My beautiful granddaughter Charlotte, who is twenty-six, goes into my wardrobe and sighs with pleasure. My clothes are wonderful, she tells me, the most wonderful vintage. Vintage? Really? To me they are just my clothes, lovely clothes, but just what I wear. They speak of me. I don’t feel vintage.
I have been a grandmother since I was seventy. I am now ninety-seven and I can honestly say that not only have I learned a lot, but I have had the joyous experience of watching another generation of our family grow up. And this has been a totally different experience from that of watching my own children grow up. The times we live in are different now, but I am also a very different person from who I was at twenty-eight, when our first baby was born.
During a successful career as a ballerina and top-billing theatre and film actress in England, I had fallen in love with a young, newly qualified veterinary surgeon, Robert Ayre-Smith. He went on to pursue a degree in agriculture at Cambridge and was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to the University of Louisiana. It was there, in Baton Rouge, that we were married, in 1951, during those hopeful post-war years.
The following year we returned to England, where our first daughter, Sally Jane, was born. Sally was only three months old when we set off to Kenya, where Robert had been appointed by the Colonial Veterinary Service to run a 10,000-acre government experimental farm in the Rift Valley. Our son Mark was born in 1953, and a few years later we had another daughter, Harriet. I’m happy to say our three children are still with us and we have, in addition, three grandchildren, Finn, Charlotte and Indie, now aged twenty-seven, twenty-six and twenty-four.
In 1964, we sailed on the Oriana to Sydney, where Robert joined the CSIRO as a principal research scientist. We settled into our new life in Australia and I returned to my career by joining Channel 7 as a TV producer. At the time, it was an uncommon occupation for a woman. Life was full with children and work. Later, when Robert went to work in Baghdad, Spain and Honduras, the children and I went to live with my parents in England and we joined Robert for holidays. It was an unusual way to live and eventually we all decided that we missed Australia and would like to return and make a permanent home here.
Mark and his family live in Far North Queensland. Sally Jane pursued a successful career as a producer in film and television, is married, but has no children. Harriet is married and has a daughter. Her husband is Australian, but they live and work in America. So I have not been able to see my grandchildren as consistently as I would have liked to. Nevertheless, the gaps between our meetings have, in certain ways, enhanced our relationships. I was lucky to get to know them well when they were young, so our emotional closeness remains strong, despite the physical distance between us. As they have grown up, their individual characters have developed, which is a wonderful experience for a grandmother to witness.
Their world is unimaginably different from the one in which I grew up, in England. I didn’t know my mother’s parents at all. Her father died before I was born and her mother died when I was just one or two, so my paternal grandparents were the only grandparents I had. And they played an important part in my life.
My grandmother was a very strong woman. She went to work when she was still a child, because they were poor, there were lots of brothers and sisters, and their father had died. I remember her telling me the sweet story of when she went to a clothing factory to see if she could get a job, because she could sew. In those days you couldn’t get ready-made clothing—everything was handmade. The foreman said to her, ‘How old are you?’ She replied, ‘Eleven.’ He then asked her to spell ‘work’ and she said, ‘W-o-r-k.’ Then he asked her to spell ‘walk’. When she hesitated, he said, ‘Look, come back later. I think you should do a bit more schooling.’ She did go back, and she worked hard all her life.
I remember her stories of taking in lodgers: she was determined to earn extra money so that her three children would have a proper education and a much better way of life than her own early years. And this she achieved. My father had a successful career in the Royal Navy and his brother and sister had executive positions in the civil service.
My grandmother was the dominant person in their marriage; my grandfather was gentle and clever, and told me lovely stories. He spent most of his working life in the Thames Water Police. I still have his large metal police whistle, which I carry in my handbag.
My grandmother, that little girl who asked to work in the factory, was a very fine seamstress. One of my treats when I was little was to be allowed to look at the marvellous boxes of Victorian buttons in her sewing cupboard. Some of those glorious buttons and trimming would now be very valuable. Another memory: when I was quite small and feeling cold at bedtime, my grandmother would warm newspaper in front of the fire and wrap it round my bare feet. ‘There’s nothing like warm newspaper to warm you,’ she’d say. Nowadays, with electric blankets, that sounds a bit ridiculous, but at the time it was gorgeous.
She also had a wonderful, long gold muff chain, on the end of which was a gold pocket watch. Every dress she wore had a little pocket for it. When she died, she left the chain to me and the watch to my cousin. We both treasure these items.
My grandmother was not a tall woman, about five-foot- two, but she held herself upright and was strong. Most of the photos of her as a young woman were taken in the age when subjects had to pose and keep still when a camera was pointed at them, so people often look somewhat severe. Photographs can lie. My grandmother was a smiling person, warm and kind, attractive, as was my grandfather. I always thought of them as caring people, never intimidating, and I always looked forward to seeing them. That says a lot. My grandmother always smelled beautiful and it was such a pleasure in my life to be with her, and with my grandfather.
They had always lived in London, but when the war came their area was badly bombed and my father brought them to live with us, just outside Portsmouth, at Binfield in Hampshire. By the time the war ended, it seemed unsuitable for them to return to London, so my father built a granny flat and they lived with us until they died at an old age. My parents also came to live with me in their later life. I think that is what family is all about, being together, looking after each other.
My grandparents had a big influence on my life as a young girl. Life with them and my parents was secure, filled with the certainties of love and belonging. In contrast, my grandchildren’s world is global, and seems to me to be full of uncertainties. My relationship with them is, therefore, different from my grandparents’ relationship with me.
I found it easy being a new grandmother. The joy and wonder that I still feel at the birth of a new, tiny human must be universal. A baby grandchild who needs looking after evokes similar feelings as one’s own children did as babies. But as a grandmother, I had a lot more time than I did as a mother, and I could enjoy and indulge, without having the full responsibility of parenthood—without those feelings of guilt at never being good enough. And then, of course, there is the other side of the coin in the new relationship, that of the child’s perception of the grandparent.
Watching the English 2019 D-day Remembrance commemorations on television with my grandchildren was a strange experience. As my father was in the navy, I grew up in Portsmouth, where the ceremonies took place, and where D-day was launched from. As it happened, I was visiting my parents from London for a few days and I noticed that both sides of the lane in front of my parents’ house were filled with army vehicles, nose to tail—a most unusual sight. We had no idea what was going on; as it was wartime, we just assumed it was an exercise of some sort. Watching the reenactment on TV of that huge moment in history seventy-five years later, with my grandchildren, I could say to them that I was not only alive back then, but actually there, physically—things like that are so radically different from the things I shared with my grandparents. My grandchildren know I was there, but what does this momentous event mean to them?
I like to think of my role as a grandparent as a special privilege, because a grandmother can give a unique feeling of security in today’s world, which seems so volatile and invasive for young people, especially when they are confronted by 24/7 media. Providing that extra feeling of stability, as someone who has lived through significant moments in history—been there, really, on D-day—and still survived and is part of your family and loves you—this is a true grandparent’s role, and a most gratifying one. I am still here, so I give my grandchildren an intimate sense of continuity, a thread to their own past.
Of my three grandchildren, it is Charlotte whom I have seen the most, because she was born in Sydney and I often looked after her when she was little. I have vivid memories of taking her for walks in her pram, visiting the antiques market and pointing out things to this two-year-old who was genuinely curious about the various objects. A few years later, I was teaching her to sew and knit. It was lovely to see her joy and excitement when she found out how to thread a sewing needle, use a thimble and knit a little scarf for her favourite doll. I think of my grandmother and her nimble fingers and I choose to believe that this direct line between us later came in useful for Charlotte at Oxford University, when she was directing and producing plays and was able also to design and make the costumes for her actors.
I also loved teaching her to make pastry for the family mince pies that I always made at Christmas time. I’m thrilled to say she still makes them today!
Another and different occasion was her first proper haircut. I took her to my own hairdresser’s, where I had been a client for many years. Before he put the cotton smock on her, John sat her on my knee in front of the mirrors, in case she was intimidated in any way. Instead, she just clung to me and said, ‘It’s all right, Grannyma, don’t be scared. It’ll be all right.’ At all of two and a half, she was looking after me!
A more recent memory, and one I cherish, is when Charlotte came home from Oxford to speak at my darling husband Robert’s memorial service in Sydney in 2016. She spoke movingly of her relationship with her grandfather:
When I was thirteen, my grandfather sent me a book in the post that changed my life—or rather, because I was only thirteen, made my life what it has become. I’m sure he did not intend for it to have the effect it did. It was an innocuous paperback, maroon, with a small picture on the cover of a man with close-cropped hair, sitting in front of an uneaten dinner with a wine bottle at his elbow. An image curiously unrelated to the content of the book itself, because the book was Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. I had never read anything so serious, and my thirteen-year-old eyes were burning with tears of awe and reverence. That was the beginning of my impassioned relationship with Russian literature.
A year later I found myself spending a week or two in Robert and Carol’s flat in Woollahra and I could not sleep most nights for jetlag mingled with a vein of homesickness. And during those long nights I read War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Sometimes I would bring my books to the break fast table in the morning, and Robert would take them and hum in approbation. He told me that it had taken him several months to read War and Peace, which made me feel better about the difficulties I was having. He apparently read it on a boat to Brazil. So it was that Robert opened an entire world at my feet, which I have been exploring to the best of my ability.
I think this illustrates what an influence grandparents can have on grandchildren, grandfathers as well as grandmothers.
Charlotte says that Robert taught her how to be at ease, no matter where she found herself. He taught her that thinking, just thinking, is a glorious thing to do. Subsequently, whenever she is under pressure, she says to herself, No, stop it, Robert would not approve. Robert also loved music. One of his favourite pieces was Schubert’s ‘Ava Maria’, and whenever the world crowds in on Charlotte or she feels lonely, she will play this song and remember the things her grandfather taught her.
My two grandsons are not as familiar to me now as they were when they were younger. When they moved to Sydney, they would drop in after school and partake of my cooking and enjoy discussing their schoolwork with Robert. They have both grown into attractive young men, different from one another in personality and temperament, but with a family similarity. Finn, the elder, is thoughtful, sensitive and developing a love for his home in Far North Queensland. Indie is gregarious and enjoying studying at the Film and Television School.
I have come to the conclusion that the contribution of grandparents to family life, while not a necessity, is certainly an asset. This was brought home to me recently, when the young daughter of friends of my daughter Sally Jane, whose farm I live on, asked Sally if she would be a de facto grandmother at her school on Grandmother Day, because her real grandparents were in South Africa, where she used to live. My daughter accepted instantly, having realised how upset her young friend would be on the day, not to have a grandmother of her own like everyone else. It was apparently a very happy occasion for all.
Being a grandparent is not only a privilege and a joy, but also a challenge in today’s world, and doubly so if one is as old as I am. But, without wanting to be greedy, I wonder if I will live long enough to have the added joy of being a great-grandmother! Great-grandmother to a girl, perhaps, who would also appreciate my clothes, vintage or not.