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pushing up the daisies, now. Old Charlie. Hung like a horse.
    So there was dancing and singing all along Bard Road and Mrs Chance picked us up, one on each arm, and took us to the window so the first thing we saw with our swimming baby eyes was sunshine and dancing. Then a seagull swooped up, past the window, up and away. She told us about the seagull so often that although I cannot really remember it, being just hatched out, all the same, I do believe I saw that seagull fly up into the sky.
    There was a little sigh behind us and she was gone.
    The doctor got there ten minutes after, he wrote out the death certificate. That was that. So Mrs Chance adopted us but never let us call her ‘mother’, out of respect for the dead. We always called her ‘Grandma’, and ‘Chance’ became our handle.
    But I don’t think for one moment that ‘Chance’ was her own name, either. All that I know about her is: she’d arrived at 49 Bard Road on New Year’s Day, 1900, with a banker’s draft for the first year’s rent and the air of a woman making a new start in a new place, a new century and, or so the evidence points, a new name. If she decided to call herself ‘Mrs’, it was part and parcel of that shaky swipe after respectability I’ve mentioned, because I never caught one whiff of husband and, to tell the truth, she never lost a rakish air.
    She wasn’t tall, about five foot two, five two and a half, but solid-built like an armoured car. She always put on so much Rachel powder she puffed out a fine cloud if you patted her. She rouged big, round spots in the middle of her cheeks. She used so much eyeblack that kiddies on Electric Avenue used to give her a chorus of ‘Two Lovely Black Eyes’ as she passed by. For all the thirty years we knew her, thanks to peroxide, she was canary-coloured blonde. She always pencilled in a big, black beauty spot below the left-hand corner of her mouth.
    For outdoors, she wore black and she never went out without one of those square oilcloth carrier bags in which she kept her fat leather purse, a clean handkerchief in an envelope she’d marked in pencil ‘clean hankercheif’, a couple of safety pins, in case, as she said, her drawers fell down, and often an empty or two on its way back to the off-licence. There’d be a little black toque on her head, with a spotted veil. And I always remember her grey lisle stockings, that she secured below each knee with two lengths of knotted elastic.
    Indoors, providing the boarders weren’t around, she never wore a stitch, as often as not. She was a convert to naturism. She thought it was good for us kiddies, to get the air and sunlight on our skins, as well, so we saved a lot of wear and tear on clothes and often gambolled naked in the backyard, to the astonishment of the neighbours, who were a proper lot. Brixton’s changed, a good deal. These days, you could stage a three-point orgy in the garden and nobody would bat an eye except that bloke with the earring next door might pipe up, ‘Got enough condoms?’
    She didn’t so much talk as elocute. She rhymed ‘sky’ with ‘bay’, and made ‘mountaynes’ out of ‘molehills’, except sometimes she forgot herself, the air turned blue. We’d been out in the market, once, stocking up on rabbit food – she’d a passion for salads, it went with all that naturism. During her strictest periods, she’d make us a meal of a cabbage, raw in summer, boiled in winter. There we were, picking over the greens, when some prim voice behind us, rudely referring to Grandma, opined: ‘. . .  no better than she oughter be . . .’
    Grandma swung round, dukes up: ‘What the fuck d’you mean?’
    We never found out who set her up in Bard Road and she never volunteered the information of her own accord. She’d invented herself, she was a one-off and she kept her mystery intact until the end, although she left us everything, we owe her everything and the older we grow, the more like her we become.