NAN AND GRANDAD

A snapshot from the 80s

Mum and Dad both had jobs. Dad stood guard at the gates of New Scotland Yard, home of the Metropolitan Police—protecting the men and women he looked up to from Irish bombers, schizos off their meds, and any bad man with a score to settle. He wished he were a policeman: all security guards do. He lived in his navy blue V-neck jumper with the patches stitched on the shoulders, even when he wasn’t at work. Every evening he polished his shoes and ironed his trousers. He kept his dark hair short and tidy, brushing it over to the left with fingers dipped in Vaseline to make it shine. For a period he tried to grow a police-issue moustache, but got bored one afternoon and shaved it off.

Mum flipped burgers at McDonalds. It was hot work, sweating over the grills, but with no time to pause and think, time passed quickly. Time did not pass quickly for me. From the moment Mum stepped out of the flat until the moment she reappeared at the end of our street many hours later, dressed in her brown McDonald’s uniform and carrying the cheeseburger she’d brought back for my dinner, I’d stand on a chair, my face pasted to the window by a sticky concoction of tears and snot, crying as though my whole family had been slaughtered before my eyes. Babysitters would leave traumatised.

Soon I had been blacklisted by every babysitter in South-East London. Nan stepped in and the crying stopped. She’d bring colouring books where, instead of colouring in with pens, you dipped a paintbrush in an eggcup filled with water and then stroked the wet brush over the page, and like magic the water turned into paint and coloured the picture. She also brought packets of Wotsits to stuff into my mouth. I loved Wotsits. My fingers would turn orange and I’d suck the cheesy residue from them with undisguised joy. In the afternoon Nan would tie her headscarf into a knot under her chin and we’d go to the park to feed the ducks.

I bloody loved Wotsits! (My cousin was more of a Quavers girl)

Nan was the glue that held the family together. Old school South London matriarch. She and Grandad lived in the same tower block in Denmark Hill that they’d moved into after getting married just after the war. The same flat Dad and his three siblings had grown up in, topping and tailing, kitted out in ill-fitting hand-me-downs and scrapping with the other kids of the estate on the grass bank outside. The same flat Mum had moved into as a teenager after Nanny Brenda had killed herself—and the same flat she and Dad had returned to years later, Mum carrying me in her belly, while they saved up the deposit for the flat above Rose.

We’d ride the train there for Sunday dinner. The flat was stuffy: a constant haze of cigarette smoke and steam emanating from the numerous pots of boiling vegetables: broccoli and cauliflower, soft as mush. Nan and Grandad each smoked a pack a day and had done since the war. The smoke made my eyes burn and my throat scratch. Grandad never moved from his armchair in the corner of the room: fag in one hand, cup of tea on the side, struggling to see the telly through his thick-rimmed glasses because the lenses had steamed up like the inside of a car windscreen on a winter morning. Horseracing or snooker on the telly, volume turned up as far as it would go. Is someone whistling?

GRANDAD! YOUR HEARING AID!

Grandad grins, fiddles with the gadget in his ear and the whistling stops. Strong but silent: the only time Grandad expressed himself was when any of his four sons were at each other’s throats—then he’d fly out of his chair while emitting this booming “OIIII!” grab the two sons by their heads, one in each hand; tell them and everyone else on the estate: “I BLOODY WARNED YOU!” and crack their heads together like a couple of coconuts.

Nan and Grandad fell in love as teenagers during the war. Then the army shipped him off to Palestine. He wrote her love letters, which she kept in a little wooden box. Grandad never spoke a word about his time in the war, except to complain: “Bloody post’s always late in Palestine!”

At every family gathering, one of the brothers would turn to Grandad and say: “Dad, ave you told em about Palestine?”

Grandad would remain silent, struggling to suppress a smirk, eyes fixed on the telly. Carry on puffing on his fag, but there’d be a sparkle in his eye. Then everyone would deliver the punchline at the same time: “BLOODY POST’S ALWAYS LATE IN PALESTINE!” and burst out laughing. Grandad wouldn’t take his eyes off the screen, but on his face would be an open-mouthed grin, his few remaining yellow teeth on full display.

The only story Nan ever told about the war (and she told it over and over again) was this one: As a teenager, to protect her from German bombs, she had been evacuated from London to the Kent countryside. One spring lunchtime, walking alone on a country lane, the bright sun reflecting off the buttercups of the surrounding fields, birds singing, crickets chirping, leaves blowing gently in the subtle breeze and only a small handful of fluffy white clouds floating in the blue sky, she bent down to smell a dandelion and heard a rumble overhead.

Looking up, she saw a solitary German fighter plane, exiting a marshmallow cloud, heading for the coast and back to base in Northern France. The pilot saw my nan, too, and when he did, he turned the plane and started flying it towards her. Realising she was about to be attacked, Nan started to run for her life. She knew she had to get off the road, as the pilot had lined the plane up with it just as he would a runway; but the only place to go was into a thorny bush of brambles, and to get there she’d have to dive over a low wall. The teenage girl was in two minds—surely she was being silly. But then, still running, she turns her head to look up at the sky behind her and there he is, all lined up: no doubt about it she is being divebombed! She threw herself headfirst over the brick wall and landed painfully in the bush; her arms, legs and face scratched to pieces; her whole body tingling: she’d landed in stinging nettles. The pilot sprayed the road with bullets before picking up altitude and heading home.

After being chased down a country lane and shot at by a plane, the poor girl was a bag of nerves. Still shaking two weeks later. Couldn’t hold a cup of tea without spilling it. She went to the doctor, told him what had happened, asked if there wasn’t something he could give her to calm her nerves. The doctor pulled open his desk drawer, took out an almost full pack of cigarettes, handed them to her and said, “Give these a try.”

Artwork by Dean Simmons. Check out his Substack

Thanks for reading. This is a reworking of a piece I posted about four years ago at the beginning of my Substack days. Some of you old heads might remember it.