I am sitting on a train from Nottingham to Norwich as I write this. I have spent a few days at home, and now I’m thinking about my grandfather, though I’m not entirely sure why. Perhaps it is because of the old gentleman who asked me which train I was catching when I was stood on the platform, who mentioned in passing how he was stationed in Norwich sixty-five years ago, as an RAF pilot. My grandfather would have been only seven or eight years old then. Not that this man really reminded me of my grandfather, even if I could imagine him as one.

Perhaps too it is because the other day I saw a man, again completely unlike my father’s father, wearing an old jumper like the ones he used to wear; the ones which had that particular thick-woollen smell; the ones which I can still remember the coarse feel of against the skin of my little hands.

Today was also the day I sat on the flowery living-room settee watching Eurosport with my girlfriend and remembered, unexpectedly, that this was the same settee my grandfather lay dying upon in the summer of three years ago. That settee holds better associations too though, like the December we got it, when its fresh-cotton scent mingled with the anticipation of Christmas, or the afternoons when my cousin and I would lie languorously across it, eating sweets and watching children’s television.

That summer three years ago, those last months he was alive, was summer nonetheless. Days were long and mine were passed with barbecues by the riverside; afternoon liaisons with my girlfriend and long evenings talking about the coming holidays while the summer air carried anticipation on its breath and the dew collected in the grass beneath my hands and feet. My grandfather’s last days were meanwhile spent dozing in a wicker chair and a wicker hat in the warmth of the conservatory as birds skittered about the garden outside. There was little change here from summers past, except that he no longer took an interest in the newspapers, as he had done for as long as I could remember.

As the days got warmer and my grandfather’s condition worsened, he traded the hot bright conservatory for the cool dim living room, where he could lay across the flowery settee and feel his body fade away. In the evenings I would be sent to ask if he would take any dinner. Often I would find him asleep and so would leave the room quietly and close the door, but only after lingering a few seconds just to make sure he was still breathing. Other times he might be awake, but he would not be hungry and even if he was hungry he would usually feel too unwell to move to the table and so would eat where he sat. Thus our table became one plate smaller and I played a CD or put on the radio just to fill the silences while we ate.

It was towards the end of June that my grandfather began to need more care than my grandmother could provide, so he was sent to a care home. This was a week or so before my first GCSE exam. I was told it was a temporary measure; that he would return as soon as he was better. It was just after I got in from my second exam that my grandmother told me he had died that morning. She was stony-faced as she told me this (I have never seen her cry) and remained so as she asked if I would have preferred not to know. For a moment an almost incredulous anger rose up in me at the thought that she might have kept it from me for nothing more than the sake of a few exams and the hurt it would cause me. But this I hid as I told her of course I wanted to know. This affirmation of her decision to tell me seemed to quell the anxiety in her almost impenetrable features. Had she kept his death from me until after my exams I would have been angry, though I imagine I would have eventually come to understand, or at least suppose as I do now, that protecting me was a coping mechanism for dealing with her own grief.

I never did grieve though, not like people grieve in books or in the movies, where they mope around for days, slumped over the arms of sofas, staring out the window at overcast skies and occasionally bursting into tears, either of the loud explosive kind or the slow choking kind. Which I found strange when I thought about how my grandfather had always been there for me right from when I was born, to when I was seven and my father and I moved in with him and my grandmother, up until when I was fifteen and he died. And the ways he had been there for me were innumerable, for it was always my grandfather who picked me up from school and who always made sure I had something to eat when I got in, like a cheese sandwich, or pitta bread with homous, and who ritually polished my shoes each night before I went to school in the morning, even if I complained that such excessive fastidiousness was unnecessary when I was the only one with such perfectly black shoes in over a thousand pairs of feet. It was he too who took me to the hospital when I nearly blinded myself leaping across a stream into a thick clump of bamboo.

Perhaps his absolute reliability led me to take him for granted sometimes, but it was not when I was walking home from school, looking at my scuffed and dirty shoes that I missed him; it was when I passed my GCSEs, passed my A-levels, got my driving license; it was when I saw aeroplanes in the sky, saw the Formula One racing was on TV, thought about Yorkshire, the holidays we all took there when I was a child; it was when I came home and made a cheese sandwich; Or it was times like these, when I would sit and remember him and what he meant to me.

But there is sadness mixed in with this nostalgia and part of my sadness in remembering him, remembering that he is dead, is that he never saw me get to university. I know that would have made him proud. Partly too it still bothers me that I never cried over his death. Perhaps this was because, at the time, I was a vessel too full up with Chemistry equations and quotes from Dickens and Shakespeare, to have any room for grief, or perhaps because we had expected his death for several months, so it came as no surprise when it finally happened. I still feel like I should have felt sadder at his passing, but even now sadness is neither the first nor the most prominent idea to reveal itself when I think of my grandfather. Rather, I experience myriad emotions, images and sensations that flash before my mind’s eye in a technicolor montage.

