My Granny
When I was a teenager I used to think about how other families did things feeling that having immigrant families meant I had some gaps in learning and other experiences that my English friends might have had. I used to read stories of kids being left in the middle of nowhere to get home to build resilience and confidence to deal with difficult situations. There were also other norms that I wasn’t accustomed to such as taking more responsibility for getting things wrong as in my experience you weren’t allowed to get things wrong as it seemed no one in my family ever did, obviously they did they just weren’t ever able to admit it as this would have meant a beating for them growing up. I was lucky I never faced that at home though as it could well have been the way they dealt with it. Instead I just got blamed for everything that went wrong, “The video recorder is broken, it must be Lorenzo!”. “Where are the keys? Lorenzo must have moved them!” It was a permanent challenge.
Luckily I was pretty much left to my own devises otherwise so learnt that making mistakes is ok and needs to happen. Also now looking back, I had a lot of the experiences of the kids I looked at it just didn’t happen with a plan in mind it was more how my family did things. My grandmother was a big part of this.
My grandmother came to london in around 1984 I had spent a year before living in Turkey while my mother worked to build a life and have a year off from me. I came back speaking only Turkish so this was another challenge for me as I had to re-learn my English and work at fitting in again. My grandmother came to look after me when my mother was at work and she shared raising me when my mother had to work or wanted to go out. I loved my granny, she was a tough women who was born after the end of the war when Turkey was in a bad place having joined forces with Germany. They didn’t have much and my grandmother had to work from a young age to look after herself.
When she came to London she was in her fourties’ and couldn’t speak a word of English. She quickly met her husband and they got married, he was a nice Irish man who smoked rollies and had a council flat opposite Latimer Road station. They had a tumultuous relationship as my grandmother was never easy. She learnt to cook bacon for his breakfast and look after him, but she loved an argument. He soon found out that arguing wasn’t going to be the only challenge he would have to deal with.
My grandmother was quite ahead of her time, she would have been an influencer in today’s world I think, she was a beautiful women who dreamed of becoming an actress, but in Turkey actress equaled being a prostitute back then so her dreams ended after one film. She loved to party and enjoyed the odd one, two three… whisky’s on occasion.
Growing up we didn’t have much money but I always seemed to have a lot of things that other kids in my state school didn’t have, I had a game boy when they were first released and had a full collection of Schwarzenegger and De Niro videos. I never suspected anything and just presumed this was normal. I was spoilt and still had moments of wanting more especially when I moved to private school and realised that I was far from as well off as the other kids in this new environment, but I had a good life.
My grandmother and I used to go shopping a lot and on my 10th birthday I realised there was more to this “shopping” that we used to do.
Let’s go back a bit first, so these kids being left places? I realised this actually happened to me a lot. There was one occasion where we went shopping in oxford street and my grandmother once told me to wait for her at the entrance to Marks and Spencers, I was waiting and waiting for what felt like forever at that age, I was 8 years old and started to get worried. I decided I had to get home and went off, I walked down oxford street towards Marble Arch station and saw a phone box on the way, I figured out how to make a collect call and called my mother. She was furious and had already spoken to my grandmother as she had come back out and couldn’t find me. I took the train home as I think it was free for me to travel or I managed to sneak in I can’t remember and my grandmother and mother were there arguing. I was quite happy and put on a Schwarzenegger film and sat there while they continued to argue. This was one of many times I got lost and had to figure it out.
Back to that day when I was 10. It was a normal shopping day, we were in Oxford street, we went to HMV and I got all the Schwarzenegger videos, Running Man, Predator, Red Heat.. I know I was 10, ratings didn’t exist in our house, unless it was horror films as I had an active imagination and would have night terrors. We then went grocery shopping in Marks & Spencer’s as we usually did, my grandmother was filling grocery bags, but she looked suspicious and was looking around. Suddenly two store detectives grabbed her and that was that. We were taken to the security room where they showed her the CCTV footage of her filling the bags with groceries and skipping the tills, my grandmother was a kleptomaniac.
We sat there for what felt like an eternity until the police came, I was confused and I had a bag full of videos, I quickly realised these were also stolen goods. I was scared. The police arrived and I started crying, the police took pitty on me and told me to say I was 9 so I wouldn’t get charged as 10 was the cut off, this has given me a lot of respect for the police as humans doing a job. We were taken to the police station and my grandmother was put in a cell with me in a chair outside just crying while she tried to calm me down. My mother came to get us and as you can imagine she was furious.
These experiences shaped my life, it also made me a lot less judgemental towards people on the outskirts of society who have to do things that others deem wrong to survive. I realised early on the right and wrong are very grey areas and changing habits from times of struggle are not always easy. When you are raised in a straightforward route it’s hard to understand why people do the things they do, no one is trying to do bad things or thinks they are bad, we are like atoms bouncing off each other trying to do the best we can sometimes our actions hurt others and we take it personally but everyone thinks they are doing the best they can.
On my grandmothers death bed, she used to occasionally chuckle and tell me she dreamt of going into shops in Oxford Street and shoplifting, it was an addiction to her that gave her a rush, she enjoyed the risk and this idea that risk is fun shaped me and hence doing BJJ and enjoying motorsports is my version of this, she didn’t have the luxury to do these things so found her own outlet in what she did.
I wish she had been able to tell me more stories from her past, as I think she was ashamed of what she had been through. She was hard to get on with as I got older as i grew up into our family trait of not following orders, but I loved her and she was a good influence on me.