Chapter 4: Grandma

Until I was twelve, Grandma and Grandpa were a package deal. They visited together—we never saw them apart. They seemed a single entity, like the Beatles.

Then came 1971. The Beatles were long gone. In the very early hours of May 6, we kids were shaken awake and told to get dressed. Jock Slorance, our grandfather, had died of a heart attack. It had not been his first. Perhaps it was an occupational hazard of his chosen trade as a baker, but the cigars couldn’t have helped either. Nor did Grandma’s habit of making coleslaw with whipping cream. He was seventy-two, though his gravestone wouldn’t say so. Grandma fudged the dates to hide the terrible fact that she’d been a year older than her husband.

As the car was being packed Lynn wandered down the street looking up at the stars, angry that the heavens held no sign of the change. I was just sleepy and bewildered, trying to balance the solemnity of the occasion with the excitement of a sudden, starlit journey. We bundled into the Oldsmobile for the long drive to Edmonton. It was my mother’s forty-fifth birthday.

At the funeral a piper played, and a kilted man sang “Loch Lomond.” It was my first real experience with death. I don’t recall coming to any particular conclusions about it.

We kids loved our grandparents. Or so I had thought. In subsequent years I realized what we had all loved about Grandma and Grandpa. It was Grandpa. The two of them had always squabbled, but only in retrospect did I understand the situation well enough to take sides. Grandma, I now understood more clearly, was a giant pain.

I probably picked up on some of this earlier, but when you’re still in single digits you don’t tend to analyze things that have simply always been. Grandma and Grandpa had always been there, and always honking at each other like a couple of geese in a territorial dispute.

Grandpa was kindly and indulgent with the grandchildren. I loved to watch him shave as he took the implements from a leather kit, whipped up some shaving cream, floated it on the sink water and slapped it on with an old shaving brush, and scraped off the whiskers with a straight razor. He was happy for the audience.

He was different with his wife—prickly and perpetually exasperated, huffing like a steam press. “Motherrrrrrr,” he would growl to halt some ongoing monologue.

Early in my parents’ marriage my father took a train trip with Grandpa through Saskatchewan. Somewhere a few Scotches along the flat, featureless route, the older man spoke of his daughter’s good fortune. “I see you and Joan,” he said. “It’s wonderful the way you are together. You love each other. You talk.”

By contrast, the toxicity of our grandparents’ relationship could be frightening. “She was extremely hard on Pop,” said my aunt Margaret, the youngest of their three children. “She imposed her will on him.”

The poison ran both ways. Margaret recalls an argument when her father slapped her mother—“hard.”

Christmas 1969 was our last all together. The highlight was a gift Grandpa received from our cousins. Uncle Stan’s three children got him a big trophy, the kind that might be handed out after a high school basketball tournament, with a little plaque inscribed “World’s Greatest Grandpa.” It was just corny enough to qualify as the best grandpa gift ever. He was completely tickled.

Lynn recalls another gift Grandpa got that Christmas—a pair of socks Grandma had knitted by herself. Grandpa’s reaction made Lynn wince. “He opened up the box, looked at the socks, and tossed them aside like a football.

“Grandma wasn’t trying to make him miserable. She just was who she was—she couldn’t really do anything about it. But he could be quite cruel to her.”

Grandma was who she was, all right. I could have been full of sympathy and understanding, had she never come to visit.

Medusa was not born with viper hair. According to the most popular version of the Gorgon legend she was once a fair maiden of many gifts, only later to be transformed into a monster by jealous Athena. And Grandma? We were assured that she had once been young. A formidable lass too. Mom made sure we heard of her youthful accomplishments, when her skill and determination helped rescue her family from poverty back in Scotland. Certainly there was no denying the primal force of the woman. She was will incarnate. You only had to watch her play bridge. It wasn’t hard to believe that she had found ways to use her strength in an era when a young woman’s options were limited.

But that was ancient mythology to us. The woman we knew was obstinate, willful, capricious, manipulative, and as thoroughly self-involved as a high school prom queen.

Joan “Annie” Barron was born near the border town of Hawick in 1897, one o f nine children o f Jasper Barron. An estate manager, he lost his position for daring to tell the lord of the manor how his affairs ought to be run. The family was reduced to dirt-floor poverty, not helped by the patriarch’s drinking. But if the national beverage had contributed to their domestic predicament, young Annie saw a way out via the national game. She became a scratch golfer. It was a skill she used to form useful social connections, which she then exploited to find new work for her father.

Annie’s childhood sweetheart was Jock Slorance of Hawick. No one among their children or grandchildren seems to have ever heard a specific story of how they met. Perhaps they had simply always been aware of each other. Or perhaps by the time there was an audience for the story, it was one they no longer felt the urge to tell.

