Gran, Papa

It’s snowing, lightly, as if the flakes are in no hurry to gather on the ground. It’s swirling, and the orange light from the lampposts outside make the flakes look like a million tiny embers falling from Heaven. When I was little, my grandparents used to make up stories about where the snow came from. My Papa, whilst tucking me in to bed with a hot water bottle one evening told me that snow fell when the angels in heaven were having a party, that they used the clouds as bouncy castles and the snowflakes were little pieces of the clouds that had broken off. My Gran told me that rain was God taking a shower, but that in winter he preferred a hot bath, and snow was him pulling out the plug and letting the bubbles fall through the sky and onto the ground. I never questioned why they told me different things, or why, if either of these were true, the snow was so cold. Really, to this day, I have never questioned anything either of them has said.

My Gran is a little woman with a head of black curls which I’m sure she must dye at least fortnightly in order to keep away those dreaded greys. She has a triangular chip in one of her front teeth, and she’s been meaning to get it fixed for ten years. Whenever she walks past, you catch a waft of parma violets and I’ve always associated her with the sound of a cat purring. My Papa is a huge, ginger man and therefore even at 65 has no fear of the grey hairs that haunt his wife. He has a collection of secret birds’ eggs and always wears green corduroy.  In primary school, one of my teachers read the class The BFG by Roald Dahl, 15 minutes at the end of each day and 20 on a Friday. One particular Friday, tired from finger-painting, I leaned back in my little plastic chair and listened contently to her gentle voice talking about the Giant and the ‘human beans’, and suddenly something struck me. My hand shot up in the air and I wriggled in that chair until the back of my knees were sore from rubbing on the plastic because I was desperate to tell everyone, but the teacher maintained that questions were to be left to the end and I had to “sit at peace”. But I couldn’t and I remember my heart fluttering a little and I shouted out “But he’s like my Papa!” some of my friends laughed but the teachers mouth turned into a long thin line and she said yes that was very nice but I was being rude and to zip it please. Later that night, while eating turkey dinosaurs for dinner, my grandparents came to visit and I told him about the BFG, and when my Mum wasn’t looking he pretended to be a giant and bit the head off one of my dinosaurs and I didn’t even mind.

My grandparents always have been, and will forever remain my favourite people in the whole of the world. This may be expected from people who feed you so much that you almost burst every time you visit, and who slip you a £10 note each time you see them without fail, yet these facts are not even contributing factors. Instead it’s because that I can trace almost every happy childhood memory I have back to them, and that when I close my eyes I can replay every one of them in an instant as if they are recorded like a movie in the underside of my eyelids, and that no matter how much I try, even when I squeeze my brains like a pitiful orange, I simply cannot find fault in anything associated with them, except that maybe they called their dog Max rather than my suggestion of Scooby Doo.

In terms of holidays, I have been incredibly luckily with the amount of wonderful places my parents have taken me, from the spectacular mountains of Slovenia to the fun filled adventure that is Disney Land, however despite these experiences and being completely grateful for them, my favourite holidays were always those taken with my grandparents. Back then, before the majority of my cousins were born, it was just us and my cousin Campbell (the same age, minus exactly eight weeks) and we would set off for weeks on end in a tiny caravan that smelled like cardboard to several seaside locations across Scotland, singing Patsy Cline all the way in the car and grinning so much that our cheeks ached. The most memorable of these are our trips to Southerness, a tiny holiday village home to one of the oldest lighthouses in Scotland and the most amount of crabs I have seen in one place in my life. If any location were to represent my childhood, it would be there. Gran and Papa would allow us to stay in the pool until our fingers and toes were crinkled like Seabrook potato chips and our eyes stung and itched in the corners. They let us paddle in the sea despite it being brown and frothy like the top of the beer in the pub, and they would join us on jellyfish hunts, poking them with a stick and running (Gran tried) if they were alive. One summer, when you could smell the hot air rising up from the earth, we spent five days there.  Campbell and I drunk Slush Puppies until our tongues were dyed blue and red and the front of our brains right between our eyes completely froze. We hid out in the swing park below the starts, thinking we were tough among woodchip and strangers, pretending that our grandparents weren’t watching us intently from the pub window over their glasses of whisky and water. It was in that very park that on the year we were ten, we stole our first taste of lager - so bitter horribly bitter and oh that smell! This is how I remember it: I lead the way into the pub with Campbell following, asking if we could please get the caravan key to run back just to get a torch to play a game in the park. Of course they said yes and we ran giggling like maniacs with our faces turned up to the moon and the thought of what we were going to do. We each took a can of Tennents and hid them up our jumpers – the cold tin against my skin gave my goose bumps but the adrenaline made this easy to ignore because we had done it! We returned the key and squashed ourselves beneath the metal slide as an escape from their watchful eyes and cracked those cans open and saying “Ahh” like our parents did. However following half a sip this “Ahh” turned into a real, screaming “AHH” as I spat the alcohol everywhere, spraying Campbell’s feet and frantically shoving strawberry gobstoppers into my mouth and almost choking just to rid that taste. Campbell’s reaction was less dramatic but I noticed how his eyes wrinkled up at the corners and how he coughed just a little and I knew he was just acting tough. That night, we were trying to sleep on a lumpy airbed in the awning, and every time Gran or Papa shouted out from the caravan to see if we were Ok I caught Campbell’s eye in the dark like a little glittering jewel and we collapsed into heaps of laughter until our muscles ached and we fell asleep with a half-smile ready to wake up and start all over again.

The snow is still falling and I wonder what stories my grandparents are telling my younger cousins about it these days. I wonder what they’re doing. I’m imagining my gran with a cat or two in her lap drinking tea without sugar or milk and feeling that chip in her tooth and promising she’ll make an appointment in the morning. Papa will be watching a ridiculous horror movie on channel TCM and eating caramels as they spill from his pockets and catching sight of the snow from the corner of his eye and smiling. Glasgow looks beautiful in the snow, I like how it masks and transforms so that really, you could be looking at anywhere. I look out of my window at the endless white and twinkling city and I cock my ear up just a little, straining with everything I have to listen for the patter of angel feet or the sound of a draining plug and in my brain I hear it and my heart feels like it’s brimming.


- 2010