Hickling Hands

There was the occasional creak as the hot water found its unfamiliar way through the radiator. The dining room had finally begun to warm up. My mother, though, was still sat in her grey winter coat (with multicoloured zippers), and I in my long black coat (with furry insides).

“Look at mine,” Grandad said, from his flattened, red velveteen chair, hands held out in front of him.

We were gathered with a cup of tea. His, of course, was balanced on his jogging-bottomed leg, while below Charlie circled, threatening the mug’s stability. My mother’s gloves were on the table next to her own mug as she gently scratched away at her ring finger.

If I’m honest, it was hard to distinguish Grandad’s hands from how they usually looked.

They were big and red.

But then they were all year round. Even in summer, in place of those chilblain sores would be his unhealed and untended-to cuts from his garden.

Grandad’s hands were much bigger than mine or my mother’s. They were the cumulation of years and years of chilblains. He was the oldest I could point to and go, YOU! You gave me these hands! You gave me these Hickling hands.

-=-

I used to think of them as my own, private torture.

Agonising quietly, at primary school I would sit on them for hours, rubbing my swollen hands against the coarse cushion covering of the seat, numbing the pain away. Sometimes I’d even bite on them, a strange but soothing massage.

Teachers would look at my hands in horror and gasp.

First, they would see the overwhelming red colour of my fingers. Then they would see the purple patch stretching like a bruise over my knuckle, and they might wonder whether it was the bone itself that had swollen.

To somehow remedy the irremediable, I was given permission to wear gloves in class. They became a source of pride and individuality, those black and grey fingerless gloves. Under my cardigan, I thought they gave me the edge of a plucky young heroine like Tracy Beaker or Wednesday Addams. Though I always had to take them off because, somehow, they made the chilblains worse. So gloves or not, mine, my mother’s and my Grandad’s hands would be burning bright red till spring.

-=-

Grandad would pick me up every Monday from school. My parents both worked late and, as an only child, there were no older siblings to look after me.

By the brick wall at the back of the playground, he was a tall, proud but solitary figure, apart from everyone else. I could easily pick him out over the sea of fussing parents, waiting there with a quiet confidence.

As the bright colours of the classroom gave way to black tarmac on the way home, I knew what was coming. Following the usual script he would look down with a knowing twinkle in his eye. When I followed his gaze I would find with delight, but not surprise, the orange and purple Double Decker wrapper poking out of a pocket in his dark grey fleece.

“Can I have it now?”

“Oh go on then. Don’t tell your mum,” he would say, feigning a whisper.

I remember thinking that I should’ve felt embarrassed that other kids might see me holding his hand, but I never did. They were big, rough and warm. They were safe.

As we walked quietly, I fiddled with the remains of the chocolate bar.

"Are you alright?” I would say.

"Yes love, because I'm with my Mi Mi," would be his reply.

Grandad was a quiet man. He didn’t tell what I imagined were stories typical to other grandparents. There was much he didn’t share, like his time as a steelworker or as a union man at Northern Dairies – where he frequently won Milkman of the Year. Most, if not all, that I knew about Grandad (and indeed about my late Grandmother) had come from my mother.

But even then, she wasn’t sure if she knew everything she could. Once she told me how, as a child walking through Rotherham Market with Grandad, they had passed an unfamiliar man who he had quickly greeted and then continued walking past.

“Who’s that?” my mother had asked.

“That’s your cousin.”

“Who?”

“Oh, y’know!” he said, expanding no further for my shocked mother than, “works at the butchers.”

But at the same time, as she would also attest to, I already felt I knew, if not understood everything about Grandad just through his presence.

Once home, Grandad would settle into the plush cream seat by the radiator. I would take the hardbacked red seat by the window and around five he would make me dinner along the lines of beans, or spaghetti hoops, or maybe even crisp potato waffles in the oven.

He would stay till either of my parents came back. Then, after a quick survey of the garden to give his approval, he would drive back up the Parkway to Rotherham.

After I started secondary school, even though I was old enough to be alone, he still came sometimes. My life was changing, but he was the same. Never stopping long, but then he never did, just long enough for a tea, a walk up the garden, and for his calm to fill the house.

One day in year seven, I watched as hot steam rose from my microwaved spaghetti hoops and toast. My eyes wandered away from whatever John Wayne flick was on TV (they were all the same to me) and out of the window. I took a forkful of dinner, lifting it up to my mouth, when out the corner of my eye I saw them.

I realised instantly they were in the same school uniform as me and, yes, I did know them.

It was too late to duck away. They had already seen me.

It’s Mie! Mie. It’s Mie.

