At primary school, in a year too long ago to be able to accurately identify but almost certainly falling somewhere between 1980 and 1985, as part of our music lessons, we learnt a song called My Grandfather's Clock.
If you haven't heard this song, these are the lyrics.
My grandfather's clock was too large for the shelf
So it stood ninety years on the floor
It was taller by half than the old man himself
Though it weighed not a pennyweight more
It was bought on the morn of the day that he was born
And was always his treasure and pride
But it stopped, short never to go again
When the old man died
Ninety years without slumbering (tick, tock, tick, tock)
His life seconds numbering (tick, tock, tick, tock)
But it stopped, short, never to go again
When the old man died
My grandfather said that of those he could hire
Not a servant so faithful he found
For it wasted no time and had but one desire
At the close of each week to be wound.
And it kept in its place, not a frown upon it's face
And its hands never hung by its side
But it stopped short, never to go again
When the old man died.
It rang and alarmed in the dead of the night
An alarm that for years had been dumb
And we knew that his spirit was pluming for flight
That his hour for departure had come.
Still the clock kept the time with a soft and muffled chime,
As we silently stood by his side.
But it stopped short, never to go again
When the old man died
Ninety years without slumbering.
His life seconds numbering.
It stopped short, never to go again
When the old man died.
I reckon I was probably 8 or 9 when I learned this particular song and was immediately struck by the intensity of the lyrics. I suppose it carried extra weight on a personal level for me because my own grandfather was so utterly important to me. It would also quite often pop into my head when I visited them, as they had such a clock, although it was the smaller more three bedroom semi suitable sized version.
My grandad was born in 1921, and was a terrible family secret. The people he believed to be his parents as he grew up were actually his grandparents, his "sister" was his unmarried and shamed mother.
As I understand it this was not revealed to him until he was an adult - and was never spoken of again - I don't recall any conversations with him about his childhood or family life, and I only became aware of the facts when his biological mother died and left a sum of money in her will to her "granddaughter".
I had actually met her on several occasions, totally unaware that she was in fact my great-grandmother, and we even went to stay with her at her home in Melton Mowbray, where she lived next door to her daughter, my grandad's half sister, my real great-aunt, who I spent lots of happy hours with playing badly on her piano, all the while completely unaware of her significance in my life.
It was a shame. They were both lovely women and I would have liked to have been allowed to know them in their proper designated roles in my life but clearly as it was not an open secret, the opportunity was lost to me. I assume this was to protect the respectability of my grandad as the social stigma of being a "bastard" was significant enough for them to have need to do so.
He had been a member of the RAF during the second world war. I'm not sure what his actual role was but I know it involved him being in the tail end of the plane, in itself a ridiculously dangerous spot - the tail being disabled was an excellent way to down a plane as it would lose control and become unsteerable.
By all accounts he was a bit of a jack-the-lad and spent a lot of time going off the rails. How much of this can be attributed to the shock he had recieved from the revalation that his entire life thus far was a sham and a lie is impossible to say, but I do that at some stage he pushed his marriage to my grandmother to breaking point and she took control of the relationship in order to get him back in line. He was a heavy drinker and whilst the details of how awful his behaviour was have been kept from me, the words alcoholic and violent have been mentioned. I never saw that side of him, he never touched a drop of alcohol as long as I knew him, but he did manage to keep the spark of mischief and a sprinkling of still being a man-child tucked carefully in his pocket at all times, along with his exceptionally pristine and yet soft cotton handkerchief.
Photos from his younger years show a tall sandy haired upright sort of chap, with a distance in his eyes. He had very kind eyes in my opinion, but then I was his sidekick, and we would spend many a happy hour walking the dog, or out in his garage messing around with his vice, sawing up bits of wood or doing things that involved spanners, all the while chatting and whispering under our breath about how Nana would tell us off for hiding out there rather than doing the chores we were supposed to be doing. I always felt sorry for him and felt she picked on him a bit much and constrained him, it was not until much later that I understood why that dynamic existed.
