Miss Myrtle's Garden as an Ode to my Grandmother

I went to watch Miss Myrtle’s Garden, a play in which ‘life and death coexist’, with a friend and it was fantastic. The writing, the acting, and the stage management were sublime. What struck me was how personal it was, this was the first play that I had resonated with. It was beyond watching a play about blackness, it reminded me of my grandparents and that struck me to my core - so much so that I spent the rest of the play after the intermission in tears, tracing the tears on my wet face in the snatches of darkness and pressing my lips closed so that sobs would not escape. It wasn’t even a tragedy. It had pockets of comedy and sarcasm. It was a great play because it reminded me so much of my grandmother (my father’s mum) that it brought me to tears. It was surreal.

Miss Myrtle’s Garden and Miss Girly’s Kitchen

The garden is what grounds the play. Miss Myrtle’s garden is the site for the transfer of knowledge, between Myrtle and her husband Melrose, between Myrtle and her friendly Irish neighbour Eddie, from Eddie to Myrtle’s grandson Rudy who is the antithesis of a green thumb.

My grandmother’s ‘garden’ was her kitchen, the physical and symbolic space of her kitchen. The kitchen was the hub of all of our lives when my grandmother was alive. She was renowned for making plates upon plates of food, using it as a currency to extend her kindness to strangers and strengthen the existing relationships she had. She was the best cook I know. To this day, my mum and I laugh because there were certain cultural foods I downright refused to eat at home. But, I felt too awkward saying no to my grandmother and often found myself enjoying (scraping the plate) of meals that I would have rejected at home.

My siblings and I at my grandma’s house in Jamaica

My grandmother was the first person to give me a whole fried fish as a child. Understandably, at home, my older sister and I had to pick between the fish head or the tail. I was excited when she pointed to the plate of fried fish and asked me which one I wanted. I was waiting for her to cut it in half, but she told me to wait outside whilst she prepared my plate. She trotted out on her veranda and placed the plate on my lap. The plate itself was bigger than my little thighs. The red ants and mosquitos were having a field day, nipping and biting all over my legs. But I didn’t care, I didn’t want to disappoint her and hear the infamous “yuh fraid of di food”. I made a start and before I knew it, there was only the vertebrae of the fish and the crumbs of the festival that accompanied it left on the plate.

Almost every story I have about my grandmother has a connection to food, it was beyond the plate. I will never get to interrogate my grandmother’s relationship with food, why cooking reigned supreme in her life. But I can talk at length about the impact that she had on me. She was such a great cook, and it was like looking at my grandmother when observing the way Miss Myrtle operated. Miss Myrtle refused to provide Jason (her grandson’s boyfriend) with a cookbook, a Western way of sharing recipes.

Similarly, my grandmother didn’t share. That much I know because my dad doesn’t share and he learnt everything he knew about food from her. When I asked my dad for his steak recipe, he WhatsApp called me straight away and began shooting off instructions, with little regard for measurements or order. Whenever I tell my dad I want to learn a new recipe, he insists I join him in the kitchen. Learning is observing. It’s a fun day, consisting of me standing in the corner observing and moving to pass him the ingredients he needs. It was how he learned from my grandmother; he never fails to mention her famous black cake every Christmas, noting how grandma would remind him each time that he watched her to soak the fruits in rum for the entire year (I can’t tell you the rest because dad and grandma will have some stern words with me). Or how he and his siblings could tell grandma was in a bad mood because she was talking to herself loudly in the kitchen. It was a sign they had to find something outside of the house to occupy themselves otherwise they would be roped into a full day of cooking alongside a dissatisfied Miss Girly.

The kitchen was my grandmother's version of Miss Myrtle’s garden. It was a space for storytelling, instructing and bonding. I was always shooed out of her kitchen, I guess I was throwing off her feng shui. But seriously, the square of her kitchen, like the circle of Miss Myrtle’s garden, was her space to command. I only saw the end product, delicious Jamaican food delivered on a decorated plate to me on the veranda. This was her way of showing her love, relieving me, my siblings and my cousins of any duties and allowing us to delight in her hard work.

Perhaps it's because I’m a British-Jamaican, but the idea of a family serving the guests at nine-nights and the funeral service of their loved one is not something I completely understand. At my grandma’s nine night, this disconnect reared its head; I was already in a weird headspace being in her house but her not being there. And whilst trying to confront that, guests were asking when the champagne was coming out or complaining that they were being served fish and bread as opposed to curry goat and rice. Admittedly, when people speak about me, patience is not one of the virtues that they refer to. But I found myself connecting, or at least trying to, with the people at the nine night because it's what my grandma would have wanted.

Her life was about loving others, about serving her community and making its members smile, making their lives lighter. All that she asked of her family who survived her, was for us to arrange a celebration of her life, with food overflowing. I’ve always appreciated the joy and the light that surrounds the transition of individuals in Jamaica because it emphasises finding jubilation in the mourning. For my grandma, her jubilation, was her community being taken care of by being fed when they assembled to remember and celebrate her.