I froze, not knowing if I should try to move away, but certain I would never sit in the window again. The sound of their shouting pierced through the window, followed by laughter as they walked away.

I tried to breathe.

“Was that your friends?” Grandad asked.

He was sat upright, hands relaxed but firmly placed on the arm rests. I smiled at him, making a supplicating noise of neither agreement nor disagreement.

My spaghetti hoops hung off my favourite fork.

-=-

“Did he tell you what he said to the nurse?”

“No, what?” I said.

“She asked him to sit down and she told him, ‘We’re going to have to take some bloods now.’ And he only went and said, ‘Why've you run out?’”

“What’re you like!” I called to Grandad, who was laughing to himself in the other room. But in a quieter voice I asked my mother, “Is he, you know, alright though?”

“Well, love,” my mother said. “Well, you know.”

Grandad had the sharpest wit and sarcasm, and I’d try reflect it back at him. Sometimes I’d think, ‘Was that too far?’ but then I’d look at him, eyes closed and laughing.

“They just kept telling me they’d have to get some out soon or else I’d be full of holes. They can never get it first time. And I said I can’t help it with my circulation and diabetes and that. ‘You’ve got to keep calm,’ they said. And I thought, ‘I am bloody calm!’” Grandad said, after joining us in the kitchen.

“Look at my arms.” His multiple purple bruises matched his hands.

My mother put yet another prescription away in the kitchen cupboard and said, “Well he’s had everything done: cholesterol, blood pressure and his bloods. He’s had it all.”

“Ooh lucky you,” I said, raising my eyebrows at him as he nodded and raised his back.

My mother did odd jobs for him round the house, cleaning and sorting out. Often Grandad and I would sit in the dining room, both looking out into garden, lost in thought. My solitude saw his solitude. My quiet was his quiet.

My mother had let slip about how hard the first few years of secondary school had been for me. But he’d never brought it up. I felt like he trusted me to deal with it and, even though he wouldn’t say anything, he helped nevertheless.

“Are you hungry, love?”

“I’m always hungry, Grandad.”

“Have some of those pears then,” he said. “Oh, there’s apples in that fruit bowl.”

He thought a moment, “Oh, I know”. Disappearing away, from out of the kitchen came all sorts of ceramic noises. I waited, flicking through his TV magazine and reading the horoscopes and film listings.

When he came back, he had two plates in hand. Each had a tall towering stack of thick cream crackers. Between the five crackers, in total, were thick square slices of Edam cheese, layer upon layer. He said nothing as he passed it to me, like it was normal.

-=-

When I started university I didn’t see Grandad much apart from on screen.

We talked mostly on video call. I taught him how to use a tablet, and his afternoons filled with Dragon’s Den clips and Peter Kay. It was nice for him to connect to the things he loved, and for the people who loved him too.

I could be in between deadlines, cooking panicked bolognese or Pot Noodles, and I’d see a green circle next to his profile showing he was online.

I would prop my phone up against my kettle and let it ring.

“Mi Mi! Ayyy!” he would almost shout, his big reading glasses on and his hands in the peace sign we always did as a greeting. The calls didn’t last long. We wouldn’t talk about much other than what we both had in for dinner and what we’d been up to in the day.

“Not much,” he would say.

“Me neither,” I would say. But those calls got me through first and second year.

Then when I came home for Christmas, we reverted to normal again.

Grandad demonstrated, as we sat there, how he could only bend his fingers to a certain point. His index, no more than a gentle curve. Once the middle of my finger had swollen so much that I could only bend it into a hook. I remember showing it him proudly, though it couldn’t match his.

“Well you’ve still done the garden with them though, haven’t you?” my mother said to him.

I agreed with her, shaking my head jokingly, “Yeah, you!”

Not that I could criticise.

When I was younger, my mother always warned: "Don’t come waking me up at night saying your chilblains hurt if you’re not going dry your hands properly." But I was (and still probably am) always both too young and too impatient.

With her own hands dried thoroughly, my mother passed me the hand towel. I began a half-hearted performance of drying before chasing after her out of the bathroom.

Predictably, later that night, she was sat in the living room, lit by the light of the TV and the orange glow of the lamp in the far corner. I came downstairs, tears in my eyes, my hands held out. She looked at them and, despite the warning, took them in her own hurting hands that knew a history of skin splitting to the bone, electric blankets and soreness, and held mine.

The notes my mother and I compared about our hands were the same we three – myself, my mother and Grandad – would share.

“Anyway how’s your studying?”

“It’s alright,” I said. “I’m just really busy.”

Charlie chose this moment to rise from his bed and scuttle, claws scratching on the laminate floor as he ran out through the kitchen.

