My English retake Year 11 group - mostly boys - are tasked with a piece of writing entitled 'Describe someone who is important to you'. When told the word count was 500 words they groaned. So, off the top of my head, I started to tell them about my granddad, and we roughly counted up the words I was speaking as I went. In no time at all I was near the 500 mark and I could have gone on much longer. "See it's easy!" I told them. "You just need to be a bit inspired." Anyway, I have written what I told them and more. Soon I will be asking them to deconstruct it; to explore how I have used detail and language to create an impression of someone who is important
to me....
When I think of my grandfather – granddad – I think of him fixing things. He was never happier than when he was taking things apart or putting them back together. When I was a child my grandparents lived in an old, rambling cottage that required much fixing over the years, almost all of which my granddad undertook. He liked being on a ladder. If he had a paint brush, a spanner, a screwdriver or a hammer he was even happier. But back then his most favourite place was his ‘pit’. In his cavernous garage he had an old fashioned pre-hydraulic lift era mechanics pit. It was his haven. Once settled there he’d take root. Sandwiches, mugs of soup and cups of tea were passed beneath the car or campervan that he tinkered endlessly with and when he emerged eventually for dinner he had white goggle eyes and an oily black face. His contentedness was revealed by the tra-la-las we would hear – his versions of songs that he knew from his boyhood. An oath would occasionally signal a less than co-operative engine part was being taken to task and we grandchildren knew better than to repeat any of those or we would receive a clip round the ear - ‘smartish’ as he or my grandmother would say.
Both were northerners – from a tiny village on the edge of the Peaks not far from Manchester. My granddad would entertain us with his accent. By the time all of us grandchildren came along my grandparents, my mother and her three brothers were all living in the south-west, so we had Bristol or Dorset accents. Granddad’s odd sounding vowels amused us no end. He’d use dialect like 'Ay up’, 'N'owt',‘Summat’ and ‘By gum’ to confuse us. And then laugh at our bewilderment.
As a typical northerner in many ways granddad would talk to anyone, anywhere. It didn’t matter where he was granddad would find someone to talk to and he could talk at length…..For quite a shy, private man he could be intensely sociable when the circumstances were right. These are characteristics he has passed on to my mother, and on to me.
Granddad was an undemonstrative yet largely cheerful sort of man but he could be a little morose at times. His idea of a joke was to tell us noisy grandchildren to ‘go take a long walk off a short pier’ or ‘go and play with the cars on the motorway’. ‘Oh granddad! Don’t be silly!’ we would groan before we ran off making even more noise than we had been making before.
Sometimes he would make us laugh by waggling his ears. Not only could he do them separately but he could do them simultaneously too. We were always impressed by this skill. I have never met anyone else who can do this in all the time since.
On our wall is a wedding photograph and in it is a tall, young man in a smart wedding suit, with dark wavy hair, a Roman nose and an open hopeful face. Beside him my dainty grandmother with a flower garland in her hair. It is the mid-1930s and they do not know a world war is coming. They will have four children before, during and after that war. They will know the fears of bombing raids but granddad will not go to war as he is already a 'reserved occupation' worker – at this time he was working in Stockport's steel works which of course focused all its energies on the war effort. ‘Reserved occupations’ were vital for the country’s survival in wartime. Much later, briefly, he became a Plumber's mate, and then he worked as a crane driver in a coal fired power station. Granddad did this last job for many years before he retired – then he took on a post man role for a while just to prevent boredom and getting under my grandmother’s feet all day. He was nothing if not versatile; he might not have been office material but he definitely liked to get his hands dirty.
Other family pictures show a young boy with his adored mother. No-one, least of all granddad himself, talked about how her death, when he was almost eight years old, affected him. He was part of a generation that simply ‘got on with it’. But we do know that he was devastated, that his father’s second marriage created a rift between him and his father that lasted many years and that granddad left home before he was sixteen. It probably didn't help either that granddad's new step-mother saw him as too strong a reminder of her new husband's first wife or that granddad became a head strong teenager.
Apart from hhis own and family weddings and christenings granddad would never set foot in a church – his Methodist lay preacher father, who had been a World War One Military Medal hero for bravery, is said to have been a little too forceful with his religious beliefs and too handy with his punishment of ‘sin’. This contributed to granddad's already unhappy experiences at home.
At 65 granddad and gran decided that retirement meant kicking up their heels and seeing the world. Backpacking around Australia seemed like a good idea – with a youth hostel pass and a small tent for emergencies. A whole year there gave them a taste for more and with one of their sons settled there with his young children it suited them to visit quite often over several years.
Sadly granddad contracted Legionnaires Disease during their last visit. He was near death, the life support machine was switched off and we all waited on both sides of the globe for the inevitable call to tell us he had passed away. But no. Suddenly the next morning he sat up in bed demanding breakfast. It certainly made the Sydney news!
But he wasn’t invincible. Although Fate had granted him a reprieve he returned to the UK weaker and frailer. He continued to enjoy aspects of life he always had, until, inevitably, he became ill from complications that had never gone away.
By chance I was the last person to see him ‘alive’ if you can call it that, in hospital. I chatted to him, if he heard me I really don’t know but I am always glad I did see him that evening because the next morning he had gone.
