The next instalment of 'A Little Something To Hide' is out tomorrow and I can't wait for you to meet Granny Mac.
Much like the trance that Gracie MacDonald found herself in
on the coach to Albuquerque, I think I may have written her story in something
of a fugue state. I don’t recall much of what led to her being. My original
note read:
Granny MacTavish – going to Albuquerque to see her
grandchildren. She lost her husband Albert, and has been trying to fill the
void ever since.
I’m reasonably certain that had I pursued those thoughts,
Granny MacTavish (and thank God I scrubbed that name) would lead a life of
stunning mediocrity; a soul searching for a cause, unable to find one, and
meandering through the pages of her chapter with a character arc that flatlined
– the clacking of her knitting needles being the highlight of an otherwise
mundane story.
Beneath that note, and added much later, was another.
Briefer, but arguably more intriguing:
Outlandish storyteller or afraid of the truth?
I’m still not sure which she is, but I realise now that the
seed above found fertile territory and developed into a story that lingers
until the end of the novel.
In developing her as a fantasist, I was reminded of a
companion from my primary school years. His real name shall remain a mystery,
but for the purposes of this account, let’s call him Boris – it seems a
suitable moniker to attach to someone skilled in the art of mendacity.
According to Boris, life was full of adventures, almost all
of which were facilitated by a mix of uncles and cousins whose wealth and
exuberance appeared limitless. As we recounted our weekends to each other in
the playground, speaking perhaps of a visit to the friends of our parents, or a
trip to Percy’s Reserve for a bit of blackberry picking, Boris would amuse us
with the extraordinary tales from his weekend.
He might tell us of water-skiing on the harbour behind his
Uncle Carl’s speedboat, the hunting of wild pigs in the Ōrongorongo Valley with
his cousin Bruce, the discovery of gold nuggets in Marlborough’s Wakamarina
River on an overnight trip to South Island with his Uncle Mike.
There was always a story with Boris, always remarkable, and
always, as we chose to believe, entirely invented.
Three things should be noted though about Boris and his
tales. One, we never challenged the veracity of his claims. We simply allowed
him to tell us a story that was more interesting than any of ours from the
previous weekend.
Two, he had a seemingly infinite number of relatives, all of
them male, and all of them wrestling to keep Boris entertained. I suspect his
mother spent a significant proportion of her time managing both his diary and
the disappointment of those of his relations who failed to incorporate Boris
into their weekend plans.
Three, there was always just enough plausibility in
everything he said that his experiences might have been true. If that was the
case, Boris’s childhood is unparalleled. No child in history has led a more
exciting or varied life than our former school chum.
I don’t know what’s happened to Boris. I hope that he’s
putting his adventures on paper to create a barely believable memoir, or more
likely, producing entertaining fiction born from a highly developed
imagination. Either way, if I should ever meet him again, I may not believe
what he tells me about his life.
Granny Mac emerged from Boris; a teller of tales whose
invention was designed to mask a humdrum existence, taking embellishment to
ever greater levels until the foundations of her stories were usurped by the
myth that followed.
It may be why I remember so little about writing her
chapter. As writers of fiction, we authors inhabit a world of make-believe,
where any truths that we might harbour in our writing are veiled in a narrative
that we seek to divorce from ourselves. Granny Mac’s knitting machine and the
baby clothes and jerseys that she produced from it could just as easily
represent my mother’s efforts. The whirr of a carriage zipping along a needle
bed is etched in my memory, an observation I plucked from my home life. Unlike
Granny Mac’s boys though, we didn’t need to conceal my mother’s knitting; she
was a recognised figure at local markets, happy to sell her output. What we
weren’t allowed to reveal though, was that some of the items on sale stemmed
from the efforts of my father, whose war-time experience as a boy meant
learning to knit socks, just like Gracie’s mother. His creations, which
extended to other items of knitwear, were attributed to my mother. My sisters
had a rule to observe in their teenage years, if they were inviting friends to
visit in the evening, they had to forewarn my father so that he had time to
conceal whatever fashions he was creating.
And so, Granny Mac’s choice of endeavour and her concealment of the practice is an amalgam of my parents, a microcosm from within the Brown household that found its way into a Boris-like character’s story. But that’s where it ends, the invention and the nefarious practices are Granny Mac’s alone – I mean, did you ever see me driving a Dodge Camaro?
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Craig Brown is an author living in Newbury. Discover his serialised novel, 'A Little Something To Hide' at craigbrownauthor.com
BlueSky/Threads/Twitter: @GOMinTraining
Copyright © Craig Brown, 2024
16 September 2024
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