“Bloody in and out. In and out,” Grandad said, getting up. “He’s got the bloody ball out now.” But he was up like a shot.

When we went outside, though, Charlie quickly gave up on playing catch and lounged around under the bench, just happy we had joined him.

Grandad started the garden then, lifting heavy plant pots with ease. It was no challenge, really, for a man once accustomed to pouring out giant vats of liquid metal. In his pale blue fleece, grey joggers and those blue trainers that had seen better days, he picked ripe tomatoes. He washed and gave us them in a plastic bag, before sitting with a tea in the white plastic chair. When his tea eventually got cold or he got sick of it, he’d pour it out onto the bricks. It would run between them in little channels, pooling up in milky blobs. Charlie would then sweep in, licking it up.

“We like a cup of tea, don’t we, Charlie?” he said, stroking Charlie’s black fur. The golden watch on his wrist glinted in the sun as the nearby church’s bells called the hour.

“You hungry, Dad? Fancy owt for lunch?” said my mother, poking her head round the back door.

“I’m alright,” he said. “Oh but I’ll have some cake, though."

He got as big a slice as could be cut, before sneaking more. You’d never see it leave his hands as he always ate so fast. He couldn’t have tasted it, so I didn’t understand what he could have gotten out of it, other than the performance. To make me smile.

“We’ll need to get going now, Dad,” my mother said, damp tea towel still in hand from the lunch plates.

“Right, tek off then,” he said, getting up from his easy chair. “I’ll have to take my lad out.”

Pulling away, my mother wound her window down and we waved to him. I kept my eyes on him till the we turned the corner when he would be out of sight. He’d stopped waving and just stood, hands in his jogging bottom pockets, lingering for a moment longer.

Driving home, we passed the imposing church at the top of the hill. There was the pub and their massive plastic Santa, laid down all year and heaved up at Christmas; the bakeries, the auto shops, and the scrapyard. As we reached the Parkway – the strip of motorway that spans Rotherham to Sheffield – I looked out at the horses hiding behind the trees, the pylons and the wind turbines. I could picture Grandad on his walk. From the top of the hilly field he would look down to the factories where he used to work, dog treats, loose change and, if he could remember it, his phone jangling in his fleece pocket.

-=-

As part of my degree, in what should have been third year, I went on a year abroad to Japan.

That winter ended up being my worst for chilblains. No heating in my room meant they swelled up larger and more painfully than ever before. They were no longer even red. They were purple and ripping apart. I scolded myself for letting them get so bad and hoped they could be cured with menthol cream.

I wondered if he had chilblains that year. My mother did. I’d seen her throbbing hands on video call. They were the hands that lifted him up, dosed out medications, and poured out his pop. They were the hands that cared. Mine hurt from the heat radiating from my phone as I called to see him. I could see my fingers through my tears, held up in a peace sign, as Grandad weakly rested his own in a similar shape on his forehead. Hands, red.

There we were, for just a bit longer. Three generations of Raynaud’s together.

Everything had happened so quickly, successive illnesses in successive days. Then one especially cold night he was gone. I couldn’t fly back to the UK for the funeral so there was no closure, no family gathering, no Grandad: just me.

Since then, the weather still turns and the chilblains still form and worsen.

The heating at work or university still cooks them till they’re bright red raw.

And we still gnaw away at them, trying to urge that pain away.

-=-

I realised something, when I was home again in September. I boarded the train for a study week off. We passed through Doncaster and I sat unaware. Then gliding by, almost as in a dream, outside the window was the retail park: Primark, where Grandad bought his joggers; the Morrisons where he’d push the trolley round in his speckled black fleece; and the WH Smiths I’d long to go to before a visit to his house. It was the first time I’d seen it since I’d left for Japan. And from the train rather than the road, at first, I didn’t recognise it.

But as soon as I did, I turned to look. There, too, was the old church with its dark bricks, on the hill. Though I couldn’t see his street, as I told my mother later, I started crying.

“Ah, I know love,” she said. “I know.”

She took my hand in hers, holding it in her lap as we sat on the sofa.

“Your Grandad would’ve said, ‘Did you wave to me from the train?’”

“He always said that!”

“I bet the other passengers will have been thinking, ‘God someone doesn’t want to go home, is it that bad?’” We both laughed.

“That person’s seen Rotherham and wept!” I joked, squeezing her hand.

I looked down at our hands. Hand in hand, thumb by thumb.

Even without the redness, the chilblains, swelling and bursting open, our hands looked the same.

From the grooves on the knuckle, to the shape of the nail, even the length of the fingers.

They looked the same.

So I took a picture.

Each year, my Hickling hands look more like hers, more like his, more like mine.