Kafui Dey interviews Grandma Mavis Hyde

A Life Without Borders: A Conversation with Grandma Mavis Hyde

She has been in Ghana for over sixty years. She drove a trotro called Follow Me along the beach road to Jamestown when Accra was still mostly trees. She attended the All-African Peoples' Conference. She met Kwame Nkrumah, Emperor Haile Selassie, and danced at the state banquet when Queen Elizabeth visited. She cleaned toilets at the United Nations in Geneva and listened through the earphones when the sessions turned to Africa. She received her first hug at thirteen. She is ninety years old and still has a dream. Her name is Grandma Mavis Hyde, and she has lived on this land in Community 25, Accra, for decades — not as a visitor, not as an expatriate, but as someone who belongs here completely.

On Turning 90

She feels pretty good. She is reading the same sunshine as everyone else, sitting in a chair, thinking. On her birthday she wanted to go to the sea — her husband Eddie's ashes are in the water — but the people around her had already organised food and invited some of the physically challenged people she works with, including amputees who came from as far away as another African country to be with her. She doesn't particularly like parties arranged for herself. What she wanted was to share it more widely with the world.

What she has learned in ninety years, she says, is the importance of knowing who allows you to be here and who gives you the strength to be here. All credit goes to her Lord. And after that: action. Not just words. A smile, a hug, a positive thing done — these cost nothing and change everything.

The Orphanage: Before the First Hug

Her earliest memories are of the orphanage. She cannot remember where it was — she thinks perhaps Lichfield — but she has deliberately brushed those memories away. You can only take so much pain before it takes you out, she says. If you hold it all, you cannot give love or kindness or a smile. So she let it go.

What she remembers is that in those days, prospective foster families were given photographs of the children — they were called penny a smiles — and families would come to look and choose. She was rejected once or twice and sent back. One old lady, however, did not want a photograph. She just asked for the girl and said bring her. A car dropped Mavis at the door. Nobody answered. A neighbour named Auntie Mary came running out and took her in until the Watson family returned.

The Watsons — she will always call her Grandma and Grandpa — were the first people who ever hugged her. She was thirteen and a half. Nobody had held her before that. That is why now, she says, when she sees anybody, she has the audacity to touch them and hug them. That first hug at thirteen is still with her today.

The Watson Home and Learning to Read

The Watsons had never had children. They had been waiting for a gift from God. Grandma Watson was the head cook at the local school in Kidsgrove, Staffordshire, and the household ran on fresh produce from the garden — apples picked from the trees, potatoes dug from the earth, jam made from scratch, bread baked in the big old-fashioned fireplace. It was warmth Mavis had never known.

She could not read when she arrived. She could not write her name. Her vision was already poor and she could not see the blackboard. She does not remember going to school before the Watsons — if there was schooling in the orphanage, she has no memory of it. Grandma Watson taught her herself. Near Christmas one year, someone gave her a book — beautiful pictures on every page, chosen because the grandmother knew she could not yet read. Mavis cried. And decided she would learn. She did, quickly. The Watson household gave her two shillings and sixpence a month in pocket money. She bought sweeties, a treat for the dog they had given her, and five cigarettes for the old man's pipe.

She stayed with the Watsons until around twenty, then left on a train going nowhere in particular — the way of many orphanage children of her generation, young and ready to fly and do all the naughty things they had never been allowed to do. She ran away for space, she says. She ran away to breathe. What followed she keeps private. Out of the badness, she says, came a lot of goodness.

Finding Faith: Billy Graham and the March to Wembley

She found Jesus at Cliff College in the UK, through a Billy Graham crusade. Britain was alive with it, she says — churches full, people marching from Manchester to London, tens of thousands filling Wembley Stadium, singing because of the faith and because of the freedom that had just returned after the war. She was about nineteen. She queued for miles just to reach him. He told her she was saved. She asked if she could now do what she wanted. He told her to try not to do too many naughty things. She said she would do her best.

She still prays every day. At every airport she travels through, the first place she goes is the prayer room — whatever nationality or religion, they are all there together in the same small space. If Jesus accepted her, she says, there is no reason the world cannot come together too.

