to be better than you thought you could be.  As a result you never left his company diminished but always enticed to be something grander. 

As he got older he had cancer and rumours around the country village grew.  One day when he went into the butcher’s after a severe bout of illness, the butcher said ‘I heard a rumour Jimmy that you were dead’.  Granda replied ‘I heard it too but I didn’t believe it’.  He was exceptional to the end.  When he was rushed to hospital with severe pain I dashed to the ward to find him surrounded by those who loved him.  I couldn’t think of what to say, so I asked him ‘What he’d done to himself’.  He smiled and shook his head ‘I don’t know, I don’t know’.  I accused him of being like the old Eskimos deliberately walking out on the ice flow to die.  He chuckled and murmured ‘Well now, don’t you go following me out onto that ice’. 

His powers of description never abated.  One visitor to the hospital kept asking Granda how he felt.  At every visit it was the only question.  Granda silenced him by answering ‘Have you ever seen a rat pierced on the end of a pitchfork? That’s how I feel’.  Towards the end there were those vultures who kept urging him to see the light, get right with God.  Their urgency to save Granda drove those who really loved him to distraction.  God must squirm at what some twits do in his name.  Granda’s life was a constant calling out to God.  It was a silent one, but all the more genuine because of that silence.  His spirituality wasn’t a badge to show others; it was in how he treated others.  At the graveside the preacher prattled on about how he thought Jimmy had got right with God before the end.  The heavens opened at that moment and the rain bucketed down.  My brother leaned over and whispered in my ear ‘I think that’s Granda piddling on him from heaven’.  I laughed; held my face up to the sky and thought Jimmy would have enjoyed that one.