Going to Nan's

Going to Nan's

In the early sixties I lived in Harlow, Essex, but we would often go
back to London to visit my grandparents. I was about eight or nine at
the time. We drove along ghostly country roads at night. A mixture of
gloom and sporadic lighting, cat's eyes on the road, the Light
programme on the radio, playing music such as Midnight in
Moscow.

We sped, or so it seemed in those bumpy old cars, past looming trees
that occasionally brushed our windows. Touching the dark subconscious
of childhood fears, tangled forests and scary scenarios from Rupert the
Bear and Messrs Grimm and Andersen.

My brother and I would have Smiths Crisps with a little blue bag of
salt to untwist and sprinkle as desired. Sickly smells of leather
upholstery and petrol adding to the potent mix. Gradually, waves of
sleep would tug at my body, but I clung awake through the magic
lands.

We would usually be coming back from London during the night, but
sometimes we would stay over. For example, during the extended family
Christmases at Nanny Watts, my mum's mum.

She lived near King's Cross where she worked, or didn't according to my
Dad, on the railways. Us kids - my brother and assorted cousins -would
be bundled together in beds, two or three per bed. When we'd finally
settled down, I would drift into that twilight zone between sleep and
the world. Listening to the trains rattle past, and the many other city
noises that were so different to the sounds of Harlow.

I normally slept in my Aunt Jackie's room. She still lived with my Nan,
but as her youngest child wasn't that much older than me. She had
posters of cowboys on her walls. Tough men with dark clothes and
personalities to match, facing the world with only their gun, their
horse and an attitude.

Eventually we'd all ride off into our dreams. Then in the morning
there'd be new games to play by the canal, or amongst the bomb craters
that were still dotted around the nearby wasteland.

One Christmas we all stayed up late to watch King Kong; so many kids,
so much laughter, tensions too, of course. We used to fight and our
parents had to keep order, without offending each other, too much, in
an uneasy pax parentis. While they were simmering,
we would have made up and be swapping toys, or trying to cadge some
beer out of my granddad.

I did most of my early drinking round my grandparents; my dad's mum was
always good for a drop of Guinness. She had a great love of the black
stuff, and could even be seen in her local enjoying a glass while
shelling her peas in a plastic basin.

New characters would come into our lives. There was Ginger, who'd come
round to Nanny Watts' flat. Ginger had been half-blinded by someone
throwing pepper in his eyes as a kid, or so my mum said. He'd get the
men to go down the pub, and sometimes I'd be allowed to stand outside
and Ginger would listen to me reel off names of FA Cup winners and past
Prime Ministers. I think I was more like eleven by then, and already
dreaming of growing up and being a man inside the pub, swapping tales
and ordering my own beer.

Date mostly written: 1995