Ghana: A Dance, a Trotro, and a Burning Fringe

She met her first husband on a dance floor — somewhere near Dewsbury, she thinks. He was Ghanaian, studying in the UK, fifteen or more years her senior. He could dance. He said he could take her to Africa. She had a feeling about Africa — she must have read something, seen something, felt something. She decided: I'll go. I'll follow you.

They married in Liverpool, near the cathedral. She boarded the plane to Ghana wearing every sample of Dior and Chanel from the airport lounge. She must have smelled extraordinary on that flight. She landed in a little wooden hut of an airport terminal on a rough runway, and smelt Africa for the first time.

The culture shock was complete. She asked to go to the supermarket for a chicken. He took her to the market. The chicken was alive. He said she would have to kill it, clean it, and cook it. She refused and found someone else to do the killing. Then she turned on the kerosene stove for the first time, turned the knob, struck the match, and burned off her fringe, her eyelashes, and the front of her hair. It was sore. That was Ghana.

They lived first in Mprobe, in the trees. No electricity. She navigated the house by candlelight and had a few accidents. One day a large snake fell from a tree onto the top of their car. She did not get out for several hours.

Follow Me: Driving the Trotro

She needed to earn money. So she bought a trotro. Blue, she thinks. She bought it from a firm opposite Kingsway stores that sold them. She had not properly learned to drive, but there was almost no traffic on the roads in those days, and she learned as she went. Her route ran along the beach road past Korle Lagoon to Jamestown. The fare was three pennies — which is where, she informs her interviewer with satisfaction, the word trotro comes from. Three pennies. Tro.

She called her mate Bloody Fool, which was not his actual name but a description she found accurate when she discovered he was skimming her threepennies. Her strategy was to look at his fingers and ask how much glue was on them. The passengers, initially startled to find a white woman driving their trotro and occasionally shouting naughty words in Ga she had been told were greetings, eventually accepted her. When they called her obruni, she told them to get out. Then she let them back in for free.

GIS, Dresses, and a Dutch Jeweller

Walking around Kingsway stores one day in a dress she had made herself, with her baby daughter Kwillie Koko dressed in a matching one, she was noticed by a man who asked if she could make more. She borrowed hand machines, employed a few girls, bought African cloth, and was selling dresses every week. At the Ambassador Hotel she met a Dutch woman named Ata who made jewellery and was leaving her job at the Ghana International School. GIS was looking for a nursery nurse. Mavis had the qualification. She got the job immediately. She worked from nine to twelve, hugging children who arrived crying, teaching them songs, doing story time, dancing. The children of diplomats, embassy staff, Ghanaian professionals — all nationalities together. She loved every minute.

The State Banquet, Nkrumah, and Haile Selassie

She was at the state banquet at the Ambassador Hotel when Queen Elizabeth visited Ghana. She does not know quite how she got there, but she was there. Nkrumah walked in two miles ahead of where his body was, she says — the voice, the charisma, the presence going before him. People were pushing and shoving just to be near him. The music everywhere. The Ghana food served alongside the silver service. She had never seen so much food in the world. She just wanted to get near Nkrumah — she says she would have pinched his bottom if she could have reached him.

She also attended the first All-African Peoples' Conference and met Emperor Haile Selassie there. She describes him as sugar candy. Very dainty and with a quiet power that still moves people decades later. His daughter came to visit Mavis at GIS and offered to spend a day in the nursery — she said fine, as long as you don't mind if a bird poos on your knickers. The daughter was a lovely girl, she says. Lovely lady.

The Coup, the Gun, and the Miracle

She felt the wind of change in Ghana before the 1966 coup. She smelt it in the people — saw tear drops, felt the anger of the fishing communities when foreign trawlers came and took the fish, heard the whispers to keep your voice down. She believes Nkrumah wanted to do too much too fast, and that giving so much of Ghana's reserves to other African liberation movements left the country without the foreign exchange to sustain itself. The Exchange Control Act of 1961 followed. The essential commodities disappeared from shelves. The coup came.

When it did, she was at the Star Hotel with her perfume and her cigarettes, trying to reach her children who were in boarding school. She was dragged off the steps by her long blonde hair, thrown into the back of a car with two soldiers and a gun at her head. She had no idea where they were taking her. She said her naughty words. The soldier asked if she knew what she had said. She asked him what he was doing in Ghana with a gun if she was not allowed to be there. By some miracle she still cannot fully explain, they drove her to the Ghanaian High Commission at the roundabout and left her there unharmed. She was so blinking lucky, she says.

