Elephant Grannies

This week's Elephant Words image came from Douglas, and I hope he won't mind my saying that it was a very Douglas image. I'm not sure I can expound on that further, so don't ask. It just does.

I think I'm reasonably pleased with what I came up with (which probably means everyone else will hate it); this was just one of those ideas that, once I'd had it, pretty much wrote itself.

88:88

Once there were two grannies with one beautiful granddaughter. Her name was Alyson, her hair was the colour of Gold Blend, and she sang Pink songs wherever she went. (Hearing an eight year-old screech, ‘Teachers dated me – my parents hated me’ or indeed, ‘Push up my bra, I don’t wanna be a stupid girl’ always made the grannies want to speak up, but neither dared. If it had been any other child, yes – but not their darling Alyson, who could do no wrong.)

Because she had two grannies, Alyson’s parents alternated their visits from one Sunday to the next. (Sunday is, after all, the day for visiting grannies. Even the TV stations understand this, filling their schedules with granny-friendly programming - nary a naughty word or post-1973 film permitted.) One Sunday they would take her to see Granny Roebuck, the next Granny Beacham. Then Granny Roebuck again, then Granny Beacham. Holidays caused agony, since this would extend the gap between visits to dry, deathless millennia – and a postcard written in semi-literate schoolgirl scrawl barely made up for the grannies’ loss. (In her day, Granny Roebuck woed, children had been taught to start new sentences with a capital letter long before the age of eight. Similarly, the text-talk on Granny Beacham’s postcard added extra wrinkles to her brow. ‘Last nite we 8 swordfish’ puzzled her for many days, but she couldn’t bemoan ‘Luv Alyson’, since even misspelt luv was better than no love at all.) On the plus side, sometimes after their holidays Alyson’s parents needed a holiday themselves – on which occasions they’d allow their daughter to spend Saturday night with a gran too – but though also equally rotated, Saturday nights such as these always caused barely-concealed heartache in the granny whose turn it wasn’t. In such ways do lonely old women become bitter and spiteful, even if those traits were never in their nature before. But short of a timely heart-attack, stroke, chronic debilitating illness, or duel to the death with walking sticks and biscuit tin lid shields, there was no way out of this quandary until…

Until one day, Granny Roebuck discovered an amazing thing about her bedside clock. The electric had been off the night before due to a storm and the clock was flashing 88:88, but when Granny Roebuck came to reset the time, she forgot that this was a 24 hour clock and that if it was after noon (or indeed, afternoon) then a small red dot should be lit in the bottom corner below the alarm symbol. When her alarm didn’t go off the following morning but instead came on during the middle of Emmerdale that evening, she remembered the importance of that small red dot and set about moving the time backwards (since it was the kind of clock that allowed you to either advance or retreat the digits, and Granny Roebuck had always been the sort to think backwards rather than ahead) twelve hours. This is when the amazing thing occurred, although it did take Granny R. quite a while to come to terms with what it all meant: that the clock had somehow taken her back too, not just twelve hours - but exactly twelve days in time. Her first inkling of this was when she returned to Emmerdale to find the characters having arguments and dramatic confrontations Granny R. found curiously familiar. When she went to look for the TV Times to check if for some reason she was watching a repeat, she could only find an old edition with Dr. Who on the cover – even though she could have sworn she’d put that one in the recycling bin days ago. A few moments later the phone rang, and the hairs on the back of Granny Roebuck’s neck bristled (even the ones on her top lip seemed to be tingling) with déjà vu. She knew exactly who it was: Mabel Nolan from the WI, calling to see if she could bake a cake for the summer fair. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she told herself, ‘the summer fair was last Saturday!’, but sure enough her prediction proved accurate and a conversation she’d already had ensued. She was smart enough not to mention the perceived anachronism to Mabel Nolan though. Otherwise, it’d have been all round the WI by the end of the week – Petra Roebuck was “going”. But if Granny R. really were “going”, she’d rather keep it to herself; the last people she’d want to know about it were the busybodies at the WI. She’d seen how they reacted to Ena Kane when she took off her knickers at the Beetle Drive and handed them across the table to Milton Crowther with a cheeky wink. “Oh, poor Ena!” they all crowed, “how awful for her – she was always so smart, so quick.” They feigned concern, sympathy, compassion… but the overriding emotion was one of smug relief. “I thank god every morning that he’s allowed me to keep all my marbles thus far,” said Kathy Sykes, and a murmur of accord spread round the WI like a timpani roll. Soon afterwards they bundled Ena off to a home, and someone with a full shilling took her place at the next Beetle Drive instead. Only Milton Crowther seemed disappointed.

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