The evolution of a grandmother

In an extract from a new book, MARILYN DUCKWORTH explains how the mantle of grandparenthood arrived.

My sister hands me the phone. "It's Helen." My daughter, calling from Wellington.

We are in the dim hallway of Fleur's university flat in Marris House, Newcastle. I am staying only briefly, on my way to take up the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton.

That morning my head is still weighted with hooded ghost figures I have been dreaming. I dream too much. In April 1980 I am something of a ghost myself. Eighteen months after the sudden death of my husband Dan (not Helen's father) I am still fragile with loss, leaning towards the past. When Helen, the eldest of my four daughters, tells me her news, I am instantly very much in the present.

The future is here in the hallway too. The impending birth resounds like the classic rejoinder - Life Must Go On. I am nearly smug with anticipation. Dan and I had shared seven children between us. It was sometimes too many. It wasn't a shortage of love but a shortage of time that could defeat us momentarily. While Dan was alive we were able to swim on, floundering but always rising again to the surface. On my own I sank, swallowed water and felt bloated with responsibility. Grandchildren, I knew as I spoke to Helen, would be different. It didn't occur to me to mind joining the grandmother generation - it was a joke after all. I would never become my grandmother, I would do it differently.

I certainly would.

I was back home in Wellington in good time for the arrival of Helen's baby. It feels very strange, knowing the child you laboured to push into the world must turn around and do it herself. Contemplating it is rather like looking at a reflection of yourself, like a double helix. Helen's baby was overdue as she had been.

I have always been overcome by childbirth scenes, sobbing my way through soapy TV deliveries, choked up by panting labour sequences in movies. I have constant dreams of giving birth again or of discovering a child I had forgotten was mine, and wake up worried sick about his vitamin C intake. These dreams are so vivid that next day I have caught myself reaching out for Ribena on the supermarket shelf.

Now I dreamed Helen was in trouble, the baby trapped in the birth canal; and I woke at 4 one morning, worrying. In fact she had gone into labour around that time but didn't contact me until daylight when the contractions were well under way. Then nothing appeared to be happening. I'd given birth like "shelling peas," as my mother was fond of saying, and I couldn't imagine what the hold-up was.

By the evening I was a mess. Friends insisted I join them for dinner at a restaurant down the road and leave the telephone number with Charlie, the expectant father. During the main course I was called to the phone. Helen was having an epidural, she was exhausted and making very slow progress. Had I been dealt one of my psychic dreams? I didn't think I would sleep after I got home, but I did, and was woken soon after 3 by the telephone. Helen's triumphant, sleepy voice. "I had a little daughter 20 minutes ago, by Caesarean."

I had no grandparents when I was growing up as a child in England during wartime. I knew they were still there, in New Zealand, my barely remembered birthplace. I had vague memories of a large, squashy woman holding my nose and trying to get me to drink salt water after I'd licked the spray off a bowl of tomatoes. I had a picture of a sharp-nosed little woman threatening me with a broom after I'd whacked her playfully on the bottom. But I didn't get to know these people until I was 11 and arrived at Auckland wharf in 1947. Fleur and I were surprised by our paternal grandparents' seriousness and failure to understand the rules of childhood. My maternal grandmother had a pleasant tendency to giggle with us at our childish jokes, but I was uncomfortably aware of her nervousness when she shepherded us around Auckland city streets that clanged with trams. We had quickly become used to trams. She was a country person.

I have not become my stern-bosomed grandmother or even my bustling good-humoured "Gramma." So what have I become? I've become "Waz," a reduction of "Waween," Fleur's name for me when she couldn't pronounce "Marilyn." In the supermarket, reaching past my trolley for a carton of milk, I hear this alias bellowed down the aisle before a grandchild materialises off camera and dances to me. A dotty name for a less than admirable grandparent. Because I had spent too long feeling like the old woman who lived in a shoe, I had made it clear from the outset that I didn't have it in me to become a traditional granny, hovering with a cookie jar.

It strikes me that there were times when I felt let down by my own mother in the same way. She had had her reasons too - she went through a divorce in the year of Helen's birth, and spent years putting herself together. My timing was wrong. She grew into grandmotherly habits, but not until she was much older. I understood this. It's a common enough story today.

Today grandmothers are younger and usually working. They are often chasing new relationships and/or battling broken ones. They have only so much leisure time, dress young and want to have fun - why not? They have forgotten how to knit Fair Isle jumpers, and tend to rely on McDonald's instead of the oven. At McDonald's you get a novelty toy thrown in with a "Happy Meal."

And how many grandparents constitute a fair share? In this age of broken marriages, they can proliferate

Marilyn Duckworth was born in Auckland, spent her childhood in England and now lives in Wellington. She has published 13 novels, a short-story collection, a book of poems and her memoirs, Camping on the Faultline. She has won the Literary Fund Award for Achievement and the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, and in 1987 was awarded an OBE for services to literature. In 1996 her novel Leather Wings was shortlisted for the South-east Asian and South Pacific Commonwealth Writer's Prize. She has held the Katherine Mansfield Fellowship in Menton, a Fulbright Visiting Writer's Fellowship and fellowships at Victoria University and the University of Auckland.

* Edited extract from Grand Stands: New Zealand Writers on Being Grandparents edited by Barbara Else (Random House $24.95), published this week.