We heard some non-domestic war stories, though. Jock fought in the Great War and survived that mechanized plague thanks only to a momentary intrusion of humanity. Buried up to the neck by a shell blast in 1918, Slorance came to staring down the barrel of a German rifle. It would have been fairly standard practice at the time for that anonymous soldier to interrupt this delightful family story before it had even begun. But young Slorance was spared. His rewards were dubious—a pow camp, followed by near starvation during a postwar trudge across Germany to Holland, followed by Annie Barron.

Jock Slorance immigrated to Canada. He worked on the Welland Canal and as a cook at a Muskoka Lake resort hotel, where he made batches of pancake batter so large he had to stir them with an oar. Annie joined him, and the couple married in 1923 in Leduc, Alberta. The marriage would last forty-eight years. There were three children—Stan, born in 1924, Joan in 1926, and Margaret in 1927. Eventually they would live to see twelve grandchildren, a narrow plurality of whom would bear the Burgess brand.

Some of the Burgess kids share a weird little trait. It’s a little hard to describe. Basically, we have a strong aversion to the sight of bumps. As kids we’d be watching cartoons, and some cat or kangaroo would get hit with a bat a couple of times and we’d shriek. Not because of the violence—it was the little cartoon bumps that popped up on the victim’s head. They creeped us out. Near the family cottage at Clear Lake there was a little grove of trees afflicted with a disease that caused the leaves to erupt with bumpy growths. We would stroll through the trees, picking off leaves and compulsively squishing the bumps. Leslie had it worst. It was possible for the other kids to drive her crazy simply by repeating “a cluster of bumps,” a phrase that naturally became very popular.

One day Mom admitted that she had grown up with the same odd aversion. “But I was careful never to show it,” she insisted.

And really, it wouldn’t have been hard to hide. Mom wasn’t watching cartoons with us and shrieking along. It makes for a fascinating case study of nature vs. nurture. Scientific studies of identical twins constantly attempt to discern which traits are inborn and which are learned. If a lab rat may be allowed an opinion about his own experience, I’d argue this shared revulsion, which we called “bump torture,” is unlikely to be learned behaviour. I think it is in our genes.

That was surely a disconcerting idea for Mom. The realization that a parent’s best efforts cannot prevent certain genetic legacies from being passed along must have led to a few nights staring holes in the bedroom ceiling. Because that was Mom’s prime directive all along—to break the chain, to be better than her teacher, to control the inheritance she bequeathed to her children. Our childhoods, she determined, would differ from hers. And she would be a different mother from her own.

Not that she announced this goal every night over dinner to the sound of swelling violins. I don’t recall ever hearing her say it. But it was clear that Mom was operating via negative example.

In the airline industry they call it “tombstone technology”—the mechanical and operational improvements that follow a major plane crash. That was Mom’s parenting model, more or less—survey the wreckage and vow to do better.

As grandchildren, safely buffered by a layer of management, we did not know exactly what it was like to be raised by Annie Slorance. But we knew enough about our grandmother to shudder at the idea.

You didn’t really communicate with Grandma. She communicated with you, and you dealt with it. There was nothing you could give her. Your opinions? Maybe a little advice about recent trends? No. You might as well offer five dollars to a raccoon.

Understanding Grandma was no simple task either. Like learning a language, it was a skill best acquired through early immersion. Mom was the expert. She was our resident Kremlinologist, interpreting for us the mysteries of a strange and frightening regime. Frequently during Grandma’s visits I would overhear a seemingly innocuous exchange that would leave a mysterious chill in the air. It was then necessary to ask Mom to interpret what had just happened. Only she had the internal decoder.

It might start with a remark from Dad: “We need new tires for the station wagon.”

To which Mom might reply, “It seems like we just bought the old ones.”

Which might then cause Grandma’s jaw to clamp like a bear trap and an icy silence to descend. Later, Mom would explain: The issue of tire wear reminded Grandma that the family had left town to drive out east the previous summer, instead of staying home and inviting her to visit. “Aaahhh,” we would say.

The first word out of Grandma’s mouth was usually, “No.” She said it reflexively, like someone else would say, “Well,” or “Um,” to buy time while formulating an answer. If you said, for example, “They say it could rain today,” Grandma might respond with, “No . . . eh . . . well . . . it might rain in the afternoon.” That initial “No” was instinctive. It was what she did best, and if upon reflection she found herself forced to agree with something she would then adjust the sentence as best she could.

After Grandpa died we got plenty of Christmas visits from Grandma. It was no accident that her son, Stan, had moved to the New Jersey coast, almost as far from Grandma as was possible to be without needing webbed feet. Margaret was in Ottawa and not putting out the welcome mat. We, however, lived right across the Prairies.

Spending Christmas Eve with Grandma was always going to be a bit like watching Genghis Khan come down the chimney. But there was another aspect to her holiday visits that tended to interfere with the holiday spirit—it was Grandma’s tortured relationship with gifts, both given and received. Grandma’s philosophy was a sort of twisted tribute to the aphorism “It’s the thought that counts.” Your thought would be interpreted by Grandma, and the evaluation would be based on both promptness and resale value. Grandma had her very own return policy: If a gift mailed to her did not arrive before her birthday or Christmas, she would send it back. If you cared enough, you would take the trouble to get it there on time.