He and I had an unshakeable bond. I was his co-conspirator for mischief and he was my protector, a realisation I didn't come to until some years after he died when I went out to meet my biological father in Sweden just after my 21st birthday.
My father told me that having left my mother and returned to his home in the Highlands, he had returned to my home town to attempt to see me, when I was around 3 years old. His mother had given him a teddy bear to bring as a gift for me. When he got here, he was sent packing immediately by my grandad having had it made quite categorically clear that under no circumstances whatsoeverwould he be allowed to see me, so he shouldn't bother to stick around one second longer.
Cowed and defeated after really not making much of an effort at all, my dad put the bear in the bin, returned to Scotland again, told his mother I had loved the bear, and I was perfectly fine and promptly gave up on me.
I can understand why this happened and what propelled my mum and grandad to prevent me from seeing him. He hadn't exactly done himself any favours by dumping his young wife and baby daughter in the first place, and the mess he had left behind him was pretty substantial.
Having invested considerable effort and time into supporting my mum to recover from that, it is no wonder that my grandad feared the repercussions of allowing him back into our lives.
Perhaps he recognised the alcoholic in himself as being present in my dad, and wanted better for me than he had given his own daughter, and indeed better for her than a replica of his own bad behaviour - I don't know - what I do know is that he was my best friend, my strongest ally, and the person I relied upon whenever family life at home got bad, which it did with remarkable frequency. A hug from him made everything ok again, even when it really wasn't. It was him I clung to when my mum and stepdad (no1) split up, and he who would, I knew, have defended me unconditionally no matter what. I was always happy in his company and actively sought it out.
I knew that everyone eventually died. We are born, we live a life, then we die. It was pretty matter of fact for me, most of the time, that's just how things are - except when I contemplated that in the context of his life. He wasn't going to be allowed to die. I wouldn't let that happen. He and I were a team, and a life without him in was unthinkable.
He was ridiculously proud of me. He came to anything I did at school, including the infamous netball match in the fourth year juniors where, short of a goal shooter, they had asked me to stand in for the first team in the last match of the school year against another local primary school. They had never bothered to play me in an attacking role before, preferring to use my height as a defensive tactic when I was picked to play - but on this occasion I volunteered and the PE teacher went along with it.
We won. 15-0. I scored 10 of them. Every single ball that left my hands and slid deftly through the netted hoop of glory above my head was loudly cheered, by the increasingly dumbfounded gathering of parents who hadn't borne witness to such a dazzling display of goalery in any previous inter-school encounter, but most loudly by my grandad, wildly waving the oversized stuffed dolphin I had insisted on bringing along as a mascot for good luck. (His name was Flipper and he was a Christmas present from my Nana and Grandad when I was 6.)
Meanwhile, the PE teacher was kicking herself repeatedly at having failed to spot my goal shooting expertise sooner. I was Girl of the Match that week.
Any time I had the opportunity to spend some time with him, I grabbed it with both hands. Most Saturday mornings we would go to a garage/petrol station/second hand car dealership owned by one of his friends of unknown origin, who was not that far removed from the stereotypical second hand car dealer sort of chap. Twisty moustache, Brylcreemed hair, wore a brown smartish raincoat, with a salesman's way with words, and perfectly happy to have a 9 year old girl serving petrol to his customers because it freed him up to talk with my Grandad for a couple of hours. He was called Del, which just added to the whole stereotype.
At about 11am we would cook bacon on a hot plate in his little office above the showroom, butter some floury rolls, assemble the sandwiches with the assistance of a liberal splurge of ketchup and make massive mugs of tea, stuffing our faces before going home for lunch. Good times.
(Between my formative years living above their newsagents with the ready access to sweets and chocolates that it provides, those Saturday mornings and early lessons in "how to binge eat your feelings away" that I received from various sources, it is no small wonder that much of my adult life has been plagued with the side effects of an obesity problem. But I digress.)
