In Memory Of My Nana

My Nana passed away this week, and as she was a great Nana I thought I would perhaps share my favourite story of hers, so you can appreciate her too.

(Note that my mum, who is Nana’s daughter, has ok’d this; Nana herself would probably have thought nobody would be interested. I asked if I could write down some of her memoirs a few years ago and she said, “I’m sure nobody would be interested in any of that,” and then busted out a fantastic and very unexpected story about how she was stationed on Fiji as a nurse during the war, when all the women and children had been evacuated, and all that remained was 20ish nurses and 2000ish American soldiers, and she got proposed to every night.  So perhaps it will be more interesting than expected.)

Here is my favourite photo of Nana, on the ship across to Fiji:

NANA ON THE LEFT IN THE INSANELY CUTE OUTFIT

The story is about how my Nana and Grandad met, and got engaged. Nana was 102 when she passed, and firmly believed that she would end up somewhere nice reunited with my Grandad, and I hope she was right. 

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Nana and Grandad met on a troop ship across to Egypt, near the end of the war; he was a pharmacist and she was a nurse.

Their first date was at the Pyramids, because clearly my Grandad wanted to set a romantic standard that none of his grandchildren could ever hope to live up to.  This was before the area around the Pyramids was built-up, so they took a camel-drawn cart (not that romantic) to tour the Pyramids at night (pretty romantic) and every time they went past a hotel the camel driver turned around and leered at them and said “Lovely place for a honeymoon!” (Not that romantic.)

So they were off to a good start, but after the war – and I forget the details of why – Nana ended up in England and Grandad ended up back home in New Zealand, some 6 months later, via Japan. 

This is the part where it all gets slightly Notebook-esque and you are allowed to have a little cry if you like.

Grandad wrote Nana a letter proposing to her, and he waited and he waited and he waited and no response came and he became Very Despondent.

Meanwhile, Nana carried merrily on in England, because the letter had never arrived.

Eventually Grandad confided in a friend that he had been Cruelly Rejected and his friend said (paraphrased) “Lewis don’t be an egg, the letter probably didn’t arrive” and so Grandad promptly sent a second letter, but also booked passage on a ship and just straight went on over to England, presumably because he wasn’t trusting the postal service with this a second time.

Grandad worked his passage across, scrubbing decks and working in the kitchen. (Mum says that every time he told this story the decks became both longer and dirtier and he invoked the phrase “scrubbing my way to [Nana]” with alarming regularity.) There was also a notable occasion where Grandad, emptying slops from the kitchen, became disoriented and emptied them out the wrong porthole and onto the dock and had to go and pick them all up again.

But despite these tribulations he did eventually arrive in England , and made his way to London to find, and propose to, Nana!
He didn’t know where Nana lived, but he had her phone number.
So he found a payphone and he rang the number and Nana answered! 

But alas, Grandad did not know how to work the payphone properly, so she couldn’t hear him. 

(Back in the day, payphones had an A button and a B button; if you rang someone and they answered, you pressed A to talk. If they did not answer, you pressed B instead, and you got your money back. But Grandad did not know this, so he didn’t press anything.)

So Nana said “hello? hello?” and Grandad said probably many things but none of them were heard, and how terrible would it have been if all of this was thwarted because Grandad was too overexcited to properly work an old-school payphone?

But then – and this is the part that might induce the little cry – Nana had a thought and she said: “Lew, is that you?  I can’t hear you! Push the A button.”  

And then there was even more silence so Nana described where the A button was and how one might push it, just in case the caller was Grandad.

And Grandad found the A button, and he pushed it. He came over the same day, and proposed the same day, and Nana said yes! Or rather, as her diary entry from that day says, in a rather tongue-in-cheek way: “[Lew] seems a helpful fellow to have around the house, and I happily promised to marry him.”

They got married three weeks later - it would have been sooner but they had to wait for the banns, and Nana had to borrow a wedding dress - and were happily married for the next 60-odd years.

During that time they lived in England and New Zealand, and travelled the Silk Road in a caravan, and had three children, and seven grandchildren, and one great-grandchild, and provided copious amounts of animal biscuits and raspberry fizz and love to said grandchildren, and were generally top-notch grandparents.

AND WERE ALSO RIDICULOUSLY ENAMOURED WITH EACH OTHER FOR, LIKE, EVER.

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I hope you liked my favourite story about my two fantastic grandparents. I also hope you can forgive the departure from the normal light and amusing content of this blog, but I wanted to share this story.

For Eileen & Lewis Hudson, rest in peace.