Let's Hear it for the Grannies, by Saviour Pirotta

I was at The Big Malarkey festival in Hull this week and a kid in the audience pointed out that I seem to include grannies in most of my stories. She wasn't wrong: I do have grannies in nearly all of my books. For me grannies are a leitmotif. They represent love, kindness, wisdom, empathy and life-experience, all qualities my real-life gran had in spades.

I was very close to my maternal gran. (I never knew my paternal gran. She died when my dad was only ten, but that's a whole different story, for another time). On most schooldays I'd go over to her house a few doors away from my own home, read to my bedridden grandpa and then have tea. This was invariably a generous tomato paste and olive oil sandwich with tuna, olives, capers, pickled onions and hardboiled eggs. Granny and I would eat it sitting among her potted geraniums on the roof terrace, watching Red Admirals sunning themselves on the wall across the alleyway. 

Illustration by Jane Ray from The Unicorn Prince

Granny passed away the same year I emigrated. I like to think she died of a broken heart - she often said I was her favourite grandson - but she'd had high blood pressure for years.  But the memories of those long balmy evenings spent watching the sun set behind Mount Etna across the sea have never faded. Even today, 42 years after her passing, I still talk to my gran when I feel things getting on top of me, and I always feels she answers with words of sage advice.

I grew up at a time and in a culture where old people were looked up to and respected. They were seen as the bedrock of society, passing on their wisdom to the younger generations, whether that involved advice on marital difficulties or something innocuous like learning to make fresh pasta.  I like to keep that tradition alive in my stories so, yes, Granny always pops up in a lot of my books, in one guise or another. There's Grandma Nabiha, the tribal head of a Bedu nation in The Golden Horsemen of Baghdad; there's Cook in The Ancient Greek Mysteries, who's not the protagonists' actual birth grandmother but takes them under her wings (and plies them with delicious honey cakes).  And there's a herbalist, wise-woman Granny in The Unicorn Prince who infuses the story with familial magic.  And my next Granny? Can't divulge much about her just yet; let's just say she's going to be a seafaring angel with broken wings. But, again, that's another story for another time...

Saviour's latest book The Jackal Graveyard is out now. Follow him on twitter @spirotta and on instagram at saviour2858.