I have often said I'm lucky that I have a young family. I was privileged to get to know some of my great grandparents and my grandparents. I've been lucky that they've been able to play a huge role in my life, something I know not everyone gets to have. Today I want to focus on one person who made a huge impact on my life, my Great Grandad.
I've often said that my great grandad, or to give him his proper title Grandad Sweets, was one of the biggest influences on my life. Let's start with why I called him that, whenever we visited, which was often when I was younger he had this magical draw in his living room and when you opened it, it was packed with all my favourite sweets. Fruit pastilles, wine gums, mint humbugs a never ending supply that just appeared when you opened the drawer, for a child it was a magical thing. So the name stuck and he played up to it no end, often telling us to take some with us and the next time we visited it'd be fully stocked up again.
It was from him I developed my love of films, he was an avid follower of the classics but again in his own way. The story of Gone with the Wind is legendary in our family. The classic is approximately 3 hours 45 minutes long, but as Grandad sweets didn't like the star Clark Gable, he also didn't like kissing so his home edited version is roughly 25 minutes long. He did this home editing job on all the classics, apart from Laurel and Hardy which he kept separately. He also helped develop my love of Disney, underneath the magic sweet drawer in the corner of his living room was another magical kingdom (Disney - magic kingdom, sorry I couldn't resist the bad pun!) this one contained Disney classics on VHS, we were allowed to take one each home with us each time we visited like a Disney based video rental scheme and drive my mother mad by watching them over and over again, as I remember I used to torture her quite frequently by bringing home Pete's Dragon, one of the more annoying Disney films. He also taped vast amounts of Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes cartoons on homemade VHS tapes for us, laughing along with us even if we'd seen them hundreds of times before.
As I've got older I realise just how complicated a man he was. He served in the armed forces during World War II and saw action in Africa and made his way up to Italy. He was in the village where Benito Mussolini was hung by his compatriots, but he never spoke to me about those days. He did take a picture of the former dictator of Italy hanging next to his young mistress at Guilino di Mezzigra, I was once allowed to see this picture when I was considered old enough. To this day it's one of the sickest things I've seen. Mussolini's face caved in, parts of his body hung off him where his compatriots showed there displeasure at him. To add to the mystery of the man after his death none of the family ever found where this picture was and trust me we looked for it.
Sometimes I wish I'd be able to go an speak to him about his experiences, what happened to him out there, how it changed him. He came home after the war and built for what was the time a modern house for his family,
however he ended up living alone in that house for the majority of its existence. His garden was immaculate, with his ponds and flowerbeds making a little oasis in the middle of Spalding. His three children grew up and moved out, his wife, unusual for the time left for London, leaving him living alone in this home built for a family. There's wasn't a happy relationship for the most part and she did the right thing for her in leaving for the 'big smoke', she ended up looking after the choirboys at St Pauls Cathedral and eventually returned to Spalding years later.
My Nan often tells me of his eccentricities and how he was difficult to live with, however as a great grand child I saw none of this. He gave me unconditional love and the smile on his face when I shared the news of me passing my 11 plus is one of the highlights of my life. He was a clever man and read voraciously, he had books on any number of topics, history, plants, geography and he used to let me into his library. I spent hours up there reading up on World War II, British history in general and anything else that took my fancy from his amazing library.
My dad has said that maybe he took the chance of trying to put right some of the wrongs of his past by being so hands on and being part of mine and my siblings life. I wish I could have known him as the adult I am today, we had so much in common I could see us spending hours talking about classic cinema, history and all sorts of topics. Unfortunately he passed away in 2002 just as I was hitting adulthood.
Speaking through very much rose tinted glasses I thought he was a great man, with a heart of gold that revelled in the company of the younger members of the family. He had a child like innocence about him, he knew what he liked and what he didn't. He didn't mince his words, he said what he meant and meant what he said. He was one of the first people that I wanted to emulate when I was younger alongside He-Man and Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles. Now as I'm older I see a lot of him in me, we both enjoy our own company and can quite happily spend a lot of time on our own left to our own devices. We both had a little OCD when it came to organising things, much as my DVD collection was collated first in genre and then in alphabetical order, so were his VHS and book collections. When we are interested in a subject we research it often to the point of obsession. We both have a broad range of knowledge on a number of subjects and love to discuss thing we are interested in. It's often been said in my family not to get me started on a deep discussion on films unless you have a couple of spare hours.
I've been thinking long and hard about him recently, when him and my Great Nan broke up for the last time did he feel the need to find someone else or was it that he'd been hurt to much to consider getting into another relationship, maybe he was just happy to be on his own. Sometimes I miss being in relationship, when I've had a bad shift at work and need to unload on someone, then other times I'm very much happy on my own. I've learnt to be happy being on my own, I've filled my time with learning new skills, as a sidenote the guitar lessons are not going well but the Italian ones are. It's weird I never thought of ending up like him, when I got married I thought it was forever but now I'm thinking his lifestyle wasn't so bad, he did what he wanted in his own way, is that a bad thing? I've had a couple of people offer to set me up with there friends, and I've met a couple of people on my travels given a different set of circumstances might have had something with but on the whole I'm happy at the minute, but if for some reason Anna Kendrick is reading this then drop me a message I'd be up for a coffee date!
So that's another post done, thanks to you for reading this rubbish and until next time, peace out.
Add comment
Comments