When I lie on my couch two little girls look down at me; one in pink, one in blue. They are sitting on a velvet chair staring solemnly into the camera.
They watch from a large wooden frame. On the back of the frame, it says hand painted by portrait artist F. Parker, framed at the Imperial Art Studio, Grey Street, Gisborne, New Zealand in 1894.
Elizabeth Norma Aube and Dulcia Irene Catherine, born one year apart in 1891 and 1892, were the first two children of George John Alexander Johnstone and Sarah Catherine Green.
The one in blue, Elizabeth Norma Aube is my grandmother.
I wonder about her life, I think about what little I know and revisit the stories I have made up over the years to fill in the blanks.
Here’s what I do know.
Aube as she was called, married my grandfather, Charles Petersen Judd in 1915. They had six living children. My mother was the oldest.
Grandma was tiny. She never grew taller than 4’11” She was feisty and quick. She was bossy. She was the first and maybe the only person I ever met as a child who openly liked me more than my charming younger brother Stuart. I loved her.
She called me Biddy or Bridget, I have no idea why. She chastised my grandfather when he fed me strawberries and ice cream as a midnight snack. Meanwhile, she served me porridge covered in thick cream and brown sugar. She signed her name E.N.A. Judd with great flourish. I tried to copy her signature but I could never perfect it. The ampersand in my logo reminds me of how she wrote the E.
I remember her mostly in two places; her kitchen and the Exclusive Brethren meeting room in Gisborne.
In a flash, she could get from one end of the long farm kitchen to the other before my eyes had registered what she was doing. She would take a running jump up onto the counter, grab a jar of tomatoes from the top shelf of the cupboard, run back to the big wood stove, and pour the tomatoes into the bubbling stew all before I had time to look up from my favourite job of topping and tailing the green beans picked fresh from her garden.
At church, she always stood out despite her obedience to the Exclusive Brethren rules and her tiny frame. She loved bright colours. Peacock blue and emerald green were her favourites and no one dare tell her blue and green didn’t match.
“If it is good enough for the Lord our God to make the sky blue and the grass green, then it is good enough for me,” she would say.
She sang the hymns louder than anyone, in a high-pitched wobbly voice. Women weren’t meant to be heard but she made sure — in her own way — that they heard her.
Or so it seemed to me.
I wished I had asked her more questions about her life. I thought I had forever. I didn’t.
At 17 I left the Brethren. I was, in Brethren terms, withdrawn from and subsequently ostracized by friends and family including my grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Four years later, I stood with a pounding heart knocking on the door that I had entered so many times as a child. Surely, I would be welcome. I had planned this visit for some time. It will be Grandma who opens the door I mused because Grandpa will be outside. She’ll bustle me inside and say, “My how you’ve grown up.”
“Charle,” she’ll call out to my grandfather who will be in the shed or one of the nearby paddocks, “see who is here.”
True to my musings, it was Grandma who answered my knock. She didn’t seem surprised to see me.
Without hesitating, she said, “You left the light. You departed from the truth, I cannot allow you in.” And she closed the door.
I didn’t argue. I just turned and walked back down the long driveway edged with purple bougainvillea to the road where my friend was waiting to drive me back to the Gisborne airport.
I didn’t cry. My grandmother taught me, that big girls don’t cry.
I was 12 when Grandma gave me the photograph of her and her little sister. Well, technically, I asked for it. She and I were working in her vegetable garden and she asked me to fetch it from the shed because she wanted to use the solid wood frame as a temporary stake for her tomatoes. When I saw it, I fell in love with it and pleaded with her to find something else to stake the tomatoes and to let me keep the framed photograph. Reluctantly, she agreed.
Since that day, the photograph of my grandmother and her sister has travelled with me. It came to Auckland when I left the Brethren and my family home in Ashhurst. It hung on the wall in the entrance to my flat in Herne Bay. It was a large house divided into two flats with most of the tenants being fellow Air New Zealand flight attendants. There were many visitors and overnight guests. First-time visitors were confused as to which was my flat until I hung Grandma where friends could see her when they looked in the window. Then they knew which door to open. The photograph travelled with me to London. I got married there and Grandma and her sister hung in our Holland Park bedsitting room and later in our flat near Richmond Park. I was so happy then. Life stretched in front of me full of wonderful possibilities.
The photograph made the sea voyage aboard a cargo ship when we moved to Canada. It, along with the rest of our luggage, got offloaded in Montreal and shipped to Toronto. It lived on the wall in our first apartment at 1,000 Broadview and then moved with us to 1512 King Street West, a commune-type living arrangement where everyone got to know my grandmother. Our daughter Tanya arrived while we lived at 1512.
Grandma and her sister were packed up again and stored while we did a year trip in an old Volkswagen van throughout Central and South America. After that, we returned to New Zealand and there was Grandma and her sister waiting for us when we arrived. They lived with us at 21 Benbow Street in St. Heliers and then at 31 Milton Road in Mt. Eden. We lived in Mt. Eden when our son Lucas arrived. This, we thought, and I’m sure at some point the little girl in the blue dress thought this too, will be our forever and forever home.
It was not to be. Restless feet drove us back to Toronto so into a packing box went the large framed photograph.
At 31 Kippendavie Avenue in the Beaches in Toronto, Grandma and her sister lived on the stairs landing. They oversaw the life of Tanya and Luke from preschool to late teens. They watched the arrival of our third child Kailah and kept an eye on her from that wall until she was 13.
The kids’ father and I separated while we lived on Kippendavie. Grandma watched me cry and rant and struggle as a single mum. She watched me flourish as I got myself settled into jobs, started a Registered Retirement Savings Plan, and eventually got my first mortgage and bought out my ex’s share of the house. Grandma helped me hold it together as I took my uneducated Exclusive Brethren self to university and stayed up late into the night studying until it was time to bake the nine dozen muffins that I would sell to help pay my university fees.
Grandma and her sister came with me when I moved to Victoria. They travelled back and forth between British Columbia and Ontario as I dealt with teenage hormones, chasing my distressed youngest daughter as she struggled to find herself and thought she could do so by crossing the country to live where her father, my ex-husband, now lived. They were there looking down the first time the police knocked at the door bringing home my out-of-control son. They were there as my oldest daughter grappled with her language-based learning disabilities.
When in 2000, I moved from Vancouver back to Toronto, I left Grandma and her sister along with all my belongings with the moving company to be stored until I was sure it was the right move and then to bring them to Toronto. The company disappeared along with my stuff. I was devastated but after six months, a miracle happened. My belongings were found. I like to think it was Grandma who found me.
The hand-painted photograph has been hanging above the couch at my current Toronto home in the Beach for close to 15 years. Sometimes I look at photos of my grandmother taken when I was a child. I remember her sharp blue eyes, her thin straggly hair, her snippy way of speaking, her inability to sit still and I remember that warm feeling of being her favourite child.
But it is the little girl in the photograph that is my link to my culture, my bond with my ancestors, and my turangawaewae. She is the centre square in that vast tapestry of which I am a part.
She is me and I am her. One day we’ll meet again and this time she will open the door and welcome me home.
