#granny aching

[cephalopod-celabrator]

I'm rereading Wee Free Men and I love Granny Aching. One of the narrative haunters of all time, truly. Autistic old sheep witch with a tobacco addiction who made crazy strong moonshine and who held off fairy invasion. We love to see it.

[elaurian-neuroqueering]

Reframing Our Traits

*Generalised Discworld Spoilers within!* I’m a big fan of Terry Practchett’s Discworld books. They’re funny, brilliant, different, and bring

"All witches are selfish, the Queen had said, But Tiffany's Third Thoughts said: Then turn selfishness into a weapon! Make all things yours! Make other lives and dreams and hopes yours! Protect them! Save them! Bring them into the sheepfold! Walk the gale for them! Keep away the wolf! My dreams! My brother! My family! My land! My world! How dare You try to take these things, because they are mine! I have a duty!"

(The Wee Free Men)

I get teary every time I read this passage. This was the first time I EVER saw someone frame selfishness as a weapon for good.

Like many autistic folk, I was told I was a horrible, selfish person a LOT when I was young. So much so that it destroyed my capacity to prioritise my own needs and made me doubt my worth on a daily basis.

The Wee Free Men was the first thing I ever came across that suggested that maybe selfish isn't the worst thing I could be, that it could even be used to make the world better. Make the whole world your own and fight for it, defend it, look after it.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realised how often Pratchett took Bad Traits™️ and made them a force for good in his writing.

Because he knew it's not about what we feel that matters the most, it's what we do. Let anger fuel a righteous fight, and let cowardice teach you how to keep yourself safe. And be selfish, make the hurting and unsafe YOURS and smack the Queen of the Fairies with a frying pan to defend them!

[iconuk01]

One of my favourite moments from the Tiffany Aching section of the Discworld.

Though she was known universally as "Granny", Granny Aching was eleven year old Tiffany Aching's actually Granny, and she loved her dearly, and missed her a lot when she died.

As time goes by, even though Witches are not common, or popular, on the Chalk (the part of the Discworld Tiffany is from), it transpires that Tiffany has a lot of potential as a witch, and she starts to wonder if perhaps Granny Aching hadn't been a witch too, in her own subtle way. Eventually she asks the witch who is currently mentoring and training her, Miss Level, about it in a slightly roundabout way.

‘Granny Aching . . . that is, my grandmother said someone has to speak up for them as has no voices,’ Tiffany volunteered after a moment.

‘Was she a witch?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Tiffany. ‘I think so, but she didn’t know she was. She mostly lived by herself in an old shepherding hut up on the downs.’

‘She wasn’t a cackler, was she?’ said Miss Level, and when she saw Tiffany’s expression she said hurriedly, ‘Sorry, sorry. But it can happen, when you’re a witch who doesn’t know it. You’re like a ship with no rudder. But obviously she wasn’t like that, I can tell’

‘She lived on the hills and talked to them and she knew more about sheep than anybody!’ said Tiffany hotly.

‘I’m sure she did, I’m sure she did—’

‘She never cackled!’

‘Good, good,’ said Miss Level soothingly. ‘Was she clever at medicine?’

Tiffany hesitated. ‘Um . . . only with sheep,’ she said, calming down. ‘But she was very good. Especially if it involved turpentine. Mostly if it involved turpentine, actually. But always she . . . was . . . just . . . there. Even when she wasn’t actually there . . .’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Level.

‘You know what I mean?’ said Tiffany.

‘Oh, yes,’ said Miss Level. ‘Your Granny Aching lived down on the uplands—’

‘No, up on the downland,’ Tiffany corrected her.

‘Sorry, up on the downland, with the sheep, but people would look up sometimes, look up at the hills, knowing she was there somewhere, and say to themselves “What would Granny Aching do?” or “What would Granny Aching say if she found out?” or “Is this the sort of thing Granny Aching would be angry about?” ’ said Miss Level. ‘Yes?’

Tiffany narrowed her eyes. It was true. She remembered when Granny Aching had hit a pedlar who’d overloaded his donkey and was beating it. Granny usually used only words, and not many of them. The man had been so frightened by her sudden rage that he’d stood there and taken it.