In his eyes, I could do no wrong. And in my eyes, nor could he. He was my hero. Until he went and committed the ultimate betrayal and did that whole getting ill and dying thing.
When I was about 11 he had decided that he needed to take better care of his health, so had stopped smoking and tried to lose a bit of weight. He wasn't hugely obese or anything, just enough to be cuddly, but he decided to take up road cycling and promptly got himself an old bike and stripped it down and rebuilt it for himself with better parts and a comfier seat. He later built one for me too, from parts he had assembled from various bits and pieces of other bikes, and painted in bright red shiny paint. It was way cooler than my previous and now outgrown bike which was a brown Raleigh girls bike that I had been thrilled with at the time but paled into tepid insignificance when the local boys started turning up to play on bikes with their new BMX bikes that they would do stunts on and giant leaps off the kerbs. When I got my red bike, it was more of a racing style but a ladies version and I was thrilled with it.
He joined a local cycling club made up of a mixture of ages of men who all liked to have a bit of a bike ride regularly and would go off for lengthy bike rides that usually ended with a cup of tea and a cake at a cafe where many such cycling enthusiasts congregated.
He was also a keen amateur photographer and either through this hobby or the cycling, not sure which, made a new friend called Gordon, who as it turned out lived just down the road from him. Gordon was also a cyclist, and owned a tiny camera shop in the nearest city centre. (It was the shop that was tiny, the cameras came in a range of sizes.)
For the first few years of secondary school, I lived about 5 minutes walk from where my grandparents lived, and on days where my mother was at work beyond school hours, I would walk from school to my grandparents house, they having already collected my brother from his school.
The minute I walked in I would be given a sandwich (peanut butter and jam on wholemeal bread) and a glass of Kia-Ora orange squash and be allowed to eat that while watching the kids tv shows that were on after school.
If we were staying for tea, it was usually something like a salad with potatoes and boiled eggs about 5.15pm and if we were staying any longer than that, inevitably we would be graced by the presence of Gordon, who would have cycled home from his shop in rush hour, stopping only at the local shop closest to home, where he would purchase a brick of cardboard coated vanilla or Neopolitain ice cream, and a packet of wafers. The ice cream would be wrapped up in newspaper to preserve it, and he would duly arrive around 6pm, hand it over to my grandmother, accept her offer of a cup of tea and settle in for a chat lasting an hour or so with my grandad.
If the Tour De France coverage was being shown on Channel 4, the pair of them would sit there enraptured listening to the report of the days events, discussing various important details like bicycle clips and whether seventy gears were strictly necessary.
Goes without saying, I liked Gordon. He was grimy and greasy and used words that made little sense to me about apertures and wide-angles and chain guards, but he always brought ice-cream which won my silence for the duration of his visit, and my eternal gratitude.
Nana never ever said anything to him, but you could tell just from the way she would say his name using only a despondent sigh that she wasn't exactly thrilled with his imminent arrival.
For one thing, she had a small fridge with an icebox at the top. She didn't own a separate freezer or anything like the sort we see nowadays. Her entire capacity for storing frozen goods was barely bigger than a shoebox. Having survived the rationing of WW II, she was not prone to waste either, and if Gordon ended up bringing the larger size of the two types of ice cream brick you could buy (which was double the small one) she would grumpily have to find somewhere in the icebox to fit it, which caused serious duress to her frozen pea collection.
My grandads cycling continued for quite a few years, and he was in good shape. When I was about 14, he started to feel more out of breath than he should and went to see his doctor. The doctor said he didn't think that there was anything wrong and sent him on his way.
It was apparent that this was clearly not the case, and so rather than make a fuss, Grandad quietly transferred himself to a different GP practice that had recently opened closer to his house.
This GP immediately spotted that Grandad had an irregularity in his heart sounds, and correctly predicted that the cause was a leaking valve, which was confirmed after his immediate referral to the specialist hospital that dealt with such matters.
The plan of action was to be a valve replacement - major surgery and well before the days where quadruple bypass procedures were considered to be routine surgery.
