Grandad

A real life story and tribute to my lovely grandfather

“You’ve visited France? Really?”

I’m saying with glee. My small, square hand grips the green fabric of the armchair as I hang off my grandad’s every word.

“What was it like? Tell me! Tell me about France!”

I quiz, looking up at him in awe.

It’s 1982 and suddenly, my grandfather feels like the most cultured person in my entire world.

Neither of my parents have travelled overseas. They don’t even have passports. Nearest I get to ‘abroad’ is an episode of ‘Wish You Were Here’ once a week.

“Well…… I don’t remember much, it was a long time ago.….”

He says in the calm, quiet manner I am accustomed to.

Grandad looks much older than his 66 years. His skin is the colour and consistency of a well done chicken leg. I struggle to imagine him as a young man. Even the photographs of him holding me when I was a baby, show him bald.

“Go on…..what? What do you you remember?”

I persist.

“Julie! Stop asking him about it!”

scolds Grandma.

“Why?”

“Because it’s not like he was over there on his holidays, is it?”

Mum chips in.

“It was WORLD WAR TWO!”

True.

But war means very little to an eight year old.

My best understanding of it comes from ‘Allo Allo’ on telly - a programme comprising of silly airmen, cafe bars with glamorous waitresses and important sounding hushed conversations about the ‘Fallen Madonna with ze big boobies’.

I do not and cannot conceive of the horrors of the battlefield.

“Those who fought in the war don’t like to talk about it. It wasn’t nice, you know.”

Grandma adds.

But I want to hear about it. I want him to tell me about people speaking French, about the food…..How had he got to France? Had he gone by plane?

I don’t say this.

Instead, I take the hint and leave him to his horse racing.

Grandad is the gentlest of souls.

When you grow up in a house where your parents are constantly at each other’s throats, you look for examples of how relationships are supposed to function.

Role models.

My maternal grandparents more than step up.

My ‘other’ grandparents are divorced.

Until recently, I’d thought this was only something royals and Americans did. My logic? Well, I knew that Henry VIII had been divorced and every episode of Dallas seemed to involve someone talking about it, yet no-one ever mentioned it on Coronation Street, did they?

Grandad has blue eyes. My grandma’s are green. Like all old people’s eyes, they are covered by a cloudy film that I assume, must be life’s cobwebs. I visualise their iris colours merging like a beautiful ocean when they first saw each other. The story of how they met is one I have heard recounted many times.

“I was on holiday in Rhyl with my friend, that was where he lived, Crescent Road……..”

This is usually followed by the story of how his father regularly squandered the housekeeping money down at the Conservative Club on booze.

Grandad is staunch Labour.

“And when we got married, someone he worked with told him - Frank - you must make your home your social club…….and he did!”

These days, they both wear glasses.

Grandad’s are the sort of glasses that should be called ‘spectacles’ because they somehow seem more important. He has a voice like Professor Yaffle in ‘Bagpuss’. He reminds me of Professor Yaffle in another way too; he’s very clever. Could he be the cleverest person in my entire family? As I observe him completing his ‘Daily Mirror’ crossword, I think so.

“Blue dye? Hm……..Woad!”

he says confidently, spelling out the word as he pens it in.

“W-O-A-D”

I love the stuff he knows. Sometimes, he consults his Collins Gem dictionary. The paper is the thinnest I’ve ever seen, like fly wings.

Grandad sharpens pencils with a knife.

An ACTUAL KNIFE! When he hands you back your sharpened pencil, the tapered end does not resemble the uniform cone shape one gets from inserting it into a sharpener. It is transformed. You suddenly notice the wood and relate it to a tree. You observe the texture of the graphite tip, its depth of colour. As he scrapes at it with his gleaming blade, shavings do not curl obediently like tired animals by firesides. They leap up and spark the air like mischievous sprites. I watch mesmerised as my grandfather becomes a Ladybird book woodcutter or cobbler, and I, a saucer-eyed Rose Red.

His thumb is mishapen, his nail deformed. It’s something I always notice when he sharpens pencils. Later in life, I will find a scarred thumb comforting and nostalgic when it appears on another man.

A man nothing like my grandad.

Grandad has sprawling checked handkerchiefs the size of flags. I consider that they would surely be much better utilised as summer bedding for my Sindy and Barbie.

I love my dolls.

I’ve recently acquired Fluff, ‘Barbie’s cuddly kitten’. I already have Custard, Strawberry Shortcake’s scented companion. The 1980s is the golden age for dolls having pets. Fluff, is dazzling white. Does Barbie choose her feline friends to match the whites of her eyes and teeth, I wonder?

Fluff, does not feel fluffy, nor does she feel like an actual cat. I know this because I’ve stroked my friend Hannah’s tortoiseshell. Fluff, instead, feels like flocked wall paper. Handling her, is a sensory treat though, for as well as her suede-like coat, the underside of her paws are rough to enable her to grip the scratching post.

Today, I have brought along Fluff to show my grandparents.

She’s in the cat carrier, which like all Barbie’s accessories, is bubble-gum pink. Her wide green eyes plead with me and I decide I simply must take her out into the garden. I’m sure she would love to feel some cool grass beneath her paws.

