Gangsta Granny

Eleven-year-old Ben had a problem. Every Friday night, his parents dropped him off at his grandmother's house, and every Friday night, he hated every second of it.

Ben sat in the back of the car, arms crossed, as his parents drove him to what he called "the prison." He'd tried everything to get out of it. He'd begged. He'd pleaded. He'd even tried to fake a stomachache. Nothing worked. His parents were going to a live ballroom dancing show, and they needed somewhere to put him.

"I hate spending time with her," Ben complained from the backseat. "Her TV doesn't work, all she wants to do is play Scrabble and she stinks of cabbage!"

His parents actually agreed with him. That was the worst part. They didn't like spending time with Granny either. As Ben saw it, her house was just "a convenient place to dump him on a Friday night."

And so began Ben's weekly misery. He'd walk up to Granny's front door, and there she'd be—waiting at the window like she'd been standing there since last week. She was always waiting. She had no one else. No other grandchildren ever visited. No friends came by. Just Ben, once a week, whether he liked it or not.

And he did not like it.

Granny talked to him in a baby voice that made him cringe. She called bedtime "beddy-byes." Her hearing aid made a high-pitched squeak like a duck quacking. And the food—oh, the food. Cabbage soup. Cabbage pie. Cabbage-flavored everything. Ben would sit at her small kitchen table, stirring his soup, watching the clock crawl forward one agonizing minute at a time.

The conversation was just as painful. "Erm, it's delicious, thank you," Ben would say. "Good," Granny would reply. Then silence. Tick tock. "Good," she'd say again. Clink clink. "Good." The author writes that "Granny seemed to find it as hard to speak to Ben as he did to her."

They were stuck together, this old woman and this young boy, with nothing in common and no idea how to bridge the gap between them.

Ben's only escape was his secret passion: plumbing. While his parents dreamed he'd become a professional ballroom dancer, Ben spent his pocket money on *Plumbing Weekly* magazine. He'd hide it from his parents, ashamed of his dream. "Ben was as good with his hands as he was rubbish at reading," the author tells us, "and was absolutely fascinated when a plumber came round to fix a leak. He would watch in awe, as a junior doctor might watch a great surgeon at work in an operating theatre."

But Granny's house had no plumbing to fix. Just cabbage. Scrabble. And that broken TV that sat in the corner like a monument to boredom.

Late one Friday night, after Granny had tucked him in with her baby talk, Ben snuck into the hallway to call his parents. He begged them to come pick him up. They refused. They had to see the whole show. Ben hung up, frustrated, and crept back to bed. But as he walked, he noticed something: Granny's snoring had stopped.

He'd said all those things about her being boring. Had she heard?

The next morning, Granny was quiet. Sad. Ben felt a knot of guilt in his stomach. He didn't want to hurt her—he just didn't want to be there.

But here's where the story takes a turn. Because Ben's friend Raj, the owner of the corner store where Ben bought his plumbing magazines, saw something Ben couldn't. "Just because your granny is old, young Ben," Raj told him, "doesn't mean that she is boring. I am getting on a bit myself. And whenever I have met your granny I have found her to be a very interesting lady."

Ben didn't believe him. How could he? Granny was a textbook granny. She wore cardigans. She smelled like boiled vegetables. She was, in Ben's mind, absolutely, completely, totally boring.

But Raj wasn't finished. "Don't be too hard on her," he said. "We will all be old one day. Even you. And I'm sure your granny will have a secret or two. Old people always do."

Ben dismissed the advice. After all, what secrets could Granny possibly have?

This book is called *Gangsta Granny*, and it's about the surprising connections that form when we look past stereotypes and discover the hidden depths in people we think we know. It's about an eleven-year-old boy who thought his grandmother had nothing to offer but cabbage soup and Scrabble tiles, only to discover that the most boring person in his life had the most interesting story to tell.

But here's the question that hangs over Ben's Friday nights: What if Raj was right? What if Granny really did have secrets? What if the boring old lady waiting at the window had a life that would make Ben's jaw drop?

What if Ben was about to find out that he didn't know his grandmother at all?