On Saturday Memories of grandad leaping on sofa

IT was the sight of my grandfather jumping up and down on the sofa that I remember best. Perhaps nowadays there’s many a youthful grandad who’d wreck living room furniture out of sheer joy, but in 1966 such men were few and far between.

Of course, the old man from the Somerset Levels did have something major to celebrate. I’ve just worked out that, had grandad lived, he’d have been 122 years of age before he next had a chance of seeing the England football team lift any silverware.

Note my caution – ‘a chance of’. Like millions of others, I will be glued to the screen tomorrow. And I’ll certainly be on the edge of my sofa. However, because of so many years of disappointment, I am not confident I will be jumping up and down on it.

If we win, I will certainly be doing a Harry Langsford. And emulating his daughter – my mother – too. It was the pair of them who were leaping from sofa to sofa on that Saturday afternoon in 1966.

As a ten-year-old I watched the match, right enough – but it was the furniture-leaping that has stuck in my brain for more than half a century. Grown ups just didn’t do that sort of thing back then. Not in our village, they didn’t. Specially not grandads.

If you lived in the working class part of a rural West Country village 55 years ago, then you’ll recall that grandfathers were extremely staid characters. Most of them had fought in world wars, they had taken orders under fire, they accepted the duties expected of them, and knew their place.

Grandfathers wore cloth caps and weskuts (West Country for waistcoat) and, if a shirt sleeve was ever for some inexplicable reason rolled higher than the elbow, you’d see some very white skin indeed. Because working class grandads never disrobed, ever, nor did they disport themselves with any sense of joyous abandon. In short, they tended to be very stiff-upper-lipped, buttoned-up people.

Even if Harry Langsford represented the least solemn or severe of his kind, the idea of him or any other grandad using sofa springs as rocket fuel to gain more in the way of ecstatic height was… Well, not exactly unexpected – more, totally out of the question.

So, while I remember Geoff Hurst’s late goal with clarity, what I really recall is all that joyous leaping. And me, going out into the garden to where my thoughtful non-footballing father had his head deep in a book.

“Your grandfather and mother are leaping from sofa to sofa?” he queried in a not-really-listening voice, not lifting his eyes from George Orwell.

The unlikely idea seemed to eventually reach home and he followed me back indoors – where mum launched herself 12 feet across the living room to land, with a great ‘Whoopee!’, in his arms.

Closely followed by grandad who, fortunately, thought better of it halfway through his brief flight and somehow altered direction.

“Peter! Peter!” he roared when he landed on the other sofa. “We’ve only bloomin’ well gone and done it!

Poor old grandad. He could never understand why his bookish son-inlaw didn’t like football. But then, there was an awful lot he couldn’t understand about Peter Hesp – like the fact the younger man refused to do any gardening, so grandad had to do it all for him. Which wasn’t quite as onerous as it seems because he and granny had the council house next door, so the old countryman simply took over both gardens.

Nor could he understand why my journalist father hated to hear of any news. Being a postman, Harry Langsford knew all the best snippets of news, and would come to dad’s home office on a daily basis to convey these valuable morsels to him in order that they should appear in the paper.

Years later, at a time when I too was hoping to become a newspaperman, I asked Hesp Senior why he always spurned grandad’s conveyor belt of useful stories.

“Because of all the wretched extra work it would mean for me,” he replied. “If you really want to know, I detest news. I’m not interested in who has been maimed in the latest car wreck or who has been imprisoned for some sordid misdemeanour. I only pretend to care because it’s my job.”

It is something I have never told anyone before, but I inherited this rather debilitating journalist trait from my father. I’ve just been better at hiding it (or less honest) than he was.

I wonder if my journalist son is the same? I have never asked him – and maybe he is a bit different because he certainly inherited his greatgrandfather’s sport-loving gene. Indeed, his work took him to Wembley the other night. If someone had offered me a free ticket to go I’d probably have passed the opportunity by. Why? Because I can lie, lounge, leap, snack, snooze and booze on a sofa. And, I hope, jump up and down too… I don’t think they have any such furniture at Wembley. I like to watch my cup finals every half-century in the traditional family way.

He could never understand why his bookish son-in-law didn’t like football