Even more fraught with import was Grandma’s own generosity. She would sometimes slip us kids five-dollar bills—a fortune at a time when we were getting twenty-five-cent allowances. But they always came with conditions. Even then I think we understood that each five was intended to buy us off. Seen in that light, the sum of five dollars took on an insulting significance.

A particularly telling gift was the golf cart. My eldest brother Joe played golf. Grandma decided to show her encouragement of this character-building behaviour with a lavish gift: a two-wheeled bag cart. The gift was sent ahead by special delivery, to be secretly wrapped for Christmas Eve. But the plan went awry. When the box arrived, it was Joe who answered the door. The surprise was ruined. Mom knew the situation held the potential for disaster. “When you open it,” Mom instructed Joe, “you really, really have to act surprised.”

Christmas Eve came, and Joe opened the box. He gave it his best. “A golf cart!” he enthused. “Wow! Thank you, Grandma!”

From her chair across the room, Grandma watched the performance. Her eyes narrowed; her jaw clenched; her lower lip pushed out. “Och! You knew all along! I wish I’d never bought it!”

Perhaps the greatest of Grandma’s mysteries was her love map. Who did Grandma love? More tellingly, who did she dislike? And why?

Not many people were as kind and considerate to Grandma as my father. He listened to her. He was respectful. He was kind. Grandma despised him. Bill Burgess had married her daughter, and some crimes can never be forgiven.

My oldest brother, Joe, born in 1952 would get more of the same. Grandma never warmed to him. The next two kids would fare somewhat better. But enough was enough. At Christmas 1956 my sister Leslie was showing as just a three-month bulge. My grandparents pulled into the driveway; Grandma opened the car door and looked across the yard to where my mother stood waving in the doorway. “Och!” Grandma spat out. “Not again!”

Grandma didn’t love many people. But those she loved, she loved like a spider loves flies. Of the five kids her favourite was number three—my brother John, commonly known as Jock. “Shteeve,” she once explained, “I love all you kids equally. But . . . eh . . . Jock is special.”

One day I was sitting in the living room reading when Grandma emerged from her bedroom after an afternoon nap. Catching sight of me, she smiled and began shuffling over. I had plenty of time to wonder what was up. Reaching me, she leaned over and offered her cheek. I planted a dutiful kiss, and she turned to gaze upon me with a blissful smile. Her eyes went wide. “You’re not Jock!” she cried. “Och! I thought you were Jock!”

And she tottered away, muttering. In my memory she was wiping her cheek as she went, but that may be a bit of mental embellishment.

As usual, the reasons for Grandma’s preference were a mystery. It may simply have been that Jock was named (and nicknamed) after her husband. Jock always doted on Grandma and listened to her with patience and respect.

But then so did my father, and Grandma hated him. So who knows? She also liked Lynn because, in a rare bit of insight, Grandma recognized her willful nature. “You’re a little minx,” she’d tell Lynn. “You’re like me!”

(Later in life this declaration might have hung over Lynn like an oracle’s dark prophecy. Eventually George Lucas would come along to explain about the Force and how some go to the Dark Side whereas others use it for good, which must have been a comfort.)

When we were very young, Grandma’s favouritism stung. But once the kids got old enough to stop caring, we unloved ones quickly realized our good fortune. Being the object of Grandma’s affection meant being snared in her sticky tendrils, subjected to endless, repetitive, solipsistic rambles mixed with stern advice and brandy-fuelled aphorisms. “Eh . . . life is like a game of golf,” she’d say. “You’ve got to keep trying.”

Certain of Grandma’s antics inspired only amusement. As she aged, Grandma became increasingly fond of brandy, a fact she was intent on concealing. Her method was to stash brandy bottles in the bedroom closet. She would then go to the kitchen to pour a wholesome glass of ginger ale. A fine plan. Unfortunately Grandma played it badly. “It’s only ginger ale,” she would loudly proclaim, startling those who would otherwise be reading or watching tv. “I am just going to my bedroom with a glass of ginger ale.”

I laughed. And my laughter was not the affectionate kind. I did not see my grandmother as a benign old coot. She was to me a malevolent force, even when not in the house. She could, and did, make my mother cry. My mother would stand silently in the hall, holding the telephone while Grandma detailed some perceived slight or sign of filial ingratitude. By the time Mom finally hung up, there would sometimes be tears in her eyes. I was glad Grandma didn’t choose me as one of her pets. It allowed me the luxury of anger and indifference. Having a kindly grandmother is a wonderful thing.

But it’s hardly essential. It is not your grandparents who have the power to shape your destiny, to make your home a nurturing, supportive environment or a battlefield of wills. That would be your parents. The old woman, who was just a seasonal annoyance to my siblings and me, was the primary caregiver to my mother. My mother was raised by a woman with a mind like a windowless room, a woman apparently incapable of empathy or self-analysis. Young Joan would barely make it through that upbringing.