Life and Laughing_ My Story - Michael McIntyre [4]
‘Hellooo Daaarlings!’ My glamour Gran.
My grandmother was undoubtedly a bright cookie, and her vocabulary soon increased enough for her to get by. However, her accent would still hold her back. Trying to buy haddock at her local fishmonger’s, she would ask politely, ‘Do you hev a heddek?’
Unfortunately, the fishmonger thought she was saying, ‘Do you have a headache?’
‘No, I’m fine, thank you, love,’ he would reply. He thought she was a nutty foreign lady enquiring after his well-being. He was only half right.
The headache/haddock misunderstanding occurred several times until my grandmother burst into tears in her blue Tudor house. She asked her husband through her sobs, ‘Vot iz it vith dis cuntry, vy vont dey give me a heddek?’
My grandfather, whose accent was no better, stormed round to the fishmonger’s. He called the fishmonger a racist and demanded to know why he didn’t give his wife a ‘headache’ when there were several ‘headaches’ in the window. Luckily, the mistake was realized before they came to blows, which would have resulted in one of them having a genuine ‘heddek’.
My grandmother soon became fluent in English, so much so that she became quite the best Scrabble player I’ve ever encountered. She was even better than the ‘Difficult’ setting on the Scrabble App for my iPhone and would repeatedly beat her second husband, Jim, a Cambridge-educated Englishman. She was not only a tremendously talented Scrabbler, but also fiercely competitive and uncharacteristically arrogant when involved in a game, often calling me a ‘loozer’ or claiming she was going to give me a good ‘vipping’ or exclaiming, ‘Yuv got nothing, English boy!’
I enjoyed countless games of Scrabble with her in my late teens and early twenties. Not only did I enjoy the games, but there were serious financial rewards. You see, the Cambridge-educated Englishman was loaded, having made a fortune as a stockbroker. After his untimely death, my glamour gran was left to fend for herself. So I would visit her, and we would play Scrabble. If I won, she would give me a crisp £50 note, and if I lost, she would give me a crisp £50 note. So you see how this was quite an attractive proposition for a poor student. A lot of my friends were working as waiters and in telesales to make extra money, whereas I was playing Scrabble with my grandma at least five times a week.
You might wonder where these £50 notes were coming from. Well, my glamour gran didn’t really trust banks, so when her husband died, she withdrew a lot of money and kept it hidden around her lavish apartment in Putney. I’d open a cupboard in the kitchen looking for a mug and find one at the back packed with fifties. I once found 400 quid in a flannel next to the bath and two squashed fifties when I changed the batteries in her TV remote control.
K5 E1 R1 R1 I1 T1 Z10
‘Triple vurd score and “E” is on a duble letteer, so that’s sixty-six points. Read it a veep, loozer,’ said my grandmother in a particularly competitive mood as she stretched her lead.
Now, although she was a wonderfully gifted wordsmith in her second language, she never learned how to spell many of the words. Often she would get a word that bore no resemblance to the one she was attempting. The best of which was undoubtedly ‘Kerritz’. It was a sensational Scrabble word. To use the Z and K on a triple letter score and score sixty-six – exceptional. The only problem was that outside of her mind the word was fictitious. It soon transpired that only the two Rs were correct and that the actual word she was attempting was ‘carrots’. I must