My grandma Anna Wing, the original EastEnders matriarch

Before there was Peggy Mitchell, there was Lou Beale. The original EastEnders matriarch, she lit up the soap with her acerbic tongue and formidable presence when it launched in 1985. Within months, she was a household name. But I knew her better as Anna Wing, my outrageous grandma and the single most profound influence on my life.

It’s strange to have known someone but not really understood why everyone else seemed to know her. We’d be sat having lunch in a restaurant near her flat in west London and suddenly Dermot O’Leary would come in, take her hand and tell her what a fan he was – as if she were a Mafia boss and he was there to pay tribute – then dart out again.

From what I heard and read about her character, and from the few clips I’ve seen of her on EastEnders, she was a lot like Lou Beale, and nothing like her at all. Like Lou, she was the centre of the family around which our Sunday dinners and trips to the West End would revolve. Unlike Lou, Anna was warm and loud, with a seemingly infinite curiosity for what I was getting up to.

When I was 14, I began taking the train into central London after school every couple of weeks to visit her at her flat on Great Titchfield Street. I’d usually find her across the road, sat outside her favourite Italian restaurant. She’d start there on her own, but invariably someone she knew, or a fan, would walk past and she’d wave and invite them to join her for a glass (or bottle) of wine. There was more than one occasion when my dad would receive a late-night phone call from an exasperated waiter, asking him to come and help push her up the nine flights of stairs to her flat (there was no lift). I did my first shot (limoncello) with her.

She adored her grandchildren and would rave about us to anyone who’d listen – she’d have you convinced I was a child prodigy in art and music (“paints like an ANGEL”), and my younger brother was destined to be a star because he was “absolutely GORGEOUS”. She flirted with every man who came within winking distance.

open image in gallery

She once made Eamonn Holmes blush during a bit on pensioners keeping warm in winter – she lifted her top to show the importance of layering your clothes and flashed him by accident. On Loose Women, the presenters squealed as she claimed to have gone to a scientist to lose her virginity because he’d know about sex: “Would you mind seducing me?” she asked him. Terry Wogan asked if she’d been embarrassed to work as a nude model: “No, no, no!” she scoffed, beaming. “It was lovely.”

One of her favourite stories at dinnertime – or any time of day, really – was how, while she was working as an artist's model during the Forties, one painter had thrown down his brush, rushed across the room, nibbled on her ear and whispered: “You’re temptation.” Her smile was a toothy grin that stretched from ear to ear and was often followed by one of her two signature laughs ­– like a naughty schoolgirl – “tee hee hee!” or the deeper: “Haw haw haw!”

Whenever her EastEnders career was written about, a quote would resurface about how she regretted leaving after just three years. I never heard her say that, though – she loved to work, whether it was playing the grandmother in Garth Jennings' 2007 comedy Son of Rambow, or being an East-End gangster in the music video of a local band. I accompanied her on what I think would have been her last job, a radio voiceover, when she was 96.

She was a scene-stealer to the very end. She died in the early hours of the day I graduated from university (my parents waited until after the ceremony to tell me), aged 98, and her funeral took place a few days after I’d turned 20. I was a mess – the tears started the second Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien” came on at the service, and didn’t really stop until the next day.

The ever-brilliant June Brown, my grandma’s partner-in-crime on the show for those three years and off-screen for many more after that, turned up at our house for the wake and went straight for the sandwiches: “I know it’s awfully rude, but I’m so 'ungry” she said, peeling the clingfilm off a tray. I sat in the garden with Linda Davidson, who played the punk Mary Smith, and we talked about her Louboutin shoes and how I was going to be a music journalist. She was wonderful, and for a while she made me feel like the world wasn’t falling apart.

My grandma is everywhere, even now. Her name is scrawled in the battered second-hand copy of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and The Damned, which I’m currently reading on the bus to work. She’s in a picture on the wall of Sergio’s restaurant, where some of the waiters have worked long enough to still remember her. And she’s on the steps of the flat on Great Titchfield Street, where I go and sit sometimes, just for a minute.