I was avoiding the real news last week and reading instead an article about “Granny heels” which are, apparently, blocky high-heeled shoes in which it’s relatively easy to walk. (Reading this was an abject waste of time. I do not wear and have never worn shoes in which I couldn’t comfortably run away.) A day or two earlier – while running, inevitably, and wearing shoes designed for the job – I was curbing any nascent tendency to feel okay about myself with a podcast about why pretty much all food is bad for you, which included the instruction not to eat anything whose ingredients your granny wouldn’t recognise.
What, I wanted to ask, if your granny had a chemistry degree? What if your granny was a food scientist? And what if she was a stilt-walker or a dancer or just a life-long wearer of high heels? I remembered an older friend’s response to receiving a well-meant offer from a group of young volunteers in lockdown: if she liked, they could teach her how to do her grocery shopping on the internet, it wouldn’t be as tricky as she imagined. Look, love, she said, I wrote the effing internet, I was coding while your parents were in nappies.
I don’t know quite when and how granny became the byword for dimness. The grandmothers I know are at least as high-powered as my younger friends. Some of them have quite senior jobs: a surgeon, a judge, several professors. Others, now free from long working hours, are putting decades of experience into freelance projects and voluntary work, much of it involving technical competence far beyond that of most of the undergraduates I encounter. My oldest friend, in her late 80s, just regretfully turned down an invitation to travel to California for the opening of a big art exhibition she’d curated; the difficulty wasn’t that she couldn’t, with support, manage the journey, but that she has people at home who depend on her care. There are several grandmothers in my yoga class who can do headstands – it wouldn’t surprise me if they could do them wearing high heels – and very probably muddle through the word “emulsifier” on the back of a pack of biscuits. There are also plenty of grandmothers with less glamorous professional lives on whose intellectual strength and emotional maturity subsequent generations rely.
My own grandmother gave up heels, and ballroom dancing, in her 60s when a lifetime of dieting overcame a lifetime of hill-walking and kayaking and her bones began to crumble. But she did not give up thinking, or reading – experimental literary fiction and poetry as well as recipes – until her deathbed 30 years later. In some ways she was a conventional granny. She knitted and baked, and taught me both. Her patience, kindness and love were wholly dependable. She also read me fairy tales, in which the grandmothers are not weak or stupid. Dangerous, perhaps. Eccentric. Prone to dabble in the supernatural, not necessarily benevolent.
How did ‘granny’ became the byword for dimness? That’s so wrong
Eating disorders in later life: Some of my peers have had teenage weight levels for decades
I’m a Brexit-era ‘citizen of nowhere’, trying to settle in Ireland
I was taught to avoid the ‘trap’ of cooking but I take pleasure in domestic life
[ In a Word... GrannyOpens in new window ]
At first I thought that there weren’t many grandmothers in the English literary canon, but that’s not true, it’s just that they’re rarely identified as “grannies”. Plenty of women in 19th-century fiction have grandchildren, but it’s not a defining role. They have the same agency, strength and interests as other women of their socio-economic status, and often considerable power over large households and dynastic arrangements. Wealthy widows especially are redoubtable, often in control of serious property without the oversight of a father or husband. The existence of grandchildren is incidental, or at least of strategic and dynastic more than personal significance, and retirement is irrelevant. Older women, free of childbearing, are powerful and not always friendly figures.
I suppose these hardened businesswomen are the opposite of the granny who doesn’t dress up any more and can’t understand ultra-processed food. Older women can be witches or sweet doddery old things, or sometimes one masquerading as the other, but not whole humans who are attractive and have passions and capacities and expertise beyond home-baking. No wonder some cling to youth. I want to say, I’m off to see a granny who struts miles in stilettos to conduct cardio-thoracic surgery, but actually that’s two different grandmothers I know. Maybe they’ll meet and throw a party.