Day 6: The Care Home Visit

An old proverb says that old habits die hard.

Today I was glad of it.

Dear Grandmother,

I took the early bus to the city on Saturday and came to see you. It is a long ride, two hours, round the end of the lake, then through fields, then suddenly through streets. I brought nothing in my hands, because my mother says flowers make your room too full, and I left the tin at home.

Room Twelve is at the end of a long corridor that smells of floor polish and toast. It has a window onto a garden with a bird table, a clock with very large numbers, and a chair by the window that the staff call yours. On the shelf there is a photograph of Grandfather in his good suit and one of my mother as a girl, with a ribbon in her hair.

Hanne met me at the door of Room Twelve, in her blue uniform, with a voice that never hurries. She said you had had a good morning and had eaten all your porridge. Then she gave me one piece of advice, and it is the small thing I want to pass on, because anyone visiting someone they love could try it. "Don't ask her if she remembers you," she said. "Tell her who you are, straight away, at the start. Then she doesn't have to search." So I did. I sat down beside your chair and said, "Hello, it's Vera." That was all.

You looked at me kindly and politely, the way you look at someone you are about to help. Then you said, "Good morning, Miss. Are you the new one?"

I said yes. I am the new one.

And then you were a teacher again, Grandmother. Not an old lady in a cardigan, but a teacher in her first year, worried about her class. You told me that the little boy at the back could not sit still and needed something to do with his hands. You told me the girl with the plaits read better than she let anyone know. You told me to keep the stove door shut in the afternoons or the room would smoke. You spoke about them as if they were waiting for you across the lake, fifty-eight years ago, and you needed to get back before the bell.

I did not correct you. I asked you what to do about a boy who will not read aloud, and you thought about it seriously and said, "Let him read to someone smaller." I nearly laughed, because I had already tried it, and it worked.

Then you asked me whether I had enough wood for the winter, and whether the parents brought any. I said yes, they did; someone had left a basket at my door. You looked pleased, as if you had arranged it yourself.

While you talked, your hand moved on the blanket over your knees. Your finger was writing. I watched it for a while before I understood: loops and slants, the old school handwriting, the kind with a long tail on every g. You cannot read any more, but your hand still remembers how the letters go.

That made me read about copybooks tonight, as a short aside. For a long time, children learned to write by copying the same line again and again into a book with a printed example at the top of each page. It was often a good line, a proverb, so the child learned a saying and a hand at the same time. The idea was that the movement would go into the fingers and stay there, like kneading, which your hands know without being told. Your finger on the blanket was proof that it worked.

When I left, Hanne walked me to the lift. She said you are often like that in the mornings, back in the classroom, and that it seems to make you calm. I told her you were a teacher in a lake town for one year. She said, "One year, and she's still taking the register." She said it gently, and then she went back down the corridor to help someone with their lunch.

On the bus home I thought about the proverb. Old habits die hard. People usually say it as a complaint. But your old habit is the kindest thing about you. You forget my name, and the year, and that Grandfather is gone. You have not forgotten how to worry about a child at the back of the room. I hope that habit stays with you for a very long time.

Your Vera

Day 7: Greta's Stamps

An old proverb says that no news is good news.

Greta does not believe a word of it.

Dear Grandmother,

The post comes to the lake town on a green bicycle. It comes at about eleven, with a basket on the front and two bags hanging from the back, and it rings its bell at the school gate whether there is a letter for us or not. Greta says the children like it. The children say Greta likes it.

She knows everyone's handwriting. She told me in my first week that she can tell who a letter is from before she turns it over, and which envelopes hold bills and which hold photographs, just by the weight of them in her hand, the way a baker knows a loaf is done by tapping the bottom.

The post office is one counter at the back of the shop, and on Tuesdays and Fridays Greta sits behind it. I went in this afternoon for a book of stamps. It was my second this month. Greta tore them off for me and then, instead of taking my money, she leaned on the counter and looked at me.

"You buy stamps," she said, "and you never post anything. I would know. Everything goes through my bag."

I could have said I posted them in the city. Instead I told her the truth: that I write to my grandmother, who cannot read any more, and that I put each letter in a tin. I put a stamp on every one, because a letter without a stamp looks unfinished to me, like a cake taken out a minute too early.

Greta did not laugh. She took off her glasses and cleaned them on her scarf, which is what she does, I have learned, when she is thinking. Then she said, "Your grandmother. The teacher, all those years ago?" I said yes. She said her own mother delivered the post then, on a black bicycle, and used to say that the young teacher wrote home every single week, long letters in thick envelopes. "Mother said you could always tell when she was homesick. The envelopes got fatter."

Then she told me about dead letters, and this is the aside, because I went home and read more about it. For as long as there have been postal services, there have been letters that cannot be delivered: wrong addresses, no addresses, people who have moved away. Many postal services kept a special office for them, where clerks were allowed to open the letters, only to look inside for a name or an address that would get them home. Some went back to their senders. Many could not be returned at all, and in the end they were destroyed. Greta said she always thought that was the saddest office in the world. A whole room of things people meant to say.

I said my letters were not dead letters. They are waiting letters. Greta thought about it and said that was a fair difference. Then she sold me the stamps after all, and gave me a postcard of the lake for nothing, an old one with curled corners that had been on her rack, she said, since before the ferry stopped.

Before I left she gave me a small thing to try, and I did, tonight. "Write the address anyway," she said. "Even if it is going in a tin. An envelope with an address on it knows where it belongs." So I wrote your name on this envelope, and Room Twelve, and the name of the care home, in my best handwriting. It does look different. It looks like a letter, not a note. You could try it with any letter you never send: give it its full address, as if it might set off at any moment.

Greta still refuses the proverb. She says no news is not good news; no news is just a letter that has not been written yet. She has carried other people's news on that green bicycle for most of her life, and she says the quiet days are the ones that worry her.

I think she is right, and I think the proverb is a little bit right too. You will get no news from me. My mother will tell you nothing upsetting, and you will have a calm week. That is good. But the news is not lost. It is here, in the tin, with its address on it, waiting.

Your Vera