Dorothy Lemon, 1912 - 2010
When I was 4, my Grandparents moved from the outskirts of Belfast to Bangor, 10 minutes walk from our house. I have, unsurprisingly, fairly sketchy memories of their house in Belfast - I remember going next door to visit a great-Aunt and Uncle and climbing an apple tree in the back garden, but that's it for genuine memories and everything else I remember is actually derived from the photos that exist of visits there. But once they moved to Bangor, they became a fundamental part of my everyday life - not just reserved for occasional one-off visits.
When I was 7 or thereabouts, my Mum and her friend Isobel opened a maternity wear shop in Bangor called 'New Addition', though from day one referred to by everyone connected to it as 'The Shop'. Mum worked there alternate Saturdays and on those days, Gordy and I packed up and went to Nanny and Papa's. Saturday morning was devoted to baking - sponge cakes, scones, rock buns, wheaten bread and who knows what else. While the baking was in the oven, it was activity time; and my strongest memory is of a book called 'The Umbrella Girl' (I think), about a girl who had leprosy, and who got work with a charity making silk umbrellas, possibly somewhere like Nepal. The book told her story and you coloured in the pictures; and making the umbrellas as gaily coloured as possible was part of the fun. If I wasn't colouring in, I was learning to knit or sew with Nanny's help, as she was a fantastic knitter and dressmaker - sewing I managed quite well, knitting, not so much... Baking was consumed at lunchtime, and then we took Nanny to a house at the seafront in Bangor, down a tree-lined lane that always seemed to be dark and damp, where she volunteered at the Disabled Christian Fellowship house on a Saturday afternoon. She disappeared into the mysterious big house and Papa took us for a long walk by the sea at Stricklands Glen, and eventually we went back to collect her and head back to the house, where Mum collected us on her way back from The Shop.
And actually, all the important things I loved about Nanny are all in there. Her cooking, for a kick off. I learnt from my cousins at the weekend that she taught them to bake too, when she lived in Belfast, and so we're all products of the Lemon School of Baking (appropriate name for a cookery school, when you come to think of it). She was a brilliant baker, and we had some incredible birthday cakes over the years. And I still remember the treat that was getting to stay for dinner and one of her sterling pot roasts - I can practically smell that as I type. She had her mishaps too, and I am by no means the only member of my family who has to concentrate very hard if ordering profiteroles in a restaurant, as her mispronouciation of them as 'prolifiteroles' has gone into the family lexicon. Also the stuff of family legend was the occasion when she decided to make tiramisu (usual ingredients: mascarpone, amaretti biscuits, coffee, rum and cocoa) with the ingredients available to her in her local spar - the end result was comprised of no rum (she was a good Presbyterian teetotaller), digestive biscuits, coffee, cocoa and cream cheese... with chives. My poor Aunt had taken a large mouthful of the concoction when the final ingredient was revealed, and I gather she did actually manage to swallow it, though how is anyone's guess.
Her activity is another fond memory. If she wasn't baking, she was preparing for some meeting or other. Or volunteering. Or dressmaking or knitting - the whirr of the sewing machine and the clack of knitting needles are very evocative sounds for me. I remember a beloved dress she made me out of black cord with a pink flower pattern and a pink velvet bow across my middle that I loved when I was little, and a dressing gown of deep pink (alas, the surviving photos of that are from the year I had pneumonia at Christmas, and it does not do an awful lot for the look of my little white face and big red rimmed eyes) and another of pale green, the latter a birthday present with 'Anne of Avonlea'. I still hem trousers and skirts the way she taught me to, and I can remember her sitting with a brand new skirt, resewing the hem before she even wore it and muttering about how badly things were made these days. Her interest in clothes was one of the last things to go as her dementia took hold, and while she may not have known who you were, she would definitely have had a comment on an item of clothing she particularly liked or disliked (and you had better hope she liked it, because boy was she acerbic if she didn't...). She was so sedentary over the last few years it's easy to forget what a bundle of bustle she was. I suspect it was that bustle which caused her to do the one thing that I ever saw her lose her sense of humour over, which was the time she, in haste to get the word out, misheard a rather crucial phonecall and informed Papa that his brother Billy (who was in the rudest of health) had died, when it was actually her own brother, also called Billy. The wrong side of the family had been dispatched to tell ailing parents of the shocking news and been buying several bodyweights of scones, fruit loaf and teabags by the time someone thought the whole thing odd enough to check.
She was a committed Christian and a lot of her activity revolved around church, or faith-based groups and meetings (another treasured family in-joke was the occasion on which she was enthusing about the new translation of the Bible her church had got for the pews - the 'HIV Bible', apparently...) She had dementia for the last few years of her life and so much of her personality vanished through that, but right up to the end her faith continued to mean something tangible and coherent to her - it's both sad and comforting to have been told by the handyman at the home that he often heard her organising imaginary Sunday School classes in her room.
And most of all, she was about family, and ensuring her family were cared for in all the ways she thought important - she made things for us, be it food or clothes, and her time and her industry were important gifts. She valued reading and gave us things to read that she thought we'd value, from Anne of Green Gables to books about the Christian faith that was so important to her (I got my own copy of the 'HIV Bible' from her, with a characteristically thoughtful inscription). And she gave us her time, to be with us, look after us and pass on everything she knew that mattered - self-sufficiency, knowledge and God, fundamentally. Those are excellent things to pass on.
Her arthritis, which had been growing steadily worse as she grew older, eventually became too much and she went into full-time nursing care 8 years ago, moving into a nursing home just round the corner from the house were she and Papa lived, and he remained. Dementia eventually took hold, and she has undergone a long slow decline, which at times has been extraordinarily painful to watch, though right up till the end you could still see flashes of the person she was - I visited her last on Good Friday, when she was extremely weak, and just as we went to leave she clasped her hands together in a gesture that was so characteristic it made me bawl my head off the entirety of my journey back to Belfast from Bangor. Her death wasn't peaceful, but oh, I'm glad she is finally no longer in pain.
Her funeral is tomorrow, and I have a strong urge to get myself something in a nice strong pink to wear with my black suit, in memory of my childhood dress and dressing gown. I think I owe it to my fashion-fascinated Grandmother to wear something other than black.