Annie & Guy
Though essentially plain, Annie was the kind of gal who just oozed vitality, honesty, humour and courage. She was my maternal grandmother’s sister-in-law, and together they had developed a vital closeness on account of having married the wild and charismatic Graham brothers.
Robert & Alfred had shadowy origins - out of a Scottish military orphanage. Clever, hardworking, adaptable & fearless survivors, they both suppressed whatever emotional undercurrents they bore with sporadic bouts of hard and angry drinking. In 1916, whilst billeted in Pembrokeshire, the more charming Robert seduced petite and pretty Maggie. Within weeks, they had to marry and flee to London where my mother was all too soon the first of five children under the age of six. Life was about to get tough for them.
Alfred, meanwhile, with a profound passion for both uniforms and travel, was working as a London bus driver when he literally picked up young cockney Annie. She, at the time, was one of the famed flexible and exotic Bluebell dance troupe. He managed to entrance her, and within months they too were married. Now inappropriate for her to titillate in night clubs, and unfulfilling for him to drive the same old bus routes, the next we know is that, childless and free, they had acquired a small troupe of performing baboons, with whom they set off around the world on big old steamships. Captain Graham, with his large wardrobe of uniforms, his irrepressible wife, and the apes with their own wardrobe trunk, travelled far and wide for some years. At some point, about which we can only speculate, it all began to lose its appeal, and they returned to London. I know nothing of the fate of their hapless artistes.
By the early 1930’s, both brothers had died of poor health, leaving two young widows alone in Brixton to fend for themselves through the Great Depression. Maggie had her millinery & dressmaking, whilst feisty Annie established a busy show-biz boarding house for the swelling ranks of music-hall entertainers. There, Maggie would eventually meet her second husband, who would give her the long-deserved stability of a peaceful home and a whole new extraordinary lifestyle. But hers is another story - this is about Annie.
Out on the fringe of family, Annie continued as a hardworking landlady, and a renowned reader of tea leaves and tarot, all through the war and beyond, until crippling debt and arthritis cornered her in a tiny tenement flat in Poplar. Ever proud and chirpy, she welcomed her rare visitors, and there was always an increasingly wobbly writ Christmas card from Auntie Annie.
The early seventies found me living and working south of the river, and when I learned she was about to be eighty, I called to ask her if she fancied a birthday treat. She didn’t hesitate, “I’d like to go up the zoo to see my old pal Guy. Shall we go on the bus?” When I told her I’d take her by car, she squealed with glee and asked if we could go fast.
By the day of her birthday, my car was being troublesome, so a friend generously suggested I borrow his (a zippy and low-slung little aluminium Lotus Seven). Diminutive Annie answered the door beaming through a smear of lippie and a cloud of cologne, swamped within her best musquash fur coat, a pink bow in her wispy hair, and clutching a handbag bulging with grapes and apples. We rode the smelly clangy cage elevator down to street level, where our outrageous chariot awaited. Unphased, she tumbled gleefully into the ridiculously low passenger seat, stroking and patting the dashboard, the upholstery, my arm, her hair, the grapes, and proceeded to wave regally to the whole wide world outside. It’s a good eight miles from Poplar to Regents Park, but her joy continued unbounded. Over the roar of the engine, we sang music hall songs, and when she told me she rather liked Mick Jagger, we did a few scratchy verses of Satisfaction, and then she dozed off happily after I pretended we’d done seventy along the Embankment.
Then, at last the Zoo, where I’d negotiated special access and parking in her honour before tea and birthday cake at the cafe. She was appreciative, but like a fidgetty child, eager to cut to the chase. She clung to my arm like a little bird as we headed for the raucous monkey house, where we shuffled past endless sad cages, until we reached the chimps and the baboons, whom she knew best. All were magnetically drawn to her, as she had strange little meaningful exchanges with them, and she tossed them bits of fruit, and when we left them she was tearful. For many years, it seems, she had been a regular visitor. She had dearly loved her travelling baboons, and she alluded to how cruel Alf had been to them, for which she could never forgive him, and how “when ‘e passed, a big black clahd rose out ‘is chest”. I suspect she had suffered too.
We found a bench for a little rest, before moving on to Guy’s huge cage. Guy the gorilla, who had arrived at the zoo as a baby, clutching a hot water bottle on Guy Fawkes night, 1947. His was a mostly solitary life thereafter, until his death in 1978. As ever, there was a dense crowd eager to gawp and mock and wonder at this magnificent and benign old soul. But, as we approached, they had begun to shuffle away, keenly re-directing their children’s attention to the ice cream kiosk and the snake houses. The reason was soon apparent, Guy being rather enthusiastically and gruntily attentive to a large bale of hay. But whilst (most of) the crowd slunk away, Annie went straight up to the bars and proceeded to encourage him to “ ‘urry up, yer naughty boy. I didn’t come all this way on me birfday for all this ‘anky panky. You’re embarrassin’ all these nice people. ‘Urry up now, cos look, I got yer grapes ‘ere.”
Well, believe it or not, he soon caught her eye and his haymaking ended quite abruptly as he lumbered towards her and fell under her spell. The grapes played a very minor part in their encounter, as she muttered and coo’d, and he peered and puzzled, and tilted his head, as the rest of us all became invisible. She introduced me, but he was humiliatingly dismissive. She then told him she was sorry she hadn’t been for so long, that she’d been poorly, and that she’d come to say goodbye. Feeling oddly intrusive, I stepped away and waited for her.
When we finally bumbled back to the car she seemed so much frailer, but her now almost simian features were radiant and happy. I was still inwardly blubbing. She slept on the way home, where I made her cocoa and left her in front of the telly, waiting for On The Buses.. I visited her again a few weeks later, but she was too tired for any more adventures. Within a month she passed peacefully in her sleep.
She left me her Art Deco brass fire surround, and the monkeys’ travelling trunk. And an indelible blueprint for living.