Her children were eventually brought to England after long fights for their British citizenship. One became a real estate millionaire. Another works at a high level in the NHS and loves every Ghanaian patient in her care. Her son Jason runs Mr Music Man in Canterbury, a shop full of African music and high life records that old people travel to hear.

Geneva, the UN, and Skiing Without Swimming

After leaving Ghana under difficult circumstances and being rescued and cared for by the British High Commission, she took a Eurail pass — £28 for unlimited travel — and ended up in Geneva near Lake Lausanne. She did not speak French or German but she found work cleaning toilets at the United Nations. She kept the earphones close and when a session touched on Africa or freedom, she would find someone to swap shifts with and go and listen. Between toilet cleaning she was invited to everything because she was young and attractive and unafraid of anything. She went water skiing without knowing how to swim, nearly drowned, and went skiing in the Alps without knowing how to ski. She learned the hard way. She always does.

DESO: The Land, the Dream, the People

DESO stands for the first letters of her four grandchildren's names. It is a piece of land in Community 25 she bought from TDC, and she has refused to sell it despite offers of large amounts of money. It belongs to God, she told the man with the dollars. It belongs to the people. It is not for sale.

Her disability work began when she saw a man crawling on his hands and knees outside the post office, begging. She found out there was a disabled centre with wheelchairs. When she went there, she was told the garage was empty. She knew it was a lie. She went home and started recycling — she and her husband Eddie rented a warehouse outside Canterbury, formed an organisation called DESO, and began shipping wheelchairs, crutches, hearing aids, sewing machines, Braille books, walking frames, and anything else that could help physically challenged Ghanaians. The name came from her grandchildren: Dela, Emma, Sylvia, Olivia.

One of the people she helped was Charles Tay, an amputee she met on the street who had a dream to be a powerlifter. She got the application forms from the Paralympic Committee in the UK. She got him to England. She got him to Cardiff for the IPC. He represented Ghana at the 2012 Paralympic Games. She and Eddie glowed. He is now travelling West Africa teaching amputee athletes how to access the Paralympic system for themselves.

The Walk of Hope — which she helped organise with Herbert Mensah over many years — brought people with wheelchairs, crutches, blindness and limb differences into the centre of public life. She brought the blind footballs that make sound inside so players can follow them. She organised the Ashanti Marathon participation for Charles's team. She supplied country music cassettes to Father at the leprosy colony. She brought sewing machines to women living with HIV in the villages and taught them to make and sell. She made condom belts and earrings for an AIDS Foundation fundraiser. She fought the deaf education system. She is still fighting.

Her husband Eddie, a Yorkshire man who never saw colour, died in Tema General Hospital two and a half years ago in a waiting room with fifty or sixty other patients, none of them seen by a doctor, all sitting in dirty wheelchairs. She lay beside him for a few hours after he passed. She is still angry about the conditions. She is still doing something about it.

What Ghana Gave Her

She did not feel real until Ghana made her feel real. She was nothing — she had no parents, no name she knew the origin of, no place she belonged — until this country and its people made her feel like a person. She arrived and was called an obruni, and she fought back, and they laughed, and she made them laugh, and she stayed. The high life music at the Star Hotel in Jamestown. The state banquet with Nkrumah. The salt at Takoradi shining like diamonds. The trees of Mprobe. The bats hanging in the dark. The trotro route to the beach. The feeling of Ghana is medicine, she says. Each letter is magic.

She wants her ashes scattered here when she dies. She wants the DESO land to become a botanical garden — every tree, every herb, every medicine plant in Ghana growing on this small plot in Community 25. A place where people can come and sit with their Bible or their Quran, bring their baby, eat a piece of fruit, hear the birds, feel a breeze. She is still planting toward that dream. She is still asking for trees.

Her Final Word

Know who your God is. Follow your faith. And if you can help someone as you pass along — just one person, even a little — your living will not be in vain. That is all she has done. That is all she is trying to do.

She is ninety years old. She still has feet. She still has a dream. She still has Ghana.