The Grip

My grandmother was well before her time. She always made sure that her house was well stocked with toilet paper.  This was way before Covid hit. There would not even be the slightest possibility that the household was going to run out.  I remember the piles and piles of toilet rolls stacked high in the bathroom cabinet and on top of it.  I never asked her why it was so important to have so much but now being in a household where we are always on the brink of running out maybe it was just about being well prepared.  

My grandmother also kept a wide array of new linen and bedspreads. I can see them all now stored, often still in the wrapping.  When a member of the family moved out or to a new home that would be one of her gifts to us, a beautiful luxurious bedspread.  All these years after her passing, I go to bed and wake up embraced by one of her gifts.

All of the linen and bedspreads were on the right hand side of her bedroom in the wardrobes and cupboards.  She took great pride in her crisp clean and colourful array.  Again, I don’t really know why she accumulated so much.  Maybe it had something to do with the Littlewoods catalogue or maybe it’s connected to her advice of always making sure that your bed is well made in the morning and that you are wearing clean drawers, “You never know when you going tek sick,” - always this edge of humour in the bleak, and again there is something about the need to be prepared. 

On the left hand side of her bedroom was her Grip - a brown battered suitcase if I recall.  Stored at the top of a beautiful walnut wardrobe.  There is the gramophone and there is her wardrobe and the Grip stored on top of it.   Why she still kept it, I never asked, but there was something precious about it.   My grandmother was from a generation that didn’t  just throw out and replace an item because it got a bit worn and tattered with age.  You mended it, you worked with it. I feel like my grandmother’s Grip was placed in that wardrobe with pride; that it meant something important to her which is why she stored all her important papers in it. 

The image of the Grip is instantly recognisable to me.  It is so evocative of a generation who moved from their homes with their Grips close by their sides and settled into another country that became their home.  The Grip, somehow encapsulating their expectations, ambitions and fears. The Grip, so robust, withstanding the test of time and also encapsulating a vulnerability, that need perhaps to always be prepared, to have it at the ready.

All of this remembering is probably why the Grip plays such an important part in my debut novel A Murder for Miss Hortense.  Miss Hortense stores her Grip in her wardrobe too but hers contains not only all her important papers but all of her indoor secrets too.   Secrets that Miss Hortense has carried with her for decades, some of them unspeakable….