Grandpa & I
Interminably recalling the late-Victorian, aristocratic utopia of his childhood was my Grandfather's chronic preoccupation during the last few decades of his life. Betrayed and bewildered by the modern world, whiskey-sodden, armchair-bound, and resigned no more to his own mortality than to “The Black Tide Of Democracy Sweeping Europe” (a pamphlet he penned and distributed tirelessly around the public lavatories of Kent, until, by clouding the last pin-prick of his vision, the Lord succeeded where MI5 had failed and halted his fascist campaign); He withdrew from the present and retreated into the balmy days of his youth, where, he lamented, “A blood-red sun always rose, my boy, throbbing and pustulating in the sky like a glorious, feiry boil, and the wind scattered acrid, black dust upon our barren orchards, the sprawling thorn fields and overgrown nettle gardens of our family’s great Kentian estate.”
I recall as a boy, seated at his slippered feet, gazing up at Grandpa, with his musky scents of the nineteenth-century wafting, seemingly from his trousers, into my young nostrils. For hours I could sit examining the milky blueness of his corneas, occasionally miming an exaggerated yawn to Elizabeth, my sister, as he began yet another tale of pre-RSPCA badger-bating or recalled, literally misty-eyed, an era when anyone admitting to voting Labour, or displaying the slightest interest in foreign food, was immediately carted off to a prison for the criminally deranged.
Rather than commanding our respect, Grandfather’s great age and the voracity of his beliefs made him rather a figure of fun to Elizabeth and I. A sharpening stone for our vicious young tongues; A mischief magnet in tweed. It was his antiquated political ideals, specifically his ardent Francophobia, that were his greatest strategic weakness - a raw nerve on which, like young hyenas, we would gleefully descend - an Achilles heel he advertised constantly in the crazed and barely intelligible rants he delivered from his armchair. I remember Mother and Father, when they had rare occasion to occupy the same wing of the house as us, seem to be able to saunter vacantly past these wild tirades, as if denying to themselves, or possibly even genuinely unaware of, Grandpa's very existence. They were usually followed by several sullen maids, the rattling drinks trolley, and two plumes of lazily unravelling cigarette smoke (here I must pause and reflect on a fond memory of Grandpa; well into his eighties, but radiant in the light of the summer hot-house, and with an expression of almost religious ecstasy flooding his face, I see him demonstrating for Elizabeth and I the political validity and bio-mechanical efficiency of the seated goose-step, whilst reclining on the sun lounger).
Being aged only eleven and nine, my sister and I were au fait with only the most rudimentary principles of fascist socialism. But like most healthy children we were also deceptively observant, and mercilessly cruel. We were certainly aware, for example, that the right stimuli could provoke bouts of white-hot, spittle-scattering rage in Grandpa; a sight we no doubt would have found more frightening and less hysterical were it not for his almost total immobility.
As I recall, the tour de force in our milieu of torments for dear Grandpa was usually performed as a kind of cute party piece for the amusement of our parent's many distinguished and glamorous dinner guests. These would come crunching up the gravel drive every Friday night; twittering couples and garrulous mobs, bathed in Rolls Royce headlights and a haze of perfume and cigar smoke, bustling uproariously into the cosy reception room at the east side of the house.
On such nights, after a brief discussion regarding the suitable approach, our mood, the aspects of the piece we wished to develop, the nuances we wanted to attune, my sister and I would edge conspiratorially into the dining hall and with synchronised, sing-song voices interrupt the by now uproarious guffawing to invite everyone to follow us to the drawing room where entertainment had been prepared. Grandpa could always be found here seated by the French windows (or ‘glazed continental doors’ as he steadfastly referred to them) either dozing bad-temperedly, muttering retorts into the old bacolite wireless clasped to his ear, or laboriously compiling his list of ‘TRAITORS TO THE CAUSE'. This fastidious archive, ninety-percent of which was merely the names of people Grandpa bore some unreasonable personal grudge, was discovered secreted in the loose skin of his neck on his death by harakiri in 1912.
Roused by the creak of the door, his eyes would expand to the size of saucers and begin to dart around in panic, as around fifty revellers filed into the room forming an audience around him two or three tiers deep, a sudden swarm of stares and diamonds, all jostling for position, peering down curiously at this unidentified old man apparently billed as the evening's entertainment.
With everyone assembled and settled to a satisfactory hush my sister and I would emerge from the crowd, together brandishing a vast French flag, which Mother had proudly procured from the army surplus store one day, quite mysteriously at the time. Edging towards Grandpa until it hung just a torturous inch from his clawing hands, we would solemnly begin to pull the flag aloft, and while it climbed its pole, with great sweeps of our free arms, we would lead the room in the boisterous humming of the French national anthem; to the increasing distress and salivation of Grandpa, seated and shackled centre-stage.