Of course we were all concerned about this - but it needed doing and so after lots of appointments he was admitted to have it done, expecting to be in hospital for about a fortnight.
The operation went well and we went to see him every day while he recovered from it. He seemed perfectly fine, but then one day it was decided that the incision to his sternum was not healing appropriately and would require a stronger and thicker type of suture to keep his rib cage together.
He ended up being in hospital for over two months because this still didn't help, and had to go back in for more surgery on at least two more occasions, each time returning with a bigger thicker rope wound in and out of his sternum. The doctors said he had very "chalky" bones, I guess that's a layman's way of saying osteoporosis, but that given enough time, it would heal.
Finally he came home, in early April. I could relax. He was still very weak but on the Sunday afternoon after he came home we ventured out in the car to a local beauty spot with an excellent ice cream shop for a couple of hours. Almost immediately after this he began to decline rapidly, and was admitted to hospital again, this time the most local one, and remained there until, in the early hours of Wednesday morning, my Nana recieved a knock on the door, to find the police standing there.
They had come to inform her that he would not make it through the night and take her to him quickly.
The phone in our house rang at about 3.30am. It woke us all up, except my brother who managed to sleep through it.
I don't know if she made it to him on time or who was on the phone, her or the police - but I do know that I spent the next few hours sitting up in bed alone, staring into space, tears dripping onto my pink and grey striped quilt cover, waiting for the confirmation that my worst fear had come to pass.
I don't remember how it was confirmed or who confirmed it, I guess my mum's partner did the honours but I don't know for sure, and I don't really recall much about that day at all.
A post-mortem would be held, as the death was unexpected, and a later inquest would find that during one of the procedures to re-secure the incision, the knife used to reopen the wound would have not been sterile, and an infection had been introduced that went unnoticed and festered until such point as it caused an embolism that killed him.
This was of course back in the day when such things would never have resulted in a court case and the family recieving many thousands in compensation, it just went on record as an accidental death and that was the end of the matter. It made the local newspaper though and I'm sure put the fear up anyone who read it and was due to go to the same hospital for a procedure of their own.
Everyone was in shock, but Nana, the dignified woman that she was, got on with it as best she could. Within a few hours of his passing she had decided that she couldn't look after their dog and he had been duly dispatched to the Happy Hunting Ground via the local vet's surgery. I was HUGELY angry about this. She might have not wanted or been able to take care of Zac but I would have gladly done so and was not given the option, only informed after the event.
It wasn't fair to him at all.
Zac was an awesome dog, they had got him before they retired when they still owned a newsagents together, after a break in made them decide they needed to get a guard dog, and ended up with Zac, who was a big fluffy white lump of animal that could no more have defended their livelihood than fight his way out of a wet paper bag. He was however, designated as Grandads dog - although Nana did all the feeding, he did the walking. I dare say she just couldnt feel like she could cope with seeing him around and coupled with the fact that she wasn't physically strong enough herself to walk him due to her arthritis was most likely sufficient cause to make the decision for her. I always felt it was hugely unfair though. Zac had no choice in the matter.
I didn't go to the funeral. I volunteered to stay behind and get the funeral tea put out for when they returned but the truth was, I just wasn't ready to say goodbye.
The hearse containing my beloved Grandad's remains arrived at their home, and all the people dressed in black got in their cars and prepared to follow him to the crematorium. I watched them all pull away in that slow and dignified manner that they do, and as they did, my heart smashed to the floor in a million tiny pieces. I didn't bother to sweep them up, there was no point.
It could never be fixed.
Once all the cars were gone, I walked back into the house, closed the door behind me, and leaned against it to gather my thoughts and wipe the wet that I was trying to prevent leaking out of my eyes from escaping. I would not cry. I had to be strong for everyone that needed me to be, my Nana, my Mum, and my little brother. I don't recall who was looking after him that day. Probably his dad's sister or mum. He wasn't there though.
I spent the next hour arranging tablecloths, boiling kettles, unwrapping sandwiches and plates of little cakes ready for the return of the funeral party. I turned myself into a human robot, thanked the guests for the nice things they were saying about him, fed them buttered scones and poured endless cups of tea and glasses of sherry, forced a smile and just kept going. This was my tribute to him. I would make sure it went well so no-one had to worry about it and could just get on with the business of grieving. I locked up everything bubbling inside me and pushed it away. Their need was greater.
Writing this now, I can see that I pretty much replicated his own demise in my behaviour over the following months. The differences only that the incisions went on my arms using a blade and the festering infection in my chest was the result of me leaving all those shattered pieces of heart outside their house on the floor.
My mum was in pieces too, but for the sake of her mum she kept going - making plans for a granny annexe flat to be built on the side of our house, so that Nana did not have to be on her own if she didn't want to.
The rest of the world cared little for our loss. The Hillsborough disaster had occured on the Saturday before my grandad passed away, and that was dominating every newspaper, every news programme. It was truly shocking and what would later revealed to be the truth behind the events of that day, even more so, but it passed me by in a blur.
The blur and fog got worse when just ten days after losing the most important and influential man in my life, another significant one did the same thing. This time it was my step-grandfather, otherwise known as Poppa.
I hadn't really seen much of him in the last year or so before he died. Stepdad No1 had accepted joint custody of both my brother and myself (my brother being his natural child) when he split with my mother and for the first few years after the dust had settled we would be collected on a Friday night and would return to my mothers custody after school on a Monday.
After I turned 13/14 these interminably dull weekends stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a man who could have cared less if I were there or not lost out to the lure of meeting friends and being more sociable.
I stopped going. And because a fundamental part of each of those weekends would invariably be a trip to see his parents, they too blurred out of my self-obsessed teenage focus. I still loved them, admittedly not so much as I was always aware of my lack of blood relationship, but I stopped spending any time with them.
When Poppa died (not leaving me his library of Readers Digest magazines, shockingly) I was already on my knees from the loss of my Grandad 10 days earlier. I was round at Nana's the day I was told, my mum turned up looking all grim and I knew whatever it was, it wasnt going to be a pools win or an impromptu trip to Disney.
So there's me, all keeping my grief under control because I didn't want to upset my Nan, and just to add to the fun times, throw in some more grief, but this time with free additional guilt thrown in! I was mortified that I hadn't been to see him for so long. And now my chance was gone. I didn't go to his funeral. I couldn't face my step-nan or the rest of the family. That guilt stopped me going to see her too. I never saw her again before she died some four years later, in a nursing home after a stroke.
Not one of my finest moments but certainly reflective of my usual methods of dealing with really hard things. Lock it up, dont let it out, never let on that you need something because chances are your luck is out anyway and why be more disappointed with your existence than you are already.
I miss my Grandad still. Not in a hurty cry when you think about him sort of way, but I miss all the things about him that helped me feel safe and secure and to be able to trust in someone. Everyone else in my life had let me down somehow. He never ever did. Once he was gone, so went my anchor and I was set adrift, all full of the potentially explosive mixture of angst, self loathing, teenage hormones, buried grief and with no sign of a safe landing anywhere on the horizon.
I'm not a believer in heaven or God or religion of any kind. But I do think we leave a trail of our energy behind, through our children, our travels and our emotions. Echoes from the past. I used to "see" people when I was a child. I wish I still could.
He would be the top of my wishlist.
As for the clock that triggered the song memories, well, in due course, that is going to pass to me. But it's never been wound since it left my grandparents house when they cleared it. Recently my mum was deciding what should happen to the things that remain from their life, who would be getting what and my husband said he would love us to have the clock as he's keen on that sort of thing, mechanical items and especially old and solid items.
We don't have anywhere sensible to put it, we live in a shoebox, but having written this now, I know when the time comes for it to be with us, how important a piece it will be personally for me and how much I will treasure it.