It had frightened Tiffany, too. Granny, who seldom said anything without thinking about it for ten minutes beforehand, had struck the wretched man twice across the face in a brief blur of movement. And then news had got around, all along the Chalk. For a while, at least, people were a little more gentle with their animals . . . For months after that moment with the pedlar, carters and drovers and farmers all across the downs would hesitate before raising a whip or a stick, and think: Suppose Granny Aching is watching?

But—

‘How did you know that?’ she said.

‘Oh, I guessed. She sounds like a witch to me, whatever she thought she was. A good one, too.’

Tiffany inflated with inherited pride.

'Did she help people?’ Miss Level added.

The pride deflated a bit. The instant answer ‘yes’ jumped onto her tongue, and yet…. Granny Aching hardly ever came down off the hills, except for Hogswatch and the early lambing. You seldom saw her in the village unless the peddler who sold Jolly Sailor tobacco was late on his rounds, in which case she’d be down in a hurry and a flurry of greasy black skirts to cadge a pipeful off one of the old men.

But there wasn’t a person on the Chalk, from the Baron down, who didn’t owe something to Granny. And what they owed to her, she made them pay to others. She always knew who was short of a favor or two.

‘She made them help one another,’ she said. 'She made them help themselves.’

In the silence that followed, Tiffany heard the birds singing by the road. You got a lot of birds here, but she missed the high scream of the buzzards.

Miss Level sighed. 'Not many of us are THAT good,’ she said.

Terry Pratchett - A Hatful of Sky

[stupidphototricks]

Drawing an unexpected line between Granny Aching and Death: Two beings who can't be anything other than exactly what they are, but who vaguely worry that they don't quite fit what their grandchildren want or need them to be.

Death, with the bony knees and the all-black garden and the logically-constructed tire swing. Granny Aching, with the boots and the pipe and the not looking like a china shepherdess.

Neither of them able to be the sort of typical doting grandparents who play and cuddle, but both finding their own quiet ways to connect.

Both of them loved and respected by their grandchildren but not knowing it, because the lack of communication goes the other way too.

These awkward family dynamics that are so real and beautifully imperfect.

[ardiebeaphotography]

From Wee Free Men

"... the hills had been silent on the day Granny Aching died.... It was no longer the silence of many little noises, but a dome of quiet all around the hut... "She missed the silence. What there was now wasn't the same kind of silence there had been before. Granny's silence was warm and brought you inside. Granny might sometimes have had trouble remembering the difference between children and lambs, but in her silence you were welcome and belonged. All you had to bring was a silence of your own.

"Tiffany wished that she'd had a chance to say sorry about the shepherdess.

"Then she'd gone home and told everyone that Granny was dead. She was seven, and the world had ended."

That final sentence is one of the most devastating things I've ever read.

Picture from: https://www.reddit .com/r/discworld/comments/b8cl4r

[featherlesswings]

I’m curious to know if anyone else has ever read The Wee Free Men and thought, “ohhh, Granny Aching was autistic.”? Because every time I reread the book, that’s what I think. Or otherwise neurodivergent. I think Tiffany is neurodivergent too, but probably because every time the narrative pauses to describe the way Tiffany thinks and does things, and the things that bring her comfort and make her feel smart… could be used to describe me as a child.

[pratchettquotes]

"I hear that goblins believe that the railway engines have a soul, elf," she said softly. "Tell me, what kind of soul have you? Do you run along your own elvish rails? With no time or place for turning?" She looked at the kelda and said, "Granny Aching told me to feed them that was starving and clothe them as is naked and help the pitiful. Well, this elf has come to my turf--starving, naked pitiful--do you see?"

The kelda's eyebrows rose. "Yon creature is an elf! It has nae care for ye! It has nae care for anyone--it disnae even care for other elves!"

"You think then there is no such animal as a good elf?"

"Ye think there is such a thing as a gud elf?"

"No, but I am suggesting that there is a possibility that there might be one."

Terry Prachett, The Shepherd's Crown

[robnebody]

I can’t recommend the Tiffany Aching books enough.

There are 5 books that span the preteen to young adult events of a young witch from a barren place known as The Chalk outside of Ank-Morpork. These are lesser known gems that I cherish deeply. They were written with young readers in mind, but they’re absolutely comfort food (particularly if you were raised by a Scottish granny like me- listening to Stephen Briggs read the Nac Mac Feegles make me homesick). They were all available via audio book from my library app (libby).