My name is Annie and when I was nine I didn’t have too many friends except my Grandmother who always wanted to be an astronaut.
She said that my Mother had come along and put an end to that dream, thank you very much for asking - but I hadn’t asked.
I
didn’t quite understand how or why my Mother had stopped her being an
astronaut but my Grandmother was not one to talk crazy like, so I went
along with her story. It had something to do with my Granddad turning my
Grandmother’s head with all that kissing nonsense and such like and her
being in the family way, thank you very much.
It
didn’t stop me and her always talking about being astronauts and we
would look at the maps of the sky and choose which of the planets we
would visit first. My Grandmother was going to Jupiter and I was very
definitely a Saturn girl.
When
I was nine I used to think that my Grandmother smelt a bit funny which I
thought was because she was in training and eating special astronaut
food.
One
evening, when I was safely sitting on her knee and after she had put a
large log on the fire, she told me how she had always dreamed of going
to the stars.
“One
November afternoon my parents, your great Grandparents Annie, took my
brother and me to see a film at a little tea room down Duchess Street,
mind you that street’s all gone now, got bombed in the war and they had
to pull the whole lot down.
“By
day it sold the most wonderful cakes in the world but in the evening,
well then it became a wonderland. Mister Guitolli would hang a white
sheet on the wall and then show films from a projector which he turned
by hand. He never charged anyone a farthing but at the interval Mrs
Guitolli would sell some of that day’s stale cakes for a half penny
each.
“Sometimes,
if he had had a hard day, he would turn the projector very slowly and
every one would stamp their feet to get him to speed up. Sometimes he
would just fall asleep and the film would stop, then smoke would start
rising from the projector and people would run out of the cake shop,
screaming. They knew it wasn’t a real fire but to us it was the only
chance we ever got to scream in front of grown-ups.
“On
the days that Mrs Guitolli was in a good mood and kissed Mister
Guitolli on the cheek in front of everyone, well those were the days
that the people in the films would move very fast as Mister Guitolli
wanted to finish early. My Mother never did tell me why he was in so
much of a hurry.” Then my Grandmother coughed, cleared her throat and
continued.
“One
day Annie I saw the most marvellous film, The Journey to The Moon, the
one where the rocket lands right in the eye of the Moon’s face. Everyone
was laughing but I felt sorry for the Moon and made up my mind that I
would go there and apologise for what had happened to his eye.”
Sadly
nothing much happened to my Grandmother and her dream for many, many
years, not until the very day of her fiftieth birthday on April the 12th, 1961 when Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.
My
Grandmother decided two things that day: 1 – fifty was no age, no age
at all, and fifty year old people could still go to the Moon and 2 – if
anything happened to Granddad, God forbid, she would marry Yuri. There
was a time when she more inclined to John Glenn, the first American in
space than Yuri, but in the end the Russian won her heart. He was her
first Cosmonaut and that was that.
My
Grandmother said that every day she would check the newspapers looking
for an advert that would state ‘Have you ever considered being an
Astronaut or Cosmonaut? Then telephone the following number .....” but
she never did find it, “Must have been on one of the days I didn’t buy a
newspaper.” she said.
She
always wondered, considering the amount of people she had told about
her dream, why the rocket folks hadn’t actually contacted her. “I mean”,
she said “wouldn’t it be better having a really enthusiastic astronaut
than a reluctant one?”
She
even wrote to the Russian Embassy who invited her to tea one afternoon
and told her that the waiting list to be a cosmonaut was so long that
she would be a hundred and twenty years old by the time they got to her.
She had to agree that one hundred and twenty was a good age but
mentioned that if her name did come up, then could they contact her
anyway? The man said he’d put her name down on the list straight away
and sent her home with a signed photo of Yuri that said ‘To my comrade’.
Apollo eight was the next big milestone in my Grandmother’s life and that was the one that got me interested.
In
March of ’68 Yuri died in a tragic accident and my Grandmother went
into a mild sort of mourning. Other people were twisting to the Beatles
and the Rolling Stones but my Grandmother had all the heroes she needed
in one man and now he was gone. My Grandfather used to be jealous of a
person he had never met and would refer to him as ‘that bloody
communist’ but after Yuri Gagarin’s death, and I’m ashamed to say it, my
Grandfather started to whistle. It led me to wonder if he hadn’t had
Yuri bumped off.
My
Grandmother gave me a poster of the crew of Apollo Eight to hang on my
wall, I still remember their names: the commander was Frank F Borman the
2nd, James A Lovell Junior was the Command Module Pilot and William A Anders, the Lunar Module Pilot.
I always wondered what happened to Frank Borman, the 1st and James Lovell Senior, were they lost in space somewhere?
In
those days, the launching of a rocket was the most important thing in
the world – at least to me. Every television channel would cover it and
very clever people with extremely large foreheads would discuss it for
hours on end. We would sit with bowls of popcorn and devour every
delicious second of the programmes and when the talking got boring,
Grandmother would test me on all the people who had ever been in space.
We
had a happy Christmas and we made it extra so, because my Father was
off to Singapore in the New Year to work for several months. My Mother
and I moved in with Grandmother in order to provide company for us all
and I was more than delighted.
Apollo
9 was a bit of a strange one and never really went anywhere, there was
lots of talk of trying out modules but to be really
cross-my-heart-honest, I found it boring.
The
next trip was really exciting, the guys were going to go to the Moon
and try everything except land. I thought it was a shame and so did my
Grandmother “Why couldn’t they just let them land on the Moon for five
minutes?” she said, but it wasn’t to be and they all had to come home
again.
In
July 1969, me, my Mother and my Grandmother all went out to Singapore
to see my Father and we had the best time ever. It was a truly amazing
place and it was there we got to see Neil Armstrong on television, not
just land on the Moon but actually walk on it. It was brilliant.
My
Grandmother and I sat there holding our breaths as Commander Neil put
his foot on the Moon’s surface. My Father said he thought that his foot
would go right through and he’d get stuck but then I caught him winking
at my Mother - my Father, not Neil Armstrong.
I
remember the day I asked my Grandmother who the first man to walk on
the Moon was and she said “where dear?” and I have to tell you, I
thought that was a funny thing to say. “Too late” I said, “It was Neil
Armstrong”.
“Who dear?”
Then I heard she’d fallen down the stairs which I was sure was due to her Astronaut training. She was very hard on herself.
She
never did tell me she was going to Astronaut Training Camp, my Father
did. I asked him whether my Grandmother had found the advert in the
paper and he said that she had and that they had accepted her. So I was
pleased but I really wished she had told me herself.
Then
one day my Father looked really sad and told me that I had to be brave
and I said I was. He said that his Mother, my Grandmother, had gone to
live on the Moon and I said stop talking crazy like as Apollo Twelve
wasn’t due to take off for some months. He told me that she had been
sent on a secret mission and that I was to tell no one. I never did.
When I was nine years of age my Grandmother went to the Moon and didn’t come back.
She will soon and I bet she’s building a rocket even now.
bobby stevenson 2013
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