A great question that Miss Myrtle’s Garden asked of me was what happens to an individual when most of their community is dead or dying. My grandmother survived some of her children and was a widow for more than a decade. For people my age, there’s a general consensus that the generations before us understood the weight of community and that they did it better than we do. I’m inclined to agree because my grandma is a paragon of this. Her community was not just limited to her family, the people in her immediate circle. Her community stretched far and wide. She was such a formidable pillar in not only her neighbourhood, but in the community that she created for herself. Nothing can replace or replicate the love you have for your children, or the romantic love you have for your life partner in your spouse. But I assume the bonds she forged beyond and the love she extended indiscriminately created groups that she could lean on, to ease the pain on the days that grief was too hard.

Knowing

A poignant theme threaded throughout Miss Myrtle’s Garden was the idea of knowing. Her grandson Rudy is constantly in the pursuit of knowledge; to find out more about his deceased father, to know more about his grandparents’ lives before they migrated to England, to learn how to garden to follow in his grandparents’ footsteps. I’ve felt a similar way. I often pester my mum, my aunts and my grandmother, inviting conversations about life before me over meals to learn more about them. To compare our lives, to recognise my fortune and join them in reckoning with their past. My mother and I are proud voyeurs of the past. We feed off revisiting it, picking it apart until we can feel the string of memories in our hands. My dad is different. And this play added to my cumulative understanding of his relationship with the past.

It can be so painful. When people who were such significant figures in your life cease to exist, it becomes something that can only be opened on the right occasions. When the string of a chord sounds just right, when the back garden is a picture of how things used to be, when a recipe tastes exactly how Miss Girly taught it. This is how my aunt and I bond over memories of my late grandmother. It’s too painful to talk about frequently, but some days, when her heart eases up just a little, and the longing is too much, she will fall into the most wonderful stories. I am introduced to examples of the enviable dedication and adoration my grandparents had to each other, to her early days in England and the sadness she felt being away from my grandparents and her daughter (my cousin). She’ll narrate how my grandma used to call her at a specific time everyday, and it never changed in all her years that she lived here; from Birmingham to all over South East London.

Children of immigrants, first generation to fourth generation are often harmlessly teased about not knowing where they come from. When I play Beres Hammond in the car, I garner calls of “weh yuh know bout dis” or when I make the fatal mistake of admitting that I cannot make a lot of traditional Jamaican dishes, I am encouraged to get more in touch with my roots. And I enjoy these reminders because I love my culture; there is so much more for me to discover. However, there are aspects of our parents’ past, of our beloved aunts and uncles’ past, of our homeland’s history that are sometimes uncomfortable to sit and dissect.

I think the play brought this out beautifully. It demonstrated that the pursuit of knowledge is a two way street, it has to be mutual between the parties that are imparting and receiving knowledge. Rudy has all these questions that intellect cannot answer, that he cannot solve with his lesson plans. The only person left to help him is his grandmother, Miss Myrtle, but she cannot. It's not that she refuses to, she truly cannot revisit her past. It is too painful. In those moments, where Miss Myrtle denied Rudy an entry into the past, I was reminded of my own family. Of how it's not a personal choice, but more of an instinct, a matter of protection. Going back into the a world, where things are different, and people who are no longer with us exist. It's a reminder of everything that you have ever lost, which is a substantial amount of emotional turmoil.

It's not a problem for there to be a solution. But it certainly begs the question, how do we remember and connect to our past when the only people who have the capacity to help us are burdened by that very past? How do we get to learn? Moreover, can we ever make the past digestible, to access a version that does not sting as much and remind us of what is no longer?

Grief

Grief is like love. Written about, agonised over and yet, I feel like words can never do it enough justice. There are not enough analogies to cover how expansive and painful grief truly is.

When my grandmother passed away, what stung me the most was the vacuum in the future, there were so many things that we would not get to do. I only saw my grandmother once as an adult, she never got to see my graduation picture go up on her beloved mantle which showcased all of her children and grandchildren, I never got to hear the stories of her youth and what Jamaica meant to her as a woman born in the colonial era. Watching Miss Myrtle’s Garden doesn’t erase that, it is a pain that is everlasting. But, it gave me the opportunity to reimagine my grandmother in her last days, to agonise with her over her decline, her loss and her grief. To capture my grandparents and the beauty of their love.

As I mentioned earlier, I was moved to tears by the play. There was a particular scene in the second act of the play that made it feel like I was watching my grandparents before me. It was beautifully haunting. I don’t remember my grandfather, I was really young when he passed away, and so all I have is the stories of the people who were privileged enough to know him intimately. He was a great man, and watching Miss Myrtle and her husband Melrose transformed my grandfather from being only a wonderful figment of my imagination to someone I could physically see. My heart felt like it was being closed in fists when I watched Miss Myrtle and Melrose share their last dance whilst she was in delirium.

Witnessing such a decisive, independent woman deteriorate across the duration of the play reminded me of my grandmother. Whilst she had her community and her children, her life partner was gone and had been gone for years. He was not there to hold her hand in her last days, and in the first few months of my grief, it made me inconsolable.

Melrose visiting Miss Myrtle as a vision, whether that was an emblem of her declining mental state or a nod to beliefs of African spirituality amongst black Jamaicans, provided me with a strange comfort. That perhaps my grandfather appeared to my grandma; that he stroked her face and held her hand as she lay in the hospital bed. One of the main things that bring me peace with my grandmother’s death is that she is at peace, she is reunited with my grandfather and her children - the pieces of her that she had to live without whilst she was with us as a mortal on Earth.