At the tune’s crescendo, Mother would stumble from the crowd and with limp, shaking hands arrange a string of onions around Grandpa’s neck, and pop a black beret upon his dear, balding head, this serving as a kind of visual finale. Here, his attempts at wriggling free from his bindings and explicit promises of vengeance would quickly dissolve into whimpering, mucus-laden sobs - a disquieting sound that still haunts me sometimes. I find it hidden in the quiet of the night, where its strains are soon joined by the distantly echoing shrieks of the relatives and strangers who circled poor Grandpa, cheering, dancing, tearing the clothes from each other’s bodies with wild eyes, and twisted tongues protruding from their mouths, locked in the primal, voodoo-like trance that characterised most dinner party-guests in the anxious pre-war years.
The onset of total blindness in Grandpa’s nineties did nothing to curtail our campaign of persecution. To us it simply added greater possibilities to our sphere of attack, whilst reducing the speed of his attempts at escape to that of a very old, blind man crawling helplessly up several flights of stairs to the sanctuary of the only lockable toilet.
Yet now, many decades on and an old man myself, I realise extended age requires little peccadilloes, such as Grandpa's staunch fascism, if only to make the days more bareable. They are, I think, defence-mechanisms accumulated over a lifetime of pain and disappointment that have grown into a tangled mass, like weeds in an untended garden, strangling all growth. Escaping into memories of youth is now as necessary a part of my day as the bowel-scrape administered by my indefatigable Negro nurse after the day’s first successful ablution. This began as an indulgence I allowed myself only occasionally but, in so needing a distraction from the boredom of near-paralysis, the terminal loneliness, the morbid tick of the Grandfather clock, it takes extraordinary willpower to use any comfort one finds only in moderation (recalling one’s childhood I mean - not having one’s bowel’s scraped, which, I only now discover, is a deeply unpleasant experience glamorised quite fraudulently by my (probably homosexual) physician.
My pining for the past struck me recently as a sign that I too may be reaching the closing notes in life’s final aria. Omens of this would probably, to be honest, count as rather wasteful uses of the Lord's time, as for some years now every beat of my heart has been accompanied by excruciating pains in my spine, brain, arms, ears, legs, lungs, liver, kidney, lap, shank, brow, haunch and testicle. Mercifully, these days my heart only manages an average of nine beats per minute, so I can usually enjoy a few seconds of relative comfort before the next crippling spasm of agony forks like lightening across my shredded nervous system.
The years have been less than kind to my appearance too. The blurred spectre that confronts me in windows and other unavoidable reflectives seems these days less a face, and more a pair of vast, flapping jowls, with eyes, glassy and pink like those of a pig, glinting dimly inside two caves of baggy, grey skin. The growth of my ears and nose continues unabated, aspiring now to elephantine proportions, out-paced only by the coarse tufts of hair they contain, and cruelly with no discernible benefit to my hearing or sense of smell. It is, I suspect, not the kind of glowingly mature face likely to be used in television commercials for age-defying moisturiser, or seen smiling broadly from a large American car in an advertisement for insurance exclusively for the over fifties (or, ‘for grave-dodgers’ only’, as my eldest grandson so hysterically likes to misquote).
I recall as a boy, seated at his slippered feet, gazing up at Grandpa, with his musky scents of the nineteenth-century wafting, seemingly from his trousers, into my young nostrils. For hours I could sit examining the milky blueness of his corneas, occasionally miming an exaggerated yawn to Elizabeth, my sister, as he began yet another tale of pre-RSPCA badger-bating or recalled, literally misty-eyed, an era when anyone admitting to voting Labour, or displaying the slightest interest in foreign food, was immediately carted off to a prison for the criminally deranged.
Rather than commanding our respect, Grandfather’s great age and the voracity of his beliefs made him rather a figure of fun to Elizabeth and I. A sharpening stone for our vicious young tongues; A mischief magnet in tweed. It was his antiquated political ideals, specifically his ardent Francophobia, that were his greatest strategic weakness - a raw nerve on which, like young hyenas, we would gleefully descend - an Achilles heel he advertised constantly in the crazed and barely intelligible rants he delivered from his armchair. I remember Mother and Father, when they had rare occasion to occupy the same wing of the house as us, seem to be able to saunter vacantly past these wild tirades, as if denying to themselves, or possibly even genuinely unaware of, Grandpa's very existence. They were usually followed by several sullen maids, the rattling drinks trolley, and two plumes of lazily unravelling cigarette smoke (here I must pause and reflect on a fond memory of Grandpa; well into his eighties, but radiant in the light of the summer hot-house, and with an expression of almost religious ecstasy flooding his face, I see him demonstrating for Elizabeth and I the political validity and bio-mechanical efficiency of the seated goose-step, whilst reclining on the sun lounger).
Being aged only eleven and nine, my sister and I were au fait with only the most rudimentary principles of fascist socialism. But like most healthy children we were also deceptively observant, and mercilessly cruel. We were certainly aware, for example, that the right stimuli could provoke bouts of white-hot, spittle-scattering rage in Grandpa; a sight we no doubt would have found more frightening and less hysterical were it not for his almost total immobility.
