Grandparents

An abbreviated chapter from Misfit

“Grandparents play an important role in the lives of their grandchildren, though it is often indirect. Most of their significance to children is seen through the support and help they give to their parents. Grandparents are often seen as stress buffers, family watchdogs, roots, arbitrators, and supporters.”

This is the Google-supplied definition of grandparents I found when I embarked on this chapter. I may have had no argument with this definition if it were not for one grandparent in particular, my mother’s mother, Helen.

However, before I get to my experience with Helen, who I would later refer to as The Demon Queen, let me fill in some essential background…

My mother hailed from Edinburgh in Scotland, to be precise Sighthill, and my father from Shieldhill, just outside Falkirk. When they married, they settled in a village called Hopeman in the northeast of Scotland. Hopeman was where our little family lived for the first 16 years of my life first on a street called Thom Street and then, when I was around 9, we moved to a larger bungalow on Farquhar Street. We were, as the song goes, moving on up!

With my father on Thom Street 1962

Location details complete, let’s begin our little journey through life with my grandparents. Every well almost every, summer in my childhood years a two-week period was set aside to visit both sets of grandparents.

With my mother and father, about to leave Edinburgh

The week in Edinburgh was always the most fun, in my eyes. My mother’s parents were more, for want of a better word, modern. Well at least her mother was, although she could be a bit crazy. You see, she was always on a diet and maintained jet-black (dyed obviously) hair till the day she left this earth. Standing at 4’ 11” she may have been small but she was a force to be reckoned with.
She was also very houseproud and would surround me with paper when I was eating to avoid crumbs descending on the carpet – heaven forbid. At one time she even had covers on the living room furniture a la Joan Crawford. The contradiction here was that, although she was indeed strict in some respects she could do the most outrageous things. For example, one day when my mother and father were out, she thought it would be a good idea to teach me to smoke cigarettes, encouraging me to take puffs. Of course, I had no desire to and when I told my mother (as kids do) she was furious.

While staying there I also got to drink lemonade shandy (lemonade and stout) and play cards in the evening. When I was older, I stayed with them without my mother and father for a week or so, but in all honesty, my mind is not solid on whether that happened or if it is in my imagination. So I will not elaborate on the visit. Either way, Edinburgh was the preferred destination as it was a short bus ride from the city center and I would go there accompanied by my mother or father to visit all the great shops. I also paid frequent visits to the newsagents up the street from my grandparents and would buy magazines and candy. I always loved magazines! Another memory was going to sleep at night with the sound of traffic out on the streets and the distant voices of the adults still awake in the living room. As it was always summer when we visited the bedroom window would be open and the net curtains would billow in the breeze. A new ‘high-rise’ building was visible from my bedroom window and I always marveled at all the lights shining from its windows. There always seemed to be life outside which for someone who lived in a small fishing village in a detached house was its own brand of exciting.

The funny thing is that all the noises I find so irritating when living in an apartment building as an adult may indeed have been wonderful to my youthful ears.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Alec, was a quiet man. He was disabled with what we later thought might be multiple sclerosis (it was never officially diagnosed). At that time, it was thought to be an affliction that resulted from a mosquito bite during the Korean War, in which he fought. He was also of small stature, probably about 5’ 4” (my mother was 5’ 1”). Unfortunately, I got my height from my mother’s side of the family (I am 5’ 3”). Alec was always very laid back; he went with the flow. He would sometimes get upset when Helen fussed over him and tried to do too much for him, but never to the point of getting angry. I am sure she must have been hard to live with but it seemed that they cared about each other and made a relationship that became more of a caregiver/patient situation work. I liked Alec, he was not always open but he was gentle in my eyes. I regret I never really got to know him beyond what he presented. He was just never very vocal.

My grandparents on my father’s side were completely different, they were ‘traditional’. My grandfather, William died in 1960, two years before I was born. He was known in the community as “Big Wull,” a coalminer, then a butcher, and finally, he worked in Nobel’s explosive factory, where he served as firemaster’ but retired due to ill health. His lungs were very likely destroyed by the work he conducted in his job. My grandmother lived longer but died of cancer in 1978 when I was sixteen. I cannot remember much of her passing as my family was in such chaos at that time. I did not get to know her very well unfortunately, but I do remember that she loved to feed the sparrows outside in the garden and called them Spugs (pronounced spyugs), which research reveals is another name for the house sparrow. She was more of a typical grandmother if you want to put it that way.

