My Grandmother was my first teacher in handling a deck of cards. She didn’t teach me magic, she taught me but how to cheat at cards. In her little ground floor apartment in Thames Ditton we would play the simple card games all children play. She showed me how to look at the bottom card and deal it when it was most useful. She taught me how to ‘lose’ an ace during a shuffle and ‘find’ it during the next game. These were simple things that seemed easy and fun, I was a good student, and it gave her enormous pleasure to watch me as I progressed in this dubious art. She was quite a piece of work my Granny, unusual by any standards, and stranger than I realized as a child. She had walked a fine line all her life, if the expression ‘pushing the envelope’ had existed during her lifetime then that is what her more generous contemporaries would have used to describe her. As a young red haired schoolgirl she attended a school for the daughters of distressed clergy. Which fairly accurately described her background and circumstances. She was expelled from this haven of gentility at the age of fourteen when she used a penknife to carve a word on the piano in the school hall. I don’t know what this word was, but it was scandalous enough that the entire rear of the piano had to be covered with thick cardboard to shield the refined sensibilities of the other daughters of distressed clergy. Both the piano and my Granny were quickly removed from the school. The piano was refinished and returned to the school, Granny did not return. By the time I knew her, she was no longer a wild young spitfire, she had developed chronic arthritis and was partially bedridden. Her confinement to bed seemed to end in the late afternoon, when after several pints of cider and a drop or two of scotch she faced the day. Or to be more accurate started the night. After she finished dressing she summoned a taxicab to take her to “The Angel” her local pub.
She remained there until the pub called ‘last order’ at eleven o’clock. The taxi was then re-summoned to transport her to her Bridge Club in the West End of London. This was when her day began in earnest, and she played bridge until two or three in the morning. This was high pressure, high stakes bridge with some of the best gamblers in the city. For many years whenever the movie actor Omah Sharif was in London filming she was his only bridge partner.
Mr. Sharif was more famous for his acting but was considered by those ‘in the know’ to be one of the most astute gamblers in the world. Finally her arthritis progressed to the point where an occasional visit to “The Angel” was all that remained of her nocturnal pursuits. Life must have seemed very dull in the small flat she shared with my Grandfather. If life was less bearable for her in these later years she was determined to make it equally so for Grandpa. There had been quite a scandal at the end of World War Two when Grandpa had failed to return from Egypt. He wasn’t injured or unable to return, he just didn’t want to and eventually my Great Uncle Odder was dispatched to deliver him back to England. I remember Grandpa as a sweet and kindly silver haired gentleman whose chief delight in life was chopping things up. It didn’t matter much to him what he chopped. His creed might well have been ‘I chop therefore I am’. He would spend most afternoons tidying things up in our back garden. Well in theory he was tidying but often he was chopping up useful and sometimes essential items, he once chopped up my cricket stumps and bat. He would then spend the remainder of the day stoking a large bonfire at the rear of the garden. Then he would come to the backdoor of our house, remove his boots, come into the kitchen and drink strong tea and munch on burned toast.
When he finished his meal he put his boots back on, secured his flapping trouser cuffs with bicycle clips and cycled home.
Looking back, I think that eating chestnuts smothered in butter and cheating at cards with Grandma were the roots of my magical life. I don’t believe she was a card sharp herself, however, she certainly knew how and what to do and she wanted to share it with someone. When you have knowledge then you must share it is a rule of the Universe. Maybe that is really what life is all about and your little piece of the hologram contains the entire big picture for someone else. She certainly was a character my Granny though.
