As we squash our bottoms into cellulite pancakes all the way up the M6 and beyond, I am more anxious than ever to get there and with every passing motorway service station I have a growing regretful, guilty, wretched feeling that I should have spent more time visiting her in the past. Like most pissed twenty-somethings and self-obsessed thirty-somethings I have been too selfish to make time to visit her; to connect with someone who, suddenly in light of her illness, seems such a vital connection to my children: through her, through my dad and then through me.
As the car hugs the last few miles of mountainous road, my daughter vomits into a carrier bag for the third time and Granny’s village twinkles into view at the end of the final valley, I sense that this visit is going to make quite some impact on my life.
I just don’t know yet that it’s going to fundamentally change how I raise my children, and how I feel as a parent.
Meet Granny … and what you’re in for
Before we meet her, I feel I should give you a brief description of my granny, so you know whose child-raising tips you’re getting along with my own.
Born on the 8th November, 1923, in chilly Aberdeen, Granny was the second daughter and youngest child of a lawyer and a teacher. Not a bad start, then. (Apart from the ‘chilly Aberdeen’ bit, obviously. Brrrrr.) The story goes that her parents were engaged for twelve years before finally being in a position to tie the knot.
By the time Granny came along, her dad was fifty and her mother forty-six, ages which would raise an eyebrow or two even today. Nevertheless, two healthy baby daughters came along who are now the proud holders of the title, Oldest Members of the Family. (And also Most Likely to Buy Junk from Catalogues, but we don’t mention that often.)
Granny met my grandfather when she was about nine years old, on one of her family’s annual holidays to a village in North East Scotland called Tarland. After a mere fourteen years of hide and seek in the bushes, giggling on the tennis court, secret liaisons, separation during the war and making sure they were very, very sure, they finally married in 1945. Blimey, he must have been a catch! And he was.
My granddad was an impressive man: intelligent, sporty and as handsome as any Hollywood star of the day – though, to be brutally honest, a star who’d been eating rather a lot of pies in his latter years – and when I knew him he smelled sweetly of pipe tobacco, had white hair and bushy eyebrows, a huge model train set in the attic and a musty study crammed with artefacts from ancient lands and strange objects from his science labs. He ate lots of cheese and biscuits by the fire in the evenings, and had more stories of faraway places and eccentric characters to tell than anyone I’ve ever met. He also carried a mystical air of unpredictability that meant you never quite knew how far any childish silliness would be tolerated before he’d make it very clear that he wanted you out of his hair. Now, Lassie! In short, he was in every way the perfect grandfather in my eyes, and I still miss him and wish I had spent more time talking with him.
He died four years ago of a heart attack, just after walking the dogs across the moor. All that cheese and biscuits didn’t help, they reckoned.
I digress … Granny studied languages at Aberdeen University but spent the last years of the war code-breaking at Bletchley Park, a time she never talks about except to comment grimly on the lack of mountains and fresh air and the intolerable excess of English people. (I did once try to point out that Bletchley is actually in England, hence the English people, but that went down like a lead balloon.) When she finally escaped back to Scotland she completed her teacher training and then taught for two years, before having her first child – my dad – and settling down into a life of motherhood from then on.
I’m not sure if this true, but certainly it seemed to me that for at least the first twenty years of my life Granny thought I was a silly, giggly, empty-headed, directionless ninny. Certainly my love of daydreaming and making up dance routines when there was a table to be laid didn’t help matters, but I think the clincher was when I started watching Neighbours in my teens. That, dear reader, in my granny’s eyes, won me the Idiot of the Year title hands down.
Liz, aged five, her brother Andrew and Granny, 1979
As a consequence of this grandmotherly disapproval, at least as I saw it, we spoke very little; I didn’t really know her, and what I witnessed of her quick tongue and lightning-fast reactions made me a little nervous around her. But about ten years ago everything changed: in a move that shocked even the most radical, optimistic thinkers in my family, I met a fine young chap, got married, had a baby, and all but gave up work to stay at home and be a Mummy. Ka-pow. The New Liz was born.
Suddenly, Granny and I found common ground: motherhood. Our shared experience of having kids young, working hard to keep the family together, our children happy and healthy and our outside interests going without going bananas during the process created a bond between us that had been woefully absent previously. We started talking on the phone about schools, violin lessons, what my kids were up to and any worries I had about them. The children sent her little pictures. She sent them back letters in old-fashioned handwriting that they couldn’t read.
What I gradually realised was so special about this growing mother-daughter-like relationship was, crucially, that she was not my mother. Mothers can say more to their daughters in one look than the entire script-writing team of Desperate Housewives can in a series. Oh, you feed your baby like that, do you? Oh, she still sleeps in your bed, does she? Grrrr. My mum is actually brilliant at letting me raise my kids my way but still, as we all know, the subject of child-rearing can be prickly indeed, even in the kindest, most caring hands where mothers and their daughters are concerned. But a grandmother stands apart from this, and can dole out advice, criticism and support free from any complicating undertones. She’s your gran – just listen to the lady, and be glad she’s still here sucking pear drops!
And so there grew, over a number of years, a camaraderie between Granny and me that I never imagined I’d feel, and we have become firm friends.
She’s still a tough cookie with a fierce brain though, and it’s a brave person who contradicts her, or says anything stupid in her presence. Allegedly … This lady suffers fools about as gladly as I suffer my own stress-related dandruff, and I’ve learned a thing or two about being idiotic in front of her. Thing one: don’t. Thing two: see thing one.
I realised, as our friendship grew stronger, that I was in the very lucky position of being able to ask my grandmother all the questions about her life, and about how she raised her children, that many mums of my generation either feel they can’t ask, or don’t have the opportunity to ask because their grandparents have passed away.
This wonderful old lady, this suddenly ailing powerhouse, this mine of information who had successfully raised four strong, independent people, could be the key to answering the question asked by thousands of stressed, confused, desperate parents every day: how has it gone so wrong for our children and what can we do to put it right?
If you need evidence that something has gone wrong – and you’d really have had to try hard not to have heard any of this before – then consider the following:
