Remembering Grandad

November 14, 1999

by Mick Womersley

If my grandfather, my mother’s father, had lived a while longer, today is the day that he would have been 100 years old. He was my greatest mentor, although I never knew it at the time, being such a very small child in the years that I spent the most of my time with him. Now that I’ve turned out to be so much like him, in so many ways, my grief at his absence from my life pains me greatly. I’ve been trying to write about him for years, yet I find that to sum up his influence on me in a few short paragraphs is almost impossible. Today, in his honor, and for the sake of my mother who is also full of the same grief, and for the sake of remembrance, I will try once more.

(Mother cried this morning -- she told me this when I called England, to mention Grandad’s birthday -- from remembering him, and wishing that she could just talk to him one more time, to tell him the things he would want to know about us all. Later I thought of mother’s grief, and my own, and cried myself, and wondered again what it was about him and the many crucial things that, without even trying, he taught me).

He was a very quiet man. Photos from his youth show a very beautiful young man, handsome and debonair in an Edwardian suit, proud and fit in army uniform. I would want my sons, if I have boys, to look like him. In the English summers, while my parents worked, he held my hand and walked with me, an old man and a young boy, over a mile, patiently, uphill through row house city streets, to the place where he had a community garden (an "allotment", in British parlance) and I played with the bugs on the water barrels while he grew vegetables. Later we’d carry the harvest back, wrapped in newspaper, shell peas, carrots, cauliflower -- "brassicas" was one word of the very, very few he was truly fond of saying. And flowers. Huge bundles of gorgeous, richly-colored chrysanthemums and dahlias. He gave much of his cornucopia away, but fed us all, and kept the family houses full of cut flowers. Watching him give vegetables and flowers away taught me to give what I had, when I could.

On rainy days, we stayed inside and played game after game of checkers, while Grandma cooked lunch. Half in the morning, and half in the afternoon, he’d smoke just one cigarette a day. He taught me not to be addicted to substances, that habits were fine, but that you should control them, not they you.

He was a Yorkshireman, with a thick, thick South Yorkshire accent. He went to war in 1917 with 22 other Yorkshire boys from our neighborhood, a local platoon in a regional regiment. He was one of only three that made it back. He never talked about the war. Listening to him not talk about such things made me more modest than I otherwise would have been, and fearful of horror, and early wise to jingoistic stupidity.

He taught me to use a saw, a hammer, screwdrivers. In a dank cellar below his tiny row house, he worked on this and that project for around the house. Don’t push too hard, let the saw do the work, he said. Drill a hole to get that screw started. He taught me that being a man meant looking after the house, and the things in it, a way to save money and care for your family. He made me to know that I could use my hands to make things, even to make a living, and even today, with an academic career, I still surprise myself with handiness at times, and am happy to know I can always work as a mechanic, or in construction, and pay my way in the world doing useful things for people. I can’t pick up a hand saw without thinking of him. I could just as easily hang a saw on the wall, as a picture of him, to remember him by.

Although he never wanted to talk about it, his military career deserves, finally, a mention in this dispatch, if in no other. Barely surviving the first war, he was a socialist and pacifist between the wars, as were many British people of the time. Yet during the depression, which hit early in Britain, and earlier yet in strike-torn Yorkshire, he re-enlisted as a way to feed himself. He would not be dependent on hand-outs. By 1939, he was 40 years old, and still a reservist. He was immediately called up. Too old to go to France for a second time, he helped rescue bombing victims from the rubble of London for a while, before a long stint at a training base.

Why one man should have to carry a second such burden of death and destruction and grief is beyond my comprehension. Yet, of course, in the scale of the conflagrations of this thankfully soon-to-end century, his witness was mild, compared to some. He ended his military career in 1945 at the same rank he began it with in 1917: a private soldier. I don’t even know how many years he served in total. He taught me the value, the necessity, of service to the community.

He went back to Germany with Grandma, as an old man (brought me back the finest toy car that any kid on our street had ever seen). It was his way of forgiving the German people, of reconciling himself to his own life with its horrors. He taught about forgiveness that way; and also that a man takes part in his nation’s and the world’s history and is affected by it and must come to terms with the ways in which he is affected, and form opinions and understandings as to the meaning of it all. I teach public policy to university students, and I wish I could bring my Grandad to class, one day: show-and-tell. The lesson? That the stuff you read about in the paper each day, the boring stuff your teacher wants you to read, will affect you, whether you like it or not, so you’d better try to understand it.

He hated war. He taught me, without even trying, or saying anything, that war is not a game, but something to be feared and avoided at all costs. Yet he also somehow let me know that it was up to the man himself to decide to go, that nations and politicians couldn’t be trusted with mens’, peoples’, lives, that to assume the rightness of a national cause was to place oneself in the hands of idiots and monkeys. To this day I am thankful for knowing that I do have the ability to choose. I served myself, of course. First my grandfather and great-uncles, then my father and uncles, then me. Three generations of soldiers and airmen. Like my father, I was a peacetime soldier, but like Grandad, I did rescue work, and saw my share of mild casualties and the occasional corpse.

And became a conscientious objector during the Reagan arms build-up of the early 1980s, after seven years good conduct and exemplary service. Because when I saw the Greenham Common peace camps on television, the women activists carried off brutally by Margaret Thatcher’s police, I knew that once more the monkeys were in charge. Both sides of my family had always been leftists and activists, north British through and through, dour and dire, community and family first. Lifelong Labour voters, organic-gardeners-before-their-time, land-rights protesters, you name it. People forget that Britain was once a socialist country, and I came from the PRSY, the glorious People’s Rebublic of South Yorkshire. I couldn’t serve a Reaganite government, watch reactionary middle Englanders waste money on missiles and submarines, when so many of my people were out of work and hurting again. Fighting my case for release from the last years of my service contract, Grandad, although already three years dead, was there with me. I won. Kept my pension, and an honorable discharge. Grandad taught me to pick my fights and stand my ground.

Things can be clear-cut, and yet they are fraught with choice and context. I know with absolute certainty that had I been alive at the time, I would have served Britain in World War Two, to the best of my ability, that war being so clearly a battle of good against the evil of the Nazi way. Yet had I been American, in 1965, I would have protested the Vietnam War, again