The most prominent memory I have of the visits to Shieldhill over the summer holidays is of the grandfather clock in the living room breaking the silence with its loud “tick tock, tick tock” (my father purchased that clock from his brother many years later). The television was never put on throughout the day, only when my dad’s brother, Harry, returned from work in the evening, so the living room was always mind-numbingly silent – apart from that clock. There was a little general store quite a walk away from the house but it had no magazines like the one in Edinburgh, just bare essentials. It was actually part of a house that had been converted into a shop. Falkirk was the nearest town but it was nothing compared to Edinburgh.

Given all that information it is not hard to see why I preferred the visits to Edinburgh, despite my eccentric grandmother. I think there were even times when my father went to Shieldhill and left us in Edinburgh – and we were not complaining. There was something very dreary about his family home. It was just so quiet and it almost felt like it was in a time warp. My father’s sister, Jesse, and brother Harry were always at work so it felt empty and silent throughout the day – apart from the aforementioned clock.

My father with his father, 1930’s Shieldhill Scotland

So those were my childhood summers. It was a long car ride both ways and I often felt car sick. I would probably have been happier staying at home and I think I advocated for that once or twice but I was too young for that to be considered an option. Imagine the fun I would have had eating whatever strange concoctions I put together and staying up late watching TV!

By the time I reached ten years of age, my grandmother in Falkirk was frequently in hospital so we would visit my father’s brother and sister, Harry and Jesse, who went on to live in the house once their mother died. Neither Harry nor Jesse ever married and continued their life together in that house till both passed on many years later. Harry had a lavish lifestyle and would wear expensive clothes and watches and book equally expensive holidays for himself in far-off lands. I suspect that Harry was gay but nothing was ever confirmed. Jesse was a seamstress and suffered from weight problems all her life. She became Harry’s ‘wife’ in all but sleeping arrangements, a ring, and a piece of paper if you will. She took care of the house, the meals, and her job while Harry went out to work at a company, he owned with two partners (PDC, Penman, Daroch, and Christie). The company was a heavy transport repair company dealing mainly with large tankers. Harry was the person who dealt with reps and managed the spares department.

The Penman family burial ground in Falkirk, Scotland. Photo courtesy Ian Penman (my cousin)

The big change that happened around that age was when my Edinburgh grandmother, Helen (aka The Demon Queen) decided to uproot herself and purchase a house very close to us, indeed if you could relate NYC distances to our little village, she lived about a block away. The house Helen and Alec bought was in dire need of repair. It had to be almost rebuilt and even then, had shady areas like the downstairs kitchen which was honestly more like a garden shed. You went down a couple of stairs to it and it had visible ceiling pipes and a door to the backyard. I can almost see that little house now as I type these words. It was hastily renovated single-handedly by my father. I am not sure he was happy about this move and indeed in later conversations, he blamed the breakup of the marriage on the omnipresence of her mother. Who knows if that is fully true but her presence definitely contributed.

Helen was always encouraging my mother to make large purchases and pay via HP (Higher Purchase, a payment plan). One night my father returned from work to a new carpet in the living room, purchased by good old HP! He was livid as he had never bought something in this manner and vowed he never would. Arguments ensued, the first of many. It seemed that if there was an opportunity to interfere, Helen took it and ran with it right over the finish line.

So, you see her name, The Demon Queen, was well earned. She undoubtedly had psychological problems and never wanted to lose control of her daughter. My sadness was that I let her win.I don’t think I was equipped to stop her back then and my mother’s illness and abandonment made her goal of regaining control so much easier.

So, was my father telling me the truth when he attributed the break up of his marriage to Helen’s meddling? I don’t think she was solely responsible, but she did drive a wedge big enough for another woman to step in and take my father away from my mother.

I still have my grandmother’s gold signet ring with the faded initials HR. My mother wore it till the day she died and it was among the few personal effects the hospital set aside for me to collect – incidentally one was a large white teddy bear.

The Ring

On reflection, I guess my grandparents did their best, even Helen. Who knows what happened to her as a child that made her behave the way she did. I cannot hold any grudges against her none of us are perfect. My mother and father raised me in the way they had been taught to raise children by the example set by their parents. Was it a perfect example? Of course not, but life was so very different for them growing up that as I grow older I lose my judgment of their behavior. They are part of my life, part of who I have become as an adult. It has taken me a long time to place respect and forgiveness at their feet but now I have that ability I want to do just that. After all, I am sure I was not the easiest grandchild to understand either, who knows what they are all thinking as they look down on me but at least I hope they are smiling at all the expectations I defied on my way to becoming a ‘Misfit.’