IF I WRITE about my mum’s father, Reginald Ward, it is not out of favouritism. He’s simply the grandparent I feel I knew best out of the four – and the only one who called me ‘Pidge’, which was short for ‘Pigeon’.
We were lucky enough to grow up with a full set on both sides: Nan and Pap Collins on my dad’s, and Pap Reg and Nan Mabel on my mum’s. All lived long lives and loomed as large and colourfully as any grandparent ought. Sweets, comics, workbenches, walks in the park and two very different kids of homemade pastry evoke the grandparental influence (the generous, savoury petticoat Nan Collins ran round the side of a roasting tin, and the neat, sugar-glazed crust on Nan Mabel’s handed-down treacle tart recipe). Incidentally, in Northampton, ‘pap’ is the colloquial default for ‘grandfather’, and ‘nan’ for ‘grandmother’. You should know this.
The big difference between the two sets was mobility: Pap Collins rode a scooter, but in the main he and Nan relied on lifts, legs or public transport. Meanwhile, Pap Reg could drive and had a car, which he drove well into his seventies. Of the two couples, Reg and Mabel were, relatively speaking, the ‘posh’ ones, in that they lived in a bungalow with a front garden, while the other nan and pap lived in a terrace looking out on the street. Reg was a toolmaker who had turned shop steward, which led him on the path to a full-time job working for the Amalgamated Engineering Union (later the Amalgamated Union of Engineering Workers). He came from working-class stock but since his dad was a clerk for London Midland and Scottish Railway, this made them, in Mum’s words, ‘upper crust’ round Jimmy’s End.
Pap Reg died in 2001, aged eighty-five, still active with the pressure group Pensioners’ Voice. I wished he’d lived to see the book I wrote about my childhood, because he formed an important part. I recorded with wonder that he could remember stuff from as far back as the early 1920s, like the address where his headmistress lived (the corner of Forfar Street and Harlestone Road) and the specific Meccano set his parents bought him while off school with whooping cough aged six (the A1 set). This made him a lot like me. We bonded when I was a student finding my political feet in London. It dawned on me in that period of enlightenment that our nans and paps were really interesting people.
Reg, in particular, had hands-on experience of industry and collective bargaining. We found common ground in our views on workers’ rights and government wrongs in the second half of the 1980s, a vital connection for the burgeoning undergraduate socialist. His first-ever job, aged fourteen, had been producing and assembling parts for model trains; I was already in my twenties and still in pampered education.
I’m glad I got to know Pap Reg while he was around, to value his generation’s unique contribution and its hotline to the beginning of the century. He gave me my first sip of beer, when I was much too young to appreciate it, which he always called ‘tonic’, just as he always called me ‘Pidge.’ I raise a glass to him now.
Andrew Collins is a scriptwriter, journalist and broadcaster whose 1970s-set memoir Where Did It All Go Right? is essentially a hymn to his family – and his grandparents.