There’s nothing more bewitching (or nerve shredding) than having grandchildren to stay!
Nappies on the carpet, pieces of Lego on the stairs, other bits of toys in the soup — every grandparent in the land knows the symptoms. it is the summer holidays, when the little ones come to stay, causing me repeatedly to declare that writing books is dead easy alongside surrogate parenting.
Last week was the first time we have had William, four, and amelie, two-and-a-half, entirely on our own, without a daddy or mummy in sight.
Do not for a moment imagine you are now going to read a catalogue of complaints, a litany of woes. My wife penny and i adored having them. But i have retired to bed less exhausted after attending a firefight in the Vietnam War, than riding herd on two small children hell-bent, as small children are, upon committing suicide any second they are unwatched, and jumping up and down on one’s stomach all day in between.
it is three decades since i had personal responsibility for any of my own offspring at the nappy phase. What a huge amount one forgets, both the good bits and bad!
Their attention span is tiny. i spent an hour assembling the Brio wooden train-set, for them to spend 15 minutes playing with it. Thomas The Tank engine stickers rated ten minutes, feeding ducks five.
But when they discover an activity, film or book they enjoy, it is impossible to detach them from it as we join a perpetual action replay. pop-Up pirate is a simple game, but i played it maybe 80 times last week. (it involves sliding plastic swords into holes in the side of a barrel in which a spring-loaded pirate is hiding, until he pops up.)
i would rather spend the night in the asylum seekers’ camp at Calais than watch the DVD of The Lion King again. i have nothing personal against peppa pig, but if i met her or her unshaven dad in the street, i might be tempted to punch them. i know far more than i want to about their stupendously boring lives.
BUT the good bits are so very, very good. stepgrandmother penny has had a pony, splashy, for 20 years, which is now a miraculous 36, and still trotting. William loved going round the ring on him, and amelie sat on him for a photograph.
The children cavorted in the pool for hours, rolled down grassy banks and were pushed by me on the swing until my arms ached.
No grandparent’s heart can fail to melt, the eyes to moisten, at the spectacle of small children in the state of ecstasy that overtakes them as readily as do tears.
in Hungerford, our little Berkshire town, there is a priceless institution called the Tutti pole. This is a cafe so retro that if crime fighter Miss Marple walked into it, she would feel that the Fifties are still hale and hearty.
penny takes every small visitor there for lunch, so they can gorge on sausages, peas and chips, fried eggs or toasted sandwiches. i regretted not taking our dogs with us when i saw how much of our contingent’s order wound up on the floor, but plenty went down the hatch as well.
We are obsessive finishers-up of everything we’ve stored in the fridge, and one forgets how children waste so much food. When they decide to down eating irons, persuasion can seldom induce them to pick them up again.
amelie is a pretty doughty trencherwoman, especially of peas and sausages, but i could have murdered William when he demanded a second bowl of breakfast Coco pops, then stubbornly refused to eat them. Only the aforesaid dogs were pleased.
penny, like most women, has eyes in the back of her head to spot a child about to impale itself on some garden implement, fall off a log or run across a road. i was less alert at the start of the week, but became super-vigilant by thee end of it.
One morning at 6am, William came pounding past our bedroom door on his way to awaken amelie from an apparently dreamless sleep. i sprang off the pillow to intercept him with a turn of speed i have not needed since a frigate sounded action stations in the Falklands War.
The physical beauty of children, the constantly changing g kaleidoscope of their moods and expressions, never ceases to fascinate and enchant.
One afternoon, when amelie decided to have a good scream for reasons she was unable coherently to explain, i removed my hearing aid, but then simply held her with a patience i did not know myself to possess until, at last, the sun came out again and she gave one of her dazzling smiles.
i admire the children’s mother, my daughter, for many things, but especially for running tight TV discipline. We see so many children who reflexively switch on a TV or ipad at the breakfast table, then remain locked onto it for the rest of f th the d day.
Technogeeks assert loftily that our children should start young to prepare themselves to live in the internet age. Rubbish! a surfeit of TV and computer games turns all too many into sad little robots.
William and amelie are allowed a burst of CBeebies ( the BBC children’s channel) before bedtime, but otherwise they do little goggling, thank heavens, though as they get older it will become progressively ever harder to police their low-screen diet. For now, and for grandparents, if not for exhausted parents returning from work, paddington Bear and sir Charlie stinky socks stories are infinitely superior to the evil box.
Like many oldies, i regret that the favourites of my childhood, especially Beatrix potter and The Wind in The Willows, have little magic for most of today’s children.
i remember long ago reading Treasure island to my offspring and finding that what had stirred in me a lifelong passion for risk and adventure moved them only to mocking laughter. Most of the young, inevitably, prefer the tales written for their own generation.
GRaNDpaReNTiNg is inherently more stressful than parenting, even if most of us experience it only in short bursts, because we find ourselves responsible for children that are not our own.
every moment of driving William and amelie back home to London, i was conscious of carrying a precious cargo that i held in trust, in a way that i am not with a wife and dogs aboard.
in our company, the children were infinitely loving anda rewarding. But as they scampered in into their own home an and embraced pa parents and toys, i ac accepted that, wi within hours, their lit little minds would mo move on from their exp experiences with us. if not forgotten, we wo would be on the she shelf — which is, of cou course, the proper pla place for us.
it sounds brutal to say that my only me memories of my gra grandparents are tha that they seemed ben benign but impossibly old, and smelled dist distinctly musty. in those days, we nev never went to stay with them because we wer were in the 24/ 7 cust custody of an adored old old-fashioned fashioned nanny,n such as has now vanished from the face of the earth.
almost all grandparents today use the same language about the little ones: ‘We love it when they come, and we love it when they go’; it is a privilege to be able to have them on the instalment system. penny and i spent most of the next day prostrate after William and amelie left.
i could never contrive to write another book if they were permanent residents. at the risk of sounding impossibly soppy, however, i cannot wait for them to come again.