I set my things out on the small rectangular lawn. Grandad does the gardening. There are rose bushes in front and my favourite is called ‘Blue Moon’. It is the shade of one of Cinderella’s gowns. There are dahlias too. Their centres look like something my spirograph would produce, a series of impossible curves. Mum doesn’t have dahlias because “they’re always full of bloody earwigs”.

Sometimes, my grandparents reminisce about the plots my mum and her brothers had when they were children.

“This is where your mum’s little patch was”

I’m told as I’m taken to a shaded area at the top of the garden. Not a great spot, but I suppose that’s what happens when you’re the youngest and the best ones have already been taken.

We have a large back garden at home. There is a shed and swings, yet I have no patch of my own to do as I wish with. I ask my mum for one, but am told no, I can’t have one. If I had a patch, I wonder what I’d do with it.

Sunflowers.

I muse. I think I’d plant some sunflowers.

“Why don’t you take em with you to the shop, Frank?”

Grandma suggests.

A clatter of shoes later and my brother and I are ready for the walk to Tommy Walker’s paper shop next to the Bookies. Sometimes my cousins come too and we all get to choose some sweets or chocolate. Each week, I choose something completely different to the week before. Each week without fail, my cousin Melanie will choose a ‘Twix’.

Whilst there, Grandad buys his pipe tobacco too. He keeps it in a round, yellow tin. I still don’t really understand the concept of smoking. How was it possible to breathe something in other than air? I try to imagine what it would be like to inhale smoke and feel perplexed why anyone at all would want to do so. That said, pipe smoke does smell more full bodied and interesting than cigarette smoke. I don’t mind it so much when it climbs in my hair and on my clothes. All the other smokers I know smoke cigarettes. Somehow, this little device he puts to his lips doesn’t seem as uncouth. Watching him pack it feels almost ceremonial, the end of the pipe reminds me of a little cooking pot on a camping stove.

Grandad doesn’t trust teabags.

“They can just give you all the sweepings from the floor”

He says.

He doesn’t trust electricity either.

Whenever I stay for a sleep over, he unplugs the television plug from its socket before retiring to bed.

Grandad has a daft sense of humour. We watch ‘The Goodies’ together and Spike Milligan. Sometimes he changes the lyrics of ‘The Brotherhood Of Man’ song to ‘We’re having kippers for tea’ and makes me giggle.

Grandma tells me that when he was young, he could croon like Bing Crosby, the man who sings ‘White Christmas’.

Grandma, on the other hand, sings like Hilda Ogden.

We arrive back from the paper shop and I sit down by the television and survey my 20p mix up. There are white mice, teeth, fried eggs and my favourite - twin cherries.

It’s at this point I notice Grandad in the doorway. He’s holding up a piece of pink plastic.

“I’m sorry”

He says.

“But I stood on your toy. I didn’t see it”

It’s Fluff’s carrier! The flimsy pink case is now squashed, the silver bars broken!

I don’t hold back and fly into a hissy fit that would shame Veruca Salt.

“Why didn’t you see it?”

I yell.

“You MUST have seen it!”

Mum steps in.

“Listen - it’s YOUR fault for leaving it in the middle of the bloody garden where someone could trip up over it. Lucky someone didn’t break their neck!”

She reminds me, harshly.

Sheepishly, I apologise and commit to drowning my sorrows with a glass of lemonade. Grandma takes my hand.

“Look Julie, your grandad didn’t mean to break your toy you know. He’s tired, he’s not himself, not well, he’s…..”

And then I have to remember what I so often choose not to.

That my grandad has cancer.

That slowly he is slipping away, dying.

I take myself away. I go and stand in my mum’s old plot at the top of the garden. Bluebells grow there now. Together, we hang our heads.

I breathe air.

When I return indoors, Grandad is dangling Fluff’s carrier. He’s attempted a crude repair involving brown tape.

It looks terrible.

He looks at me hopefully, but all I see is something unable to be saved.

After all, not everything is able to be patched up and made better like one of Nurse Nancy’s dolls in one of my old Twinkle comics.

But I smile and say ‘thanks’ all the same.

Later that year, at Christmas time, I present him with his gift - a ‘selection box’ of cough sweets. Every week I’ve been going to the garage and the paper shop, buying Lockets, Tunes, Hacks, Macs, Fisherman’s Friends….. I figure that presenting them all as a selection box, might at least make illness feel a bit more festive. I think of his mouth and throat mildly anaesthetised and relieved as the tingly sensation makes its way through his throat, his lungs……his cancer.

But it doesn’t work.

Grandad grows weaker and sicker. His fate comes to mirror that of Madame Fanny La Fan, the old lady in ‘Allo Allo’, often bedridden and away from view. Soon enough, he will go in hospital. I’m not allowed to visit him there because “hospitals aren’t for kids” just like later on, funerals and prisons will also be ‘not for kids’.

Grandad doesn’t switch off like a light but instead, fades from me like a well thumbed sepia photograph. Rather like the ones at the beginning of ‘Bagpuss’.

And Julie loved him.