Story book grandpas are always very, very old. So old that their white beards are never shaved – maybe because they’re too old and weak to pick up a razor and shaving brush? Their backs are bent and, if there are pictures in the book, the facial features of one grandfather are indistinguishable from any other – just a tangled web of wrinkles, out of which peep (usually blue) eyes, in a perpetual state of either twinkling, or grumpy frowning. The twinkly grandpas offer kindness and comfort. The grumpy ones are a bit frightening but then somehow, in the course of the story, they always turn into the twinkly ones, usually as a result of the winning ways of their delightful grand-children. Johanna Spyri’s grandfather in Heidi is a classic example. He starts out as the cantankerous kind who ends up providing love and refuge for Heidi and is finally reconciled with the villagers with whom he has fallen out, and the church that he has long spurned. Grumpy to twinkly, in a nutshell.
The other kind of grandfather, of course, is the dead or dying one. Again, very old, again very wrinkled but this time with twinkly eyes that are about to shut forever. This storybook grandfather offers children a way of processing sadness and coming to terms with death and grief.
There’s something about these storybook grandfathers that once didn’t make me squirm, but now does. It’s obvious why, really, isn’t it? As I grow older, I recognise more acutely the ways in which old people’s individuality and personalities are flattened out and forgotten. Old is a new, and simpler, category of being; the grandfather is a ‘type’, rather than a person. But the truth is, he’s nothing like the grandfathers I have known, and the ones I know now.
My grandfather – Adolf
My grandfather and grandmother, on my mother’s side, lived in South Africa. They were unreachable, except by airmail letter, the very rare treat of an expensive operator-connected phone call, or a telegram in case of dire emergencies or momentous events. After saying farewell to them at Cape Town’s Jan Smuts (now O.R. Tambo) airport at the age of five, I only saw them both twice in total during my childhood – a visit ‘home’ and a trip by them to London for my brother’s bar mitzvah. But they were very important in my mother’s inner world, her sense of herself and her, sometimes fragile, belief that things would turn out OK in the end. She relied on them, even though they weren’t there to be relied upon. We got to know them via their letters, as well as through the news we received of them from the many visiting South Africans who passed through London on their ‘European tour’.
My grandfather was my mother’s favourite. She adored and respected him above anyone else in the world. So, it was a hard thing for me to discover, reading between the lines of letters and messages passed on by visitors, that my grandfather did not favour me. My grandfather’s favourite was my brother. Visitors were full of how much my grandfather thought of my brother. All the talk was about him and how proud my grandfather was of his achievements, his cleverness, his success at school. And on the two occasions we saw my grandparents, my grandfather made this clear too. I was excluded from playing games of chess – too young, too babyish, I’d spoil the game, my grandfather said. I was on the periphery of his sphere of interest, and never allowed into the warm circle of his full grandfatherly adoration. It hurt.
Now, with two grandchildren of my own, both equally adored, neither a favourite, unable to even conceive of how there could be limits or quotas on how much love is available to dole out, I think of my grandfather with regret and sadness. I missed out on him. But I think he also missed out on me. He died before I left school, went to university and entered the world of work. He knew nothing of the woman I was to become.
My grandfather – Oupa
My father’s father, Oupa, also living in South Africa, died when I was three years old, so I have no direct memories of him, just photographs of a neat, diminutive, dapper man, with a hat rakishly positioned on his head, standing a good foot smaller than my rather less stylish and attractive grandmother. By all accounts he was quite fond of me and my brother but perhaps it was lucky that I didn’t get the chance to know him more intimately as a presence in my life. I’ve written about him in my novel Off the Voortrekker Road. Though a fiction, many of the stories about Oupa are rooted in truth – the fact that he kept my grandmother desperately short of money for the household, that he was a harsh and unyielding father (tying my father’s left hand behind his back to force him to use his right hand and refusing to pay out for a bar mitzvah for him, to my father’s lifelong shame.) His tightness with money extended to not being willing to fund my father’s university education. He could go out and get a job and earn some money, couldn’t he? Luckily my father was exceptionally bright and won one of only two or three scholarships in the whole of the Cape, allowing him to continue his education. My father grew up and succeeded despite his father, not because of him.
Oupa lacked basic decency in his family life – what Jews would call menshlichkeit. He was definitely no mensh! But this extended beyond the family too. His nefarious business exploits became the stuff of family legend. When times were tough, on two separate occasions, Oupa managed to successfully burn down his hardware stores, pocketing a large amount of insurance money, allowing him to set up afresh. In the process, he also burnt down my father’s treasured matchbox collection, a crime for which my father never forgave him.
