Nana’s log book

Text 1: Don’t Tell Mother, by Hal Brennan

An original novel extract.

Clearing Nana’s flat took three days, and by the third afternoon Ruth had stopped feeling anything at all. There was a system. Charity, tip, keep. Charity, tip, keep. The rhythm of it was a kind of comfort, like counting stitches, and she had grown expert at not looking too closely at what passed through her hands.

The biscuit tin was at the back of the airing cupboard, behind the spare blankets, where nobody would ever have reached without a chair. It had a Scottish terrier on the lid, faded almost to nothing, and it was heavier than biscuits.

Ruth sat down on the landing carpet to open it. Inside, wrapped in a silk scarf printed with tiny aeroplanes, there was a small blue book. On the cover, in gold letters rubbed thin by fingers, it said PILOT’S FLYING LOG BOOK.

She opened it. The pages were ruled into narrow columns, and the columns were full: dates, places, aircraft types written in a neat, upright hand that she knew at once, because it was the hand that had written her birthday cards for thirty years. Spitfire. Hurricane. Spitfire. Wellington. Hamble to Lossiemouth. Ferry flight. Weather poor. Weather very poor. Landed safely.

Nana had been afraid of ladders. Nana had not liked to drive on motorways. Nana had once refused to go on a pedalo in Tenby because the water looked too deep. Ruth sat on the landing with the book open on her knees and tried to make these facts lie down beside the others, and they would not.

Near the back was a photograph, small and square, its corners bent. A young woman stood beside the wing of a fighter plane, in trousers and a leather jacket, one hand resting on the metal as casually as if it were the bonnet of a car. Her hair was blowing across her face. She was laughing at whoever held the camera. She looked about nineteen, and absolutely fearless, and like nobody Ruth had ever met.

On the back, in pencil: Me, Hamble, June 1943. Don’t tell Mother.

Ruth laughed out loud, alone on the landing, and the laugh broke halfway through into something else. Downstairs the charity bags stood waiting in the hall, tied and labelled, full of cardigans. She thought of all the years Nana had sat in her chair by the window, knitting, watching the sky.

Explore how Hal Brennan uses language and structure to present Ruth’s discovery and how it changes her view of her grandmother.

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