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Aside from my parents i don’t think anyone else ever talked to me as much about Jesus when i was a child. I squirmed out of answers most of the time & used to dread her company but now that i am older and marginally wiser, i am grateful for “Auntie Gladys.” She was special!

To Jan, she was Nana……..this is her memories of her Nana

My Nana was a big lady. Her shoes could barely contain her. When she walked, little bits of her feet leaked out the sides. As a small child I plodded across her kitchen tiles and took laps of Great Nana’s bedroom, wearing her blood red heels and patent blacks, all the time wondering why they were almost as wide as long.

My Nana was a big lady. Ballymena could barely contain her. She burnt up and down the streets in a series of small cars- a mini-metro with a CB radio hidden under the dashboard, a silver grey bullet of unspecific origin, the passenger seat of which I gnawed to foam and nonsense on the daily school run home and the infamous, “I’m so sexy Saxo,” of her final driving days. As she lapped the town delivering shortbread, apple tarts and margarine tubs of home made vegetable broth to the sick, the shut in and the recently bereaved, she kept her stereo cranked to superhuman levels. Aside from a solitary Jim Reeves cassette, and two tapes of our second cousins singing gospel songs, most all of Nana’s music was of the male voice variety.

My Nana played piano like it was going out of fashion.

Upon arriving at the door of 10 Rockgrove Valley- having negotiated the ornamental rabbits and bird feeders, the potted plants and two tons of rabid Dalmatian wrecking havoc on your nylons- the surreptitious visitor (circa 1991,) might have been greeted by one of three sights. 1. My grandfather, watching endless episodes of Last of the Summer Wine, volume pumped to earthquake inducing levels, fully reclined in his reclining chair whilst shrapnel leaked from his trouser pockets, (a fact the Small Brother and I soon grew wise to, excavating for spare change, every time he vacated his chair.) 2. My Nana, fully reclined in her matching reclining chair, Take A Break firmly mounted to a red clipboard while she went at the puzzles with a mechanical pencil. 3. My Nana, installed at the upright piano, playing Jesus songs learnt by ear from the Believer’s Hymnbook. This by far was my favorite scene to stumble into.

As a very little child, (in the days before the Dalmatians, when the carpets of Rockgrove were still relatively hair free, and safe for lounging,) I remember lying on the floor, arranging my felt tips in rainbow order, as I was wont to do in those days, whilst I watched her feet pump the pedals; slowly, rhythmically like pistons clapping out some solitary dance. And while her voice was of the old-fashioned type, better suited to the revival tent than the concert hall, it was also an open-door of a voice, well accustomed to beckoning the stranger and the stumble-tongued into the song. As I sat under the piano stool listening and learning the ups and downs of the Old Rugged Cross, How Great Thou Art and Because He Lives I felt like a stowaway; a small, little light, privy to a much bigger secret.

To this day I have little time for the fall and rise of contemporary worship music- the Jesus is my boyfriend ballads, the stars and planets cosmology of the last five years and the endless repetition of monosyllabic sentiments- the old hymns are another thing entirely. The old hymns are grounded in a weighty, well-worn lyricism I’ve struggled to crawl away from. They puncture my stories like bullet points from my Presbyterian youth. They draw me deeply into literature; a love affair with library books which shows no sign of stopping. They make me tear up when Sufjan tackles Come Thou Fount Of Every Blessing and hanker after Christian era Dylan. Though I’ve wondered my whole life what, “thine eye diffused a quickening ray,” might actually mean, (imagining- until teenage times turned me serious and sensible- Jesus Christ with laser beam eyes baring down on the ill-prepared world,) I still recognize a deep, holy gravity and a perfect literary turn behind And Can It Be That I Should Gain, which rolls out like God himself, wonderful and warm and simultaneously inscrutable.

Not to say the male voice choirs didn’t haunt my teenage years. I clearly remember the horror of exiting the school gates to spy my Nana, standing in the car park, Saxo doors flung open to the wide world, whilst the Ballymena Male Voice Choir roared their way through Power in the Blood. Though fully outed as a Mannifest attendee and a regular member of the rather diminutive Cambridge House Girls Grammar School, CU, I was not yet comfortable enough with my Christianity to endure the awkward rides home with new friends from school. My Nana firmly implanted in the School Car Park would stop girls coming out of school and ask them if they needed a lift home. It would matter not one jot to Nana whether I knew these girls or not. Clearly unaware of the potential danger of riding in cars with strange old ladies, many of these girls would accept the invitation. Over the course of the car journey to Ballykeel or Dunclug, or the front doors of the Tower Centre, my Nana would pass out the polo mints, crank up the Male Voice Choirs and ask mortifying questions like, “Do you know Jesus as your personal saviour, love?” I would sit in the back seat, chewing on the strap of my school bag, mortified and too young to realize that many of these girls adored my Nana for all the very same things that made me squirm. As I progressed through Grammar school I would make a point of getting out the front door before the bell had even stopped ringing, hoping to limit the devastating potential of my Nana’s kindness.

(My Nana, blessed with the kind of universal humanity which would lead her to ask my Grandfather why the Word Cup Final couldn’t be called a draw, just to save disappointing anyone, was wont to take pity on every needy case which stumbled across her path. In her early seventies we had to gently ask her to stop picking up strangers who looked like they might be a wee bit tired walking home from the town centre. Once at the age of eight I recall my grandfather bringing home three German backpackers who had, rather naively, stopped him to ask where the campsite was in Ballymena. By the time I arrived at Rockgrove Valley the Germans were pitching their tents in the pocket-sized front garden of my grandparents’ bungalow whilst Nana cooked them all an Ulster Fry. There was no Earthly point in trying to explain stranger danger to my Nana. She was clearly more of the, a stranger’s just a friend I haven’t met yet, ilk.)

Alzheimer’s stole the last five years of my Nana’s life. It was devastating to watch her shrink into herself. She stopped playing the piano. Her fingers turned into thumbs and ached. The knitting went first and then the piano. I held her hand as she died, feeling the songs slide out of her in small raspy breaths. I read Revelation over her deathbed and for the very first time caught a small drift of those elemental things she’d been coaxing out of the Believer’s Hymnbook.

I held her hand as she died. She was a small shadow of my baby days. Her hair was a cotton cloud halo, her face lost and birdlike and her feet barely big enough to hold a shoe together. My Nana was still a big lady. It took half the town to lay her to rest.

Read Jan’s blog here