Despite all this, Oupa may have also had a softer side and my mother tells a few stories of his kindness to her. Unlike my father, she was a practical young woman, quick to pick up new skills such as those needed in the hardware store – cutting, chopping, sorting, fixing, weighing, measuring, dealing with customers. He clearly respected her for this. Perhaps Oupa’s antipathy towards my father stemmed from the fact that he just couldn’t understand a son whose intellectual achievements so far surpassed his own, while he had absolutely no interest whatsoever in the practical skills that Oupa so valued.
While it was probably no bad thing that I was protected from Oupa the man and all that went with his tempestuous relationship with my grandmother (Ouma), and my father, the stories I was told about him became a rich and important part of my childhood. Grandparents live on in memories, and this grandfather lived on in a particularly vivid – one might even say lurid – way. Grandfathers have value and significance, alive or dead. In my case, his larger-than-life character and exploits gave him a starring role in my first novel.
My father – the grandfather
My father was a loving parent, but not a hands-on one. Preoccupied with making (or sometimes failing to make) a living, and doing what was expected of him in those days, he didn’t change nappies, make dinner, do bath-time, put us to bed, read to us. On weekends, exhausted, and sometimes quite depressed, he took a ‘schluff’, a long sleep, in the afternoon, waking angrily when my brother and my arguments grew loud enough to rouse him. Practical care fell to my mother. When she was so sick she couldn’t leave her bed – just once in my memory – we discovered that he couldn’t crack an egg successfully. The kitchen floor was awash with slippery broken yoke and white and my father, a child himself, cried in shame and frustration and looked to us for assistance.
By the time my second child was born, my father had resolved his work problems, was much happier and on the verge of retirement. Suddenly Pappy Jack came into his own as a grandfather. He changed a nappy for the first time in his life, played with, and was adored by my son.
‘Why does he love me so much?’ my father asked, bashfully perplexed, yet basking in the pleasure of his grandson’s affection.
My mother came straight back, ‘Because you know who Mrs Goggins is.’
I saw my father become someone else. A grandfather. It was a route to the kind of connection that he’d missed out on with us.
My Grandpa Husband and Me
Googling grandfathers, I find a wonderful site called ‘Famous Grandfathers: A List of Bad Boys Who Are Now Grandfathers’, and they include hell-raisers Ozzie Osbourne and Alice Cooper, rock god Mick Jagger and actors Robert de Niro and Jack Nicholson. In among the stories are delightful photographs, including one of Osbourne pulling cross-eyed, goofy faces with his grand-daughter. How did this remarkable transformation happen?
My husband wasn’t a rock god nor was he a hell-raiser in his youth, and yet the transformation is, nonetheless, a big one. Yesterday – it was only a blink away, not a life time surely? – he was a long-blond-haired, hippyish student, in a leather airman’s jacket, desert boots and loons. He’d hitch-hiked across Europe, seen The Grateful Dead at the Bickershaw Festival, marched against racism and cuts and then gone on to a marriage with me, a demanding, serious job, and bringing up two children. And now here he is, ‘grandpa’.
The roles we played as parents, back in the 80s and 90s, wound up being quite stereotypical, much as we tried to break down the gender boundaries. I took a long maternity leave first time round and then gave up full-time work with our second child; my husband’s long hours and work responsibilities meant that, on weekdays at least, I took on more of the caring role, becoming the ‘expert’ in day-to-day minutiae, keeping track of who needed what, dealing with school traumas, preparing their food. But this time round, with a new batch of little ones, my husband has much more time to revel in minutiae. The one thing I’ve found hard to give up control of though, to be honest, is the role of food-giver. Whether it’s the ‘Jewish mamma’ syndrome, or something else, the pleasure of making food for the children – and now the grandchildren – is something I’ve struggled to be able to share and fought hard to retain. It seems that only I know whether a fishfinger, a sausage, or a plate of pasta is what is really needed and how to cook these culinary delights, despite my husband being an exceptional cook, generally acknowledged to be much better than me. The careful preparation of fishfingers and peas? That’s for me – not grandpa!
Grandpa (and Granny) are not really different from the complex, individual, complicated individuals we always were and always have been – quite good at some things and not others, cheerful sometimes but not always, full of our own quirks and preferences and interests. My husband hasn’t changed fundamentally, the grandpa-ness being just a new, (very precious and important) add-on, a new layer of experience, enriching but not essentially changing who he is. This grandpa – the one who once went to the Bickershaw Rock Festival `– is not the grandfather ‘type’ but a unique individual.
So, let’s remember the real ones – my father who discovered the pleasures of being with a young child, my one grandfather who was only able to perform the role fully for one grandchild, not two, my other one who I only knew through the myth-making of family memories, my husband who hasn’t had a beard since his hippy days, who arrives for his babysitting duties on his motorbike, and has eyes that twinkle as much or as little as anyone else’s, young or old.
Barbara Bleiman
September 2023