In a While, Crocodile

If you had gone to Linlithgow on a particularly cold and windy day in October 2000, you might have come across something resembling a state funeral. The hearse had a police escort and people stopped as the hearse ambled past them. It seemed like half the town crammed itself into the small Catholic church for the funeral mass (despite the majority of the townspeople being either Church of Scotland or not religious at all). Even once all the seats were full, people were standing at the back, craning their necks to see the service. You’d have been forgiven for thinking that this funeral was for a celebrity. It was the funeral of a lollipop lady.

Her name was Teresa, officially, but everyone called her Tess - unless you were a child or teacher at the primary school, then it was Mrs Brown. Still, I know you’re wondering how a lollipop lady ends up getting such a brilliant send-off. Maybe you’re wondering if it was simply that she was born and bred in Linlithgow? Well, she wasn’t. She was from Co. Tipperary in the Republic of Ireland, and she became part of the ‘Forgotten Irish’ generation – that is, part of a generation of people where almost half had emigrated to other countries for work and many never went back.

Tess did spend the majority of her life in Linlithgow though. She’d married a local man that she met in London, and they’d relocated to Linlithgow to be near his family. They had five sons together, and in 1972, Tess became a lollipop lady, wielding her big lollipop stick against traffic like Gandalf facing off the Balrog. She carried sweets in her pockets for the schoolchildren, (Crème Eggs at Easter) and people have said that she always had a smile on her face or was laughing – except for the time some kids stole her stick, leading her to chase after them, and a week’s detention for them. Some people remember being gently scolded as children if they crossed the road where they shouldn’t, telling them, ‘I’d rather it was me that got hurt than any of you.’

She’d look after kids at the crossing point until she saw their parents turning up, and she crossed at least two generations of children across that one stretch of road. People remember being her being there when they were children, and then again when they took their own children to school; some of them ended up working in local shops in Linlithgow as teens and adults, still remembering Tess as always being ready for a blether and a laugh. As for the teachers, one former headmaster recalled how Tess would always greet him with a bear hug and three words that are now etched on the plaque of the memorial bench next to where she stood for work - ‘Hello, my honey’.

Tess was my Nana, and I was one of the many children she helped across the road on the way to school. I can still picture her now with her yellow hat perched atop her brown perm, her hi-vis jacket down to her knees and her furry Ugg-like boots, years ahead of the fashion craze that swept the UK in the early 2000s.

I used to visit at weekends, and the pair of us would set off for the shops on the other side of town, her shopping trolley in tow. If it was raining, she had a little plastic cover for her perms, but she always wore the same big, red coat with a golden brooch fastened on her left side, come rain or shine. This journey from her house to the shops was only about twenty minutes on foot, but with her it was an entire daytrip. You couldn’t get along the street without bumping into somebody who knew her and who wanted to say hello. By time we were halfway to the shops, it was usually time for lunch at the Coffee Neuk. Grandad must have wondered what had become of us every week! Sometimes we’d get a bus back if we’d been gone too long, and she always offered the bus drivers a banana or an apple. Everywhere she went in Linlithgow, you would hear, “Hullo, Tess! How’re ye daeing?”

She was sixty-nine when she died – still working, and she was about to go on a trip to London to visit her brothers. The last time I saw her, she was packing for the trip and lent me a book, telling me to give it back to her next time. I had to sit through an entire school assembly where the headteacher talked about my Nana and what her loss meant to everyone. After that, the world had a little bit less about it, at least for me.

Over the years since, I’ve met people who worked with her or knew her in some way, and when I mention her, their faces light up with the memory. I’ve even had people approaching me just to tell me something about her. The local Facebook page was full of memories from people to mark the 20th anniversary of her death.

“Tess was genuinely one in a million,” said one man, remembering her, and I’m inclined to agree. I’ve never met anyone quite like her since. She didn’t save the world, but she brought love and laughter to it, wrapped up in the cuddly wee package of an old Irish and new Scottish woman.

I’ve already written about how she used to say hello, but she always used to say for goodbye, “See you later, alligator.” And you know what? For someone who has never been religious, a part of me hopes I will, so Nana, this one’s for you - in a while, crocodile.