WHEN I WAS very young, my grandmother took me every Whitsun for a week’s holiday in the Lake District. I would pack my own bag and can still remember the journeys as if they were yesterday – by steam train at the very end of the steam era – from the London suburbs through places of astonishing romance like Rugby, Crewe and Lancaster until eventually, late in the day, we would arrive at our Lakeland paradise in the far north-west.
We would stay in a remote farmhouse a few miles from a small village called Bowland Bridge, and each holiday followed a set routine: visits to Windermere, rides on the boats, tea and scones in the High Street, walks around Tarn Hows, picnics on the endless bracken-strewn Fells with the gigantic beauty of Lakeland spread out before my childish open eyes.
And in the evenings we would eat Kendal mint cake and play cards together – Canasta, Whist, Gin Rummy, Beggar My Neighbour – or Scrabble or I-Spy, or tell jokes until my sides hurt with laughter. By the time it was time for bed, I would sink into the coarse lavender sheets and imagine I was a Swallow hunting Amazons across a dark lake under endlessly blue skies.
Those holidays are amongst my happiest memories of childhood.
Many many years later and as I grew up by degrees, I discovered that my grandmother’s life had been a hard and tragic one. She lost her true love in the First World War. After she died his bloodstained last letter was found in a locked drawer in her desk. Eventually she married my grandfather, and had a child – my mother – but there were severe complications at the birth and she was unable to add to her family, as she had wanted. Then my grandfather, while still a relatively young man, developed a degenerative disease, which led to dementia. War came, and while visiting her dying husband in the local sanatorium, her house was destroyed by a V1 bomb. She emerged from the war widowed, homeless and penniless.
The post-war years were a slow and arduous struggle back to suburban respectability. Her small semi-detached house – called bizarrely ‘Burma’ – was eventually rebuilt. She returned to teaching and became a devoted servant of her school and community. Her rebellious, free-spirited daughter – my mother – married a merchant seaman and moved away to begin her own life. Relations between them were never easy but they both persevered. My grandmother was left alone to tend her husband’s grave, and her private memories. There must have been a keen sense for this thrifty, hard-working, fun-loving, God-fearing, well-intentioned woman, that life had not unfolded as she had intended . . .
But alone with her on our annual holiday I had no sense of her sadness. Was she thinking about the past as I ran without a care across Bowland Bridge towards the Fells beyond? Did her mind dwell on what might have been as we pulled Spilikins from the pile in the middle of the polished table, or played Twist for the last piece of Kendal Mint Cake? I doubt it. I think her grandchildren were a source of simple undiluted pleasure to her, as she was to us. A final piece of completion. Whatever had been or not been for her did not matter in Lakeland.
And that I think is the essential difference between parenthood and grandparenthood. All the stresses and strains of living and growing and becoming are ever present between a child and a parent, even when they both try to hide them. It’s the source of the deepest and most elemental of all our loves and connections.
But between a child and a grandparent the past – and the future – is irrelevant. There are only honeyed days to be enjoyed together free of time – bus rides to the station, Eagle comics to be bought, steam engines to be inspected, carriages to be chosen, packed lunches to be put up high, with the simple sustaining promise of a long journey to a far-off land of sky and hill and water . . .
Paul Greengrass is the critically acclaimed director of Bloody Sunday, United 93 and two Bourne films.