Every other week, or sometimes every week, we could go at the weekend to stay with my grandmother, who we called Nanna. My grandmother’s really lovely. She never stops making tea. Every 15 minutes of the day, she comes into the room with a big pot of tea and says: “Would you like a nice cup of tea?” She seems to spend half of her life in the kitchen cooking things for when people come to visit her. Now, she’s getting a little bit older, and I think she doesn’t do as much as she did, but she is a really wonderful person. She takes care of the elderly neighbours around her, visits them frequently, and for some of them who can’t really walk or get help, she goes and fetches the shopping. She always has pets, as well. Every time we went to visit her, my Nanna had a little bird in the corner of the room, in a cage, and she used to talk to it and talk to it. She’s had several, and they come and go, but some of them could really talk very well – some of them not so well, which was a bit disappointing for her, but she still loved them very much, anyway. Also, I’ve heard that she now has a rabbit in the garden, which I haven’t seen but I’d really like to. At my grandmother’s, my brother and I used to read, play and watch television. My grandma used to play with us a little bit, but I think she didn’t have as much idea of how to play with children as my mother did. She used to look after us very well, though. She loved us very much, in fact.
My other grandmother, who is my grandmother on my father’s side (my father’s mother), also had a broken marriage. She divorced my grandfather before I was born, so I never saw them together. Occasionally, we used to go and visit her. Our relationship with her was always a bit strained. Our family always used to see her as being a little bit crazy, a bit of a crackpot or something like that. Over the last few years, I’ve visited her a few times and I get on very well with her now, because we have something in common, which is our Christian religion. My father was never in the least religious and he used to see her as a bit of an oddball. I feel sorry for her really. I think she is very lovely.
I never met my mother’s father, he died before I was born, but I knew my father’s father when I was smaller. After he split up with his wife he lived together with his sister, who was my great aunt. She never married, or even had a boyfriend as far as I know. She was really an old spinster. They lived a very, very routine life. Every time we went to see them exactly the same things would happen. Every day of their life seemed to be the same. They would wake up, and then my great aunt would make the breakfast, bring it in to my grandfather, my grandfather would read the paper until a certain time, when he would listen to something on the radio, etc, etc.
My grandfather was an interesting man for me. He had a very big garden, and he used to keep bees, which was fascinating. I think, fourteen beehives, as I remember. When we were at school, one time I organized for our class to go to visit him and watch him working with his bees in the garden, which was very interesting for the other children as well. Of course, we always had supplies of fresh honey because of this.
I remember the smell in their house was a little bit old and musty. I can’t put my finger on it exactly, but there was some atmosphere in their house which was like nothing had changed for thirty years. It was very strange for us, as children to go round the old rooms, looking at the pictures on the walls, pictures of old relatives. I remember my grandfather had a big picture of Queen Victoria on his wall. Maybe nothing changed since Queen Victoria’s time, I’m not sure!
My great aunt was a very good musician. She had a piano, and she was the leading second violinist in the city orchestra, which was the Leicester Philharmonic. She spent much of her time practising for concerts.
I think that my musical ability comes from that side of the family, really, because she’s the only member of the older generation of our family who was really known to be musical. As I said, she was a very talented violinist. She always used to encourage me a lot with my music, and to take me to classical music concerts. I remember we went to see Handel’s Messiah, Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach. I enjoyed it very much and I really gained a deep love of classical music from her.
I have only one aunt, who is the sister of my father. We always had a very good relationship with them (my aunt, my uncle and their children), although we rarely went to see them, only once a year, maybe at Christmas to exchange presents. I remember that they always gave us very expensive presents and made sure we had a very nice time. Whenever we went to visit them, we would be filled up with cakes and sweets, and given little presents, so we used to like to go to see them, as children.
I think my father is just not the sociable type, and it’s not because he dislikes them that he doesn’t keep a close relationship with his family. Maybe he is just a bit of loner, really.
My aunt and her husband have four children, who are all married now, and they have children, so my aunt and my uncle are grandparents now, which makes me a sort of uncle to a lot of little children, who I haven’t met many times, and I don’t even know the names of.
Nowadays my father and mother both have new partners. My father has a nice girlfriend, who he is planning to move into a new house with. He’s lived in the same house for my whole life, but they are both planning to sell up and go to live further out in the countryside, in a very beautiful place, the Peak district, which is a little bit north of where I was born.
He works with computers. He spends most of his time, I really think I could say that, more than 50 per cent of his time sitting in front of his computer screen working. This has really been his release. Through all of the times of his marriage breaking up, of loneliness, of his own tension, this has been a real saving grace for him, that he has so much interest in his computer. He just gets completely lost in it. He is working from home, by subcontract, as a programmer. I think he’s quite successful, or he manages to get by from it at least.
My mother also has a boyfriend, who works away from home a lot of the time, so she is alone quite a lot of the time now, but she seems to be happy. She is a lot more creative than she ever was when I was a child. Whenever I go to see her now, or whenever I hear from her, she tells me about the new things that she’s learned to make, arts and crafts, and skills. Last time I went to see her I remember finding a lot of little things around her house that she’d made by using different sewing techniques, or by casting little figures of houses from clay and then painting them. It’s nice to see her happy.
I can’t imagine how big my brother is now. The last news I heard of him was that he is playing with his pop-group, who are called Delicatessen. They play Indie-Pop music, and have been playing around Europe, in France and in Germany. I think they’re becoming quite successful. He’s just completed a degree at the University of London, in Astronomy, so he is now qualified to work as an astronomer, if he wants to. I think he is more interested in his music, though. He plays rhythm guitar in his group, which is a backing guitar, and he sings a little bit and also plays the flute, as I do.
My girlfriend, Maria, has a very close, very tight-knit family. They really take care of each other, regularly visit each other, and are always calling each other to make sure that they’re OK. They spend a lot of time together. It’s really nice and encouraging for me to see that the family unit really can work, as in the case of their parents, who really love each other very dearly after many years of being married, and her grandparents, who are still completely in love, and both over 80. One of my dreams is to be happily married to a ripe old age like them.
ACCOMMODATION
Thomas
We used to live in a medium-sized detached house, in a village which, as I said, is in the suburbs of the city, and borders onto the countryside. There were maybe 20 houses in our small street, each of them with the same appearance and construction. I remember that we had about 8 rooms: we had a big living-room, a kitchen, a small room beside the kitchen, a small square garden behind the house, and my brother and I had a bedroom each, but when we were really young, we used to share a very large bedroom. The garden was always in a state of chaos, as nobody ever did any work on it, so it just grew, and grew,