'Kwaga Will Get You Sweetcorn' by Elisa Hill

The old woman sprang up. She thought to herself, “Why on earth is that cat scratching around in my garden? I don’t put bird food out any more." She ran out. The cat had a baby shrew in its mouth. She chased it away and the shrew escaped into the bushes. She went slowly back into the house. "Too cold to sit out there."
Most of her day was spent staring into the garden, watching the birds and their fights. She knew every one and watched them raising their chicks and flying away.
To the neighbours and their kids she was just the nutty old woman who lived with her daughter and shouted at cats. But inside her mind she relived her youth: the men she had known; the affairs she had gossiped about; her mother and her childhood in Dawley; her marriage to a Kenyan policeman and her life nursing..
A middle-aged woman stood and watched as her mother chased the cat. She knew her friends had thought she was crazy to keep her mother at home. “Put her in a care home, you deserve to live your life now the kids have their own lives." was the general consensus. She knew her mother was a shadow of the woman she had once been. All her life experiences -does she remember anything at all? What goes on inside her head. Who is she really? She was scared of the time when her mother would become incontinent. Her mother was already having nightmares and screaming at unseen people in Swahili.
A teenager looked up reluctantly from her laptop, "OK, I’ll stay with Nan while you go shopping; but I have to go out at eleven." Could she really cope with her grandmother any longer. She knew this dried up old woman, who was once vibrant, ran hospital wards, and lived through the Mau-Mau troubles in Kenya, was deserving of more; but she was so difficult to handle and imagined everyone was cheating her out of her money, accused her of having affairs and generally lived in a fantasy world. The young girl texted her friend, looked up and saw her grandmother escaping out of the back door again.
"The house boy hasn’t dug the pit. Kwaga will get you sweet corn for your tea."