Peter and Jane are always playing and they are always happy. They are never at school and they are never reading. I don’t know why, because reading is the most important thing. Reading, my grandmother told me, was the stepping stone to better things. If you were a good reader you would never have to face all this. You would never have to crawl over the big grey rock at the bottom of the garden with the sharp edges that stubbed your toes. You would never have to make a garden from scratch. You would never have to borrow a drill from the council and pull up all the muck someone else had left behind. You would never have to work for the council. You would never ever have to take the bins out.
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It was my grandmother who first helped me read, my grandmother, Edna May Turner. When she was young, Edna May was like one of Miss Marple’s girls. She was a girl who came to polish silver and serve tea on the lawn; a girl who came to shine up the oak banister; a girl to make gooseberry fool and collect the windfall apples in the autumn; a girl to answer the doorbell; a girl to run errands in the village.
In 1930 or thereabouts (what year was my grandmother born?) Edna May Turner was carrying out the tea; she was crossing a hot lawn in a pretty English village. Edna May, the maid who was coming on nicely; Edna, the maid Miss Marple had found through her friend Dolly Bantry, was carrying a silver teapot towards an old lady sitting in the shade. Edna was concentrating so hard on the tray in front of her that she couldn’t see that the woman in front of her was lifting a large pink bloom towards her companion.
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Miss Marple is a white-haired old lady with a gentle, appealing manner.
(The Murder at the Vicarage)
How old is Miss Marple? Nobody knows. My grandmother was in her sixties and then her seventies when she was living with us, but we never really thought about how old she was. Grandmothers are just there, always and forever. They never go away and they never get older. Grandmothers are like the stone lion that sits on the corner of our front steps. Maze sits on her kitchen stool and slowly grows green lichen around her ears. We pat her on the way in and on the way out and sometimes we sit down on the steps with her and cry.
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What did I know about Maisie? Not much, just scraps. She had white hair and she was ‘five foot five and shrinking’. That’s what she told us anyway.
‘Then you’re five foot four, Maze,’ I said.
‘A little bit more than that dear, a little more … you’re always a bit more than you think you are.’
Maze weighed eight stone five, she told me. Eight of the boulders at the bottom of the garden, eight of those rocks that fall down the hill like Jack and Jill in the stories she read to us; eight of those pebbles I picked up from the beach and put on top of my book to keep it flat. At eight stone my grandmother was both heavy and light. One day, she might just roll away.
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When are grandmothers born? Nobody knows that either. What year was Miss Marple born? Before or after Queen Victoria? Sometime after Queen Victoria was dead, I think, perhaps before the king of England abdicated. ‘Abdicated’ means he left the throne; got up and walked off and left that shiny polished throne right behind him.
‘Flounced out,’ Maisie said. ‘He flounced right out to that beaming woman with her handbag.’
The king of England flounced right out of his throne room. He ab-di-ca-ted. The king got his sums wrong on the abacus. He pulled too many red balls over when he was counting. Or he began a different sum and no one could make sense of it: not all the kings and queens of England added up together, and one white king with one red wife meant that the one in the middle, in between, wasn’t a queen. She wasn’t even a lady. Her name begins with W and it sounds like a man’s name.
‘What was he thinking, rushing off to that woman with her big red lipstick and smile … that woman with her pointy elbows? She has too much powder on her face! It isn’t decent! Too much powder and not enough sense! Powder should stay on babies’ bottoms!’
Maze spoke as though she had been there, in the crowds outside Buckingham Palace, standing at the front. Sometime in 1936 Edna May was pushing her way through thick arms and legs, she was pressing her small blue beret to her head. Maze was waving her flag and looking hard for a glimpse of that bad lady with the bright red lipstick and the big white forehead.
‘She looked like the moon,’ my grandmother said. ‘The moon wearing a large smile.’
‘Always put on your best smile,’ Mum said. ‘You never know who might be looking. Now wipe off that silly grin and go and wash your hands.’
History is remembered by a series of smiles.
3
She lives in a village, the kind of village where nothing ever happens, exactly like a stagnant pond.
(Sleeping Murder)
In the Miss Marple stories everything begins and ends in the village. Whatever happens in the village, Miss Marple knows about it. People tell her things, often without their knowing. Somehow she’s always there, just when someone’s spilling the beans. Usually she’s sitting in the corner somewhere, like my grandmother with her coffee in the morning, enjoying a nice bit of peace and quiet. Now shoo!
Most of the time St Mary Mead is lovely and quiet. Every day is like being on holiday. There are no chores, at least not for Miss Marple. In St Mary Mead, Miss Marple wakes up to breakfast served by a girl called Mavis or Edna or Mary, which by the way is my middle name; she walks to the village shop with a wicker basket; she stops at the greengrocer’s, the baker’s, the butcher’s; then she has tea at the Copper Kettle.
This is the kind of life I dreamed of; and when I closed my eyes and dreamed this is where I would be: in St Mary Mead at the Copper Kettle, having tea and cake in the corner.
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Villages are full of secrets. If I want to know something, Greta will tell me what is going on. Greta is the vicar’s wife. She loves secrets; but above all, Greta likes to gossip.
When women gossip they usually sit in circles. Gossiping is going round and round in circles until you come back to the same thing. Usually that’s someone’s husband or wife, but sometimes it’s the maid. Gossiping women are witches making spells from other people’s names, women making spells and sipping their tea. Now that I think of it, ‘Greta’ sounds just like a witch, a good witch.
Greta asks Miss Marple to tea because she hopes she can make her spill the beans. Then something might actually happen in St Mary Mead. But Greta doesn’t realise how much Miss Marple already knows, how much she can tell about Greta just by looking.
Greta Clementine was the sort of girl who relished a piece of scandal. Miss Marple took a quick glance around the room. There