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Was my grandmother a witch?
W hen I was young, I believed my grandmother was a witch. I’m not sure why; maybe it was her wiry grey hair, her wicked cackle and the mischievous glint in her steely blue eyes. Perhaps it was that she seemed to know what I needed or wanted before I had even realised it, as if by magic.
I once asked if she was a witch and she peered at me over her glasses, down her slightly crooked nose, and told me with a straight face that if I kept asking questions she would turn me into a frog. This was a little worrying, as she had a collection of ceramic frogs displayed in her living room. I started adding to it over the years, as if regular offerings might keep me from joining their ranks.
Not that I was ever in any real danger of being turned into a frog. She loved me very much. Whether she was or wasn’t a witch might have been up for debate, but her love never was.
Melinda Salisbury’s grandmother.
She loved the outdoors, and plants, and she shared that with me – with terrifying consequences sometimes. She told me to take care in the woods because of deadly nightshade, without explaining that I would have to eat the berries to be harmed. Instead, I imagined stems unfurling, reaching towards me, poisoning me if I dared to walk past them. She talked me through all the horrors that grew innocently in gardens; foxgloves, lily-of-the-valley, rhododendron, hydrangea. Don’t touch, don’t smell, don’t taste, she said. For a while, I was afraid to go near plants unless she was with me, trusting only her to keep me safe from their dark powers.
In fairness, she taught me about the safer ones, too – violets, roses, pansies, nasturtiums – and I love eating flowers to this day. She encouraged me to grow things, giving me cuttings from her plants, then reviving them without comment when I managed to nearly kill them. But flowers and plants were always more than something just to look at – they had a purpose. I still have one of the sachets we made with the dried lavender from her garden. We sewed it inside old bits of net curtains and stitched flower ribbon to it. It was to scent our knicker drawers, she told me. That, too, seemed like the kind of thing a witch would do.
My favourite times, though, were when we were on holiday in Wales. I would be summoned in the dead of night, my suitcase already packed, my uncle and aunt waiting in the car. As the sun rose, we would cross the border into a land that already reeked of magic before we even got to the waterfalls, fairy grottos, ancient woods, and shrines to saints. There was always a story about the places we visited – the monument to a dog that had been slain for killing a baby, only for the baby to be fine, saved by the hound from a wolf; the lake high in the hills that was home to a water witch; the hill that caged a dragon; another that Merlin slept inside.
Melinda Salisbury: ‘I remember standing in her bedroom saying “bloody Mary” in front of a mirror by candlelight.’
It made my childhood a weird mix of fantasy and reality that blurred the lines between fact and fiction. I expect that is the reason I once woke up in an earthquake and my initial reaction was: “Poltergeist!” Like her, if something falls over, I will blithely remark “ghosts” as I replace it. I once asked my nan if she believed in ghosts. “Who knows,” she replied. “I’ve seen some things …” She wouldn’t be drawn on what the things were, only that the world was full of mysteries. Later, when I became an amateur ghost hunter for a while, she took it in her stride.
She frequently announced to anyone who would listen that she “reared me”, which was more true than not. I remember sleeping over at her house a lot, staying up long past my bedtime, sipping the tiniest glass of Baileys while we watched television – often shows about serial killers (she especially liked poisonings), but if we found anything supernatural, we would watch that.
Once we saw a documentary on Arthur Conan Doyle’s obsession with the Cottingley fairies; afterwards, she told me about the fairies she had heard of, nothing like Conan Doyle’s pretty dancing things. The gancanagh – “Don’t talk to him if you see him” – the kelpie, the selkie and the bean sidhe (banshee). To help with my “education”, she subscribed me to a magazine series called The Unexplained, full of stories about alien abduction, fairies, vampires and werewolves. Another time, she subscribed me to a magazine that came with free rocks and gemstones, telling me they all had different properties; rose quartz for love, amethyst for protection.
She taught me some spells one Halloween; how to peel an apple in one go and throw the skin over your shoulder to learn the first initial of the man you were going to marry. I remember standing in her bedroom saying “bloody Mary” in front of a mirror by candlelight while she laughed delightedly. She told me about tarot, runes and Ouija boards – though with a warning not to mess around with them. When I was a teenage witch (who wasn’t?), she encouraged my use of candles and muttered offerings. I would seal coins and cake toppers in taffeta bags, and drip coloured candle wax on to them. “Are you doing a spell?” she would ask. “I hope it works,” she would reply when I confirmed her suspicions. Sometimes, months later, she would ask about the spell. I would have already forgotten what it was for.
Once, she meticulously cut out an offer from a magazine for a subscription book club that sold four books for 99p, as long as you bought another six books over the year. The books she thought I would like were the Element Encyclopaedias, one about witchcraft, one of spells, one on secret signs and symbols, and the last on magical creatures. “They’re your sort of thing,” she said, sure of herself. Sure of me, too. After all, she had been the one to foster this love of magic and the impossible in me.
She never did anything to dissuade me of my thoughts on her potential witchiness. In fact, she almost seemed to encourage it, with her homemade lotions and potions – if I complained of a headache, she gave me lavender flowers to rub into my temples or to sniff while pinching the top of my nose, stomach ache was cured with peppermint tea, toothache with clove oil, and earache with olive oil. They worked. Her remedies always worked. Now it seems obvious that these home cures were an inheritance from growing up without the NHS; she would have been 25, and already a mother, when it was introduced. But throughout my childhood they were proof that, despite her claim of being Catholic, she was really a witch.
Sadly, she died six and a half years ago. Part of me didn’t think she would – or could – ever die, but supposed that if she did it would be in a way as extraordinary as her life was to me, something more astonishing than the general old age and ill health that eventually took her. I think I always believed she would be imprisoned for a hundred years in a tree, or turn into a bird, or just step into the next life, shedding her old skin as she went. Something strange, and a bit spooky, but that felt like a door was still ajar and one day could be opened again. Something that better reflected the life she had led, and the hope and sense of possibility she gave to me. Something with a touch of magic to it.
The Scarecrow Queen, the finale in The Sin Eater’s Daughter trilogy by Melinda Salisbury, is published by Scholastic, £7.99. To order a copy for £6.79, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call on 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p on orders of more than £10, online only. Phone orders minimum p&p of £1.99.
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My favourite times, though, were when we were on holiday in Wales. I would be summoned in the dead of night, my suitcase already packed, my uncle and aunt waiting in the car. As the sun rose, we would cross the border into a land that already reeked of magic before we even got to the waterfalls, fairy grottos, ancient woods, and shrines to saints. There was always a story about the places we visited – the monument to a dog that had been slain for killing a baby, only for the baby to be fine, saved by the hound from a wolf; the lake high in the hills that was home to a water witch; the hill that caged a dragon; another that Merlin slept inside.
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