Among these is a particularly strong memory of a time when I was five or six and would stay at my grandparents’ house two, sometimes three, times a week. There was a game I used to play which involved, after having my bath, running straight to my grandfather, who would be sat in the old green armchair in the dining room, and jumping up into his lap to hide under my towel. Then, hidden from him in a cocoon of corduroy and cotton, I would pull at the dark hairs on his arm until he lifted up the towel and peered in at me. Once he had bent down to look in I would throw the towel over his head so that it covered both of us and shut out the rest of the world.

Alone here in this hideaway, the smells of cotton and bubble bath and my grandfather’s aftershave and his wool jumper, would mix together into a unique and heady scent that I will never forget. And here I would stay, breathing in this scent, talking with my grandfather, asking him why the hairs on his arm were dark while the hair on his head was grey, until the bathwater had evaporated from my skin and it was time to get changed into pyjamas. Then it was into the bed in the spare bedroom of my grandparents’ bungalow, to get snug under the colourful sheets, and have a story, either a Beatrix Potter, or a Winnie the Pooh, read out to me by my grandfather until his voice became hoarse. Even once the story was over though, my grandfather would sit and watch over me until he was sure I was asleep.

My grandmother sleeps alone in that room now. I assume she does so because the larger bedroom next door, the one my grandparents used to share, holds too many memories. She never talks about him, so I can’t be certain. I assume too that she misses him. Not every day, but at times like these when sat alone, perhaps on a train or perhaps in a sitting room, reminded of him by some tactile and unexpected association. Or perhaps it is when she watches the ten o’clock news or goes to Newark with my aunt that she misses him; regrets his passing, if only for the lost company, if only for the reason that, though she never said, or even indicated it, she loved him.

I too loved him, though as I grew older he became older; more set in his ways; more meticulous and exacting; resistant to change or avoidable expense. In a way there is small blessing in his passing for now that he is gone he is idealised in my memory, untouchable by acts of the present or future, and so my remembrance of him can return to those earlier times, when spending time with my grandparents was like being wrapped in a warm blanket; when the world was smaller and full of trees and grass and bumble bees; when lunch was salad and apple while watching Sesame Street or, on a Sunday, the Formula One racing. Times when he and my grandmother would take me to Yorkshire. Times when he would take me for walks by the river to look at the locks and the boats going through them. Sometimes during these walks, or else later at home, he would tell me about how he and his school friends used to go out boating, and these stories often blended into the stories of Swallows and Amazons. He read that book to me when I was nine or ten.

He also told me of how, when he was a child during the war and the air-raid sirens sounded, his father would run in and pull him out from his bed and carry him into the shelter at the bottom of the garden. I was reminded of this story when the old gentleman on the platform of Nottingham station mentioned being an RAF pilot. Not that it was much of a story beyond that, although in my head the account was always dramatised by a young version of my great-grandfather running out of a Victorian house with his fearful son in his arms, just as the house was struck by a bomb and crumpled into a heap of bricks and shattered glass.

I similarly fabricated another memory of my grandfather when he once mentioned being in a field with his father and seeing a fighter plane fly low overhead. His story ended there, but in my child’s imagination my grandfather was the man from North by Northwest, the one who runs away from an enemy plane as it fires a line of machine gun bullets down a cornfield. Of course the planes my grandfather watched as a child never fired so much as a single shot at him but imagining and believing these fantastical suppositions seems little more difficult than imagining my grandfather as a child, or even a young man; or anything other than what he was to me: a doting old grandpa.

I sigh and stare out the window to see the scenery flickering past. Trees, roads, farmhouses, all appear then disappear, each visible for only a few seconds before they vanish over the horizon. In their transience they liken themselves to memories, in the same way that the train journey likens itself to life, to the act of living, in the way that both move ever forwards, pausing only now and then to let people on or off. And those people, who step lightly from the solid concrete platforms of towns you know only in name onto the shuddering carpeted floor of the train, are the people who come and go unpredictably into and out of your life. My grandfather was one of those people, taking for many years the same journey I took, until, a few miles down the track, we reached a station at which he had to get off, a station where his journey diverged from my own.

That was how it always felt after he died: not so much as if he had disappeared but more as if he was just separated from us by physical distance, taking a different journey, and that we might go visit him some time. In a way it stills feels like that, as if, in repeating this metaphorical journey, as I will repeat this literal journey, I might be able to see him again, even if if I will not be able to get off at his station, even if my glimpses of him will be fragmentary, fleeting, and vanish, all too quickly over the horizon as the train moves ever forwards into the present.

Tags: autobiography, death, grandfather, non-fiction, summer, wicker

This entry was posted on Monday, February 23rd, 2009 at 5:28 pm and is filed under Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.