My daughter Anna is about to have a baby. The waters have broken. The contractions are looming. The expletives are ripe. “About 36 hours to go,” says a nurse.
I’m very pleased for the happy couple. But I’m not sure about being a grandfather. “It must be like being a parent without the responsibilities,” I say to Little Daughter Alice, who has just zoomed in from New York.
“No change there,” she pipes. “You should be good at that.”
I blame the jet lag.
They had the best grandad ever. Grandad Poppy. A colossal, benign influence all through their lives.
“What did he have that I need?” I wonder.
“He was a grownup,” she trills. Well, she can pipe down.
Whatever, my daughters adored him. He was their anchor in a shiftless world. There’s a photo of Anna, aged three, gazing at him in an almost religious awe. It’s like a Renaissance painting. Grandfather and Child, in a chiaroscuro light. He radiates stillness and Zen wisdom. I want some. He looks like a cross between Gary Cooper and the Delphic Oracle. My goodness, he had that old-world gravitas. And I’d better get it – in less than 36 hours.
Earth mother Anna continues to make a terrible, unsettling racket.
Alice and I flee. We’re feeling pretty useless and leave poor, moaning Anna with her mum, who remains serenely at her post in a high Victorian manner.
“Thirty six hours! We’ll keep checking in!”
We leg it across some London parks in the late September sun. I ponder over the grandfathering gig. Mild terror occurs and bits of panic. Haven’t I done children? Mine drove me half daft. You don’t really learn how to do it until you’ve buggered it up. It took me years to get it so wrong. Now there’ll be another one. Maybe I’ll be better as a grandfather. It’s meant to be easier.
But I’ve never really had a role model, both my potential grandads having died before I was born. Except, of course, for Grandad Poppy.
I consult Alice again about him. She recalls his kindness and patience and that his “eyes would always search for our faces in the backseat of the car” whenever we visited on Sundays and, “He’d sit for hours helping me with my maths homework and he didn’t leave until he was certain I’d mastered the problem.” And now, when life or New York gets too tough, she can still hear him in the subway, saying: “Come on, Min, chin up!”
“He taught me kindness and courage.”
Well, all right.
“When all else failed, I’d go see Grandad.”
Yikes! A guardian angel and a posthumous presence. A bit of a hero. And not an easy act to follow.
Anna has always agreed with Alice. She’s always had the same admiration she has in that numinous photo. She too loved “the order and the stoicism”. When the inner city comprehensive and her hippy, liberal parents drove her half bonkers, she sought the sanctuary and certainties of Grandad Poppy. His old school world was “reassuringly safe”. There was “no stubble and nothing unkempt, and talcum powder and shaving cream. He told me off in a way that didn’t ever upset me – one of the few adults in my adolescence that I didn’t back-chat or sulk at.”
Both daughters were caught in a louche, liberal world and sought out his old world with its frugality, austerity, postwar rations, where you counted your pennies and blessings. They loved those Sunday meals of gammon steak and murdered cabbage and boiled potatoes, followed by the “treats” of dreadful custard creams if they ate their greens. Then they’d go and pick fruit or perhaps hang their Twiglet limbs off the rope rings in the garage.
My shiftless values were as naught against this old-school stuff. He was Jack Hawkins, gazing at horizons from the bridge of a boat, while poor Germans sank. Or John Wayne in The Searchers. The girls still quote his cowboy wisdom. Men gotta do. Woman too. That area. I thought it tended towards frontier gibberish, but it didn’t half work on my daft, giddy girls. My hippy shit couldn’t cut it. Other-worldly hip intellectuals, they still love it. Machismo and Springsteen and Russell Crowe in Gladiator.
I could never compete. I offered them ambiguities, ontological insecurities and Little Richard. He did boundaries, granite certainties and Frank Sinatra.
It continued to work when the daughters were teenagers. I did my best hanging judge face and ordered them to be home by 9pm.
Did they listen?
I was terrifically fierce on the drugs: “Just say no!”
Did they listen?
“Don’t tell Grandad!” they begged. He would have had kittens. And stopped it.
Thirty six hours to go. I walk on and stop by some fountains dancing in light. Two ruined old men sit opposite me on a bench, sinking Stellas. Are they grandpas? Is this what it does to you? Did they not have grandpas to look after them?
My phone goes.
“Squawk. Bleat!”
Is that the signal breaking up? Or a lost sheep?
“That’s your grandchild, that is!”
Yikes!
“You’re a grandad! A girl!”
Sylvie Poppy. After Grandad Poppy.
“I’ve just become a grandfather,” I tell the two old men. They raise their cans and toast her.
The fountains are silver.
I ring Alice.
“You’re an auntie!”
I zip into my favourite church, St James’s in Piccadilly and light a candle for the baby Sylvie. A raving atheist, I say a prayer at the font where William Blake was baptised. Blake was very big on babies. I zoom back to St Mary’s. The room is tropical and shadowed. I can just make out a face, shattered and creased and crimson and drenched and quite drained. The baby doesn’t look much better.
“Hello, Sylvie.”
She resembles a cherub with a face like a punctured football.
“Pick her up, then, Gramps!”
I do. I grab the swaddled, tiny blob and her head falls off. Well, not quite. A poor first touch. Whoops! I’d forgotten that they don’t have necks.
“Hello!” I go. “Grandpa here!”
Auntie Alice charges in, grabs baby and goes, “Widgie widgie woo!”
We leave the happy couple.
After a few days, Sylvie visits. The punctured football becomes almost human. The eyes are like gobstoppers. There’s much squawking. A week passes. She turns up in a rather fancy carriage. I attempt a bit of that bonding stuff. I talk and she mostly yawns. A family tradition.
I play her some grandpa music – Elvis’s Mystery Train. She either does much dancing or breaks much wind. We follow this with a little Howlin’ Wolf and Memphis Minnie. A good grounding in the Mississippi Blues is essential in the education of the modern, young woman. And we’ve already started having adventures. We’re bonding like billy-o. We walk along the canal by Meanwhile Gardens and observe the cygnets croaking in the toxic waters. We go down the Portobello Road and borderline criminals give her kisses.
She’s presently having a growth spurt and making an infernal racket. Her various handmaidens – Grandma Jill, Mother Anna and the terrifically mawkish Alice – are, for once, quite useless.
I take over. I place her elfin bonce across my grandad’s shoulder, sing a pretty song, essay some soothing frontier rubbish and she’s soon asleep.
This grandfather gig? It’s a breeze. It can only get better. I’m a long way from Grandad Poppy, but I’m working on the gravitas. And if all else fails, I’ll stick that photo over her pram, that blessed icon, so she’ll be as snug as a bug in a rug for ever.
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