As I recall, the tour de force in our milieu of torments for dear Grandpa was usually performed as a kind of cute party piece for the amusement of our parent's many distinguished and glamorous dinner guests. These would come crunching up the gravel drive every Friday night; twittering couples and garrulous mobs, bathed in Rolls Royce headlights and a haze of perfume and cigar smoke, bustling uproariously into the cosy reception room at the east side of the house.
On such nights, after a brief discussion regarding the suitable approach, our mood, the aspects of the piece we wished to develop, the nuances we wanted to attune, my sister and I would edge conspiratorially into the dining hall and with synchronised, sing-song voices interrupt the by now uproarious guffawing to invite everyone to follow us to the drawing room where entertainment had been prepared. Grandpa could always be found here seated by the French windows (or ‘glazed continental doors’ as he steadfastly referred to them) either dozing bad-temperedly, muttering retorts into the old bacolite wireless clasped to his ear, or laboriously compiling his list of ‘TRAITORS TO THE CAUSE'. This fastidious archive, ninety-percent of which was merely the names of people Grandpa bore some unreasonable personal grudge, was discovered secreted in the loose skin of his neck on his death by harakiri in 1912.
Roused by the creak of the door, his eyes would expand to the size of saucers and begin to dart around in panic, as around fifty revellers filed into the room forming an audience around him two or three tiers deep, a sudden swarm of stares and diamonds, all jostling for position, peering down curiously at this unidentified old man apparently billed as the evening's entertainment.
With everyone assembled and settled to a satisfactory hush my sister and I would emerge from the crowd, together brandishing a vast French flag, which Mother had proudly procured from the army surplus store one day, quite mysteriously at the time. Edging towards Grandpa until it hung just a torturous inch from his clawing hands, we would solemnly begin to pull the flag aloft, and while it climbed its pole, with great sweeps of our free arms, we would lead the room in the boisterous humming of the French national anthem; to the increasing distress and salivation of Grandpa, seated and shackled centre-stage.
At the tune’s crescendo, Mother would stumble from the crowd and with limp, shaking hands arrange a string of onions around Grandpa’s neck, and pop a black beret upon his dear, balding head, this serving as a kind of visual finale. Here, his attempts at wriggling free from his bindings and explicit promises of vengeance would quickly dissolve into whimpering, mucus-laden sobs - a disquieting sound that still haunts me sometimes. I find it hidden in the quiet of the night, where its strains are soon joined by the distantly echoing shrieks of the relatives and strangers who circled poor Grandpa, cheering, dancing, tearing the clothes from each other’s bodies with wild eyes, and twisted tongues protruding from their mouths, locked in the primal, voodoo-like trance that characterised most dinner party-guests in the anxious pre-war years.
The onset of total blindness in Grandpa’s nineties did nothing to curtail our campaign of persecution. To us it simply added greater possibilities to our sphere of attack, whilst reducing the speed of his attempts at escape to that of a very old, blind man crawling helplessly up several flights of stairs to the sanctuary of the only lockable toilet.
Yet now, many decades on and an old man myself, I realise extended age requires little peccadilloes, such as Grandpa's staunch fascism, if only to make the days more bareable. They are, I think, defence-mechanisms accumulated over a lifetime of pain and disappointment that have grown into a tangled mass, like weeds in an untended garden, strangling all growth. Escaping into memories of youth is now as necessary a part of my day as the bowel-scrape administered by my indefatigable Negro nurse after the day’s first successful ablution. This began as an indulgence I allowed myself only occasionally but, in so needing a distraction from the boredom of near-paralysis, the terminal loneliness, the morbid tick of the Grandfather clock, it takes extraordinary willpower to use any comfort one finds only in moderation (recalling one’s childhood I mean - not having one’s bowel’s scraped, which, I only now discover, is a deeply unpleasant experience glamorised quite fraudulently by my (probably homosexual) physician.
My pining for the past struck me recently as a sign that I too may be reaching the closing notes in life’s final aria. Omens of this would probably, to be honest, count as rather wasteful uses of the Lord's time, as for some years now every beat of my heart has been accompanied by excruciating pains in my spine, brain, arms, ears, legs, lungs, liver, kidney, lap, shank, brow, haunch and testicle. Mercifully, these days my heart only manages an average of nine beats per minute, so I can usually enjoy a few seconds of relative comfort before the next crippling spasm of agony forks like lightening across my shredded nervous system.
The years have been less than kind to my appearance too. The blurred spectre that confronts me in windows and other unavoidable reflectives seems these days less a face, and more a pair of vast, flapping jowls, with eyes, glassy and pink like those of a pig, glinting dimly inside two caves of baggy, grey skin. The growth of my ears and nose continues unabated, aspiring now to elephantine proportions, out-paced only by the coarse tufts of hair they contain, and cruelly with no discernible benefit to my hearing or sense of smell. It is, I suspect, not the kind of glowingly mature face likely to be used in television commercials for age-defying moisturiser, or seen smiling broadly from a large American car in an advertisement for insurance exclusively for the over fifties (or, ‘for grave-dodgers’ only’, as my eldest grandson so hysterically likes to misquote).
posted by I'mGonnaTakeThatChild at 11:08 am
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