I feel an unaccustomed joy with my grandchildren, a joy which I’ve not had in any other relationship – and I’m not the only one. No cowboy was ever faster on the draw than a grandparent pulling a baby picture out of a wallet. And fellow grannies agree that the experience is astonishing, as marvellous as finding, in winter, a solitary rose blooming on a withered branch. (Actually it’s a lot better than that but you get the gist.) I read recently a quote from G. K. Chesterton, who wrote a hundred years ago that family is ‘this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of yesterday to the invisible mountains of tomorrow’– and when you’re a grandparent it all becomes clear. The realization that life is just a string of people, generation after generation, going on for ever, suddenly comes home to you in a way it never could without a grandchild.
Small wonder that these days I start calling my grandsons by my son’s name, my son by his father’s name, and his father by my grandson’s name. We all seem to be floundering around in one big familial soup.
Sometimes I wonder if the seeds of my fulfilment in the role of grannie hadn’t been sown years and years before, with my own grandmother. She was my life-saver. She lived below us in our house in London, and when things got too tense within my parents’ loveless marriage, I would go downstairs and find her in her cosy sitting room, eyes twinkling, full of jokes and affection. She had a magical cupboard stuffed with toys and board games like Snakes and Ladders and Ludo. During hot summers we’d sometimes take a picnic out to the park and eat sugar sandwiches as a treat. She had always wanted to be a comic actress – she constantly sang me the old songs and even took me to see Joyce Grenfell, Flanders and Swan and even the Crazy Gang. And since I was a lonely only child, I looked forward each year to the time when I would spend a week with her at the seaside, just the two of us. We’d take bags of plums down to the beach each day and, in the evening, visit the funfair down the road. I still remember the sound of the waves mixed with the music from the merry-go-round and the screams from the Big Dipper. Whatever ride I went on, my grandmother was always waiting for me at the end, eyes bright with excitement: ‘Was it very scary, darling? Was it fun? You’re such a brave girl!’
When I painted a picture my parents would say: ‘Oh, fine. Now have you done your prep?’ But if I showed it to my grannie she’d open her eyes wide with astonishment. ‘Did you really do this? No, you’re joking! It’s just not possible. Let me look at it in the light! But darling, it’s quite astonishingly good! It’s quite wonderful! Would you mind if I got it framed and hung it up in my sitting room so everyone can see it? You draw quite superbly… and those colours! Darling, you’re quite amazing!’
Grandparents share a curious grannie camaraderie. The other day one told me about her two granddaughters, one being three years old and the other only nine months. They each had a teddy and she was planning to knit a jersey for both bears.
The older granddaughter declared that she wanted hers to be sparkly, with gold and pink and silver threaded through, and a star motif on the front. Asked what kind of jersey her grannie should knit for her young sister, only nine months old and unable to speak her wishes, the child replied, with an evil glint in her eyes: ‘I think grey would be very nice.’
My own grandson once crept into my bed at five in the morning, claiming that he had woken early because he had had a ‘deem about piders’.
‘Grannie? Grannie?’ he’d said, when he’d finally managed to wake me up. ‘I got good idea. You go down the end of the garden and be monster, and I get my sword and I be knight and come and kill you!’
Isn’t it great, being old?
Pages 191–2 constitute an extension of the copyright page.
‘What Fifty Said’ from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem, published by Jonathan Cape. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.
Virginia Woolf letter from the Letters of Virginia Woolf by Virginia Woolf, published by Hogarth Press. Used by permission of the executors of the Virginia Woolf Estate and The Random House Group Ltd.
Diana Athill quote from Diana Athill interview with Kira Cochrane. Copyright Guardian News & Media Ltd 2009.
Maurice Goudeket, The Delights of Growing Old, reproduced by permission of Pollinger Ltd and Maurice Goudeket.
John Cooper Powys quote reproduced by permission of Pollinger Ltd and the Estate of John Cooper Powys.
A. J. P. Taylor quote from the Evening Standard.
Travels with Charley by John Steinbeck (Penguin Books, 1992). Copyright © The Curtis Publishing Company Inc., 1961, 1962. Copyright © John Steinbeck, 1962. Copyright renewed Elaine Steinbeck, Thom Steinbeck and John Steinbeck IV, 1989, 1990. Reproduced by permission of Penguin Books Ltd and Curtis Brown Group Ltd.
Carl Jung quote from Aspects of the Masculine (Ark), p. 33.
Robert Conquest limerick reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of Robert Conquest. Copyright © Robert Conquest, 2007.
Ogden Nash poem. Copyright © 1956 by Ogden Nash. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd.
Robert Conquest limerick reproduced by permission of Curtis Brown Group Ltd, London on behalf of Robert Conquest. Copyright © Robert Conquest, 2007.
Cosmo Landesman quote from Starstruck, Macmillan 2008.
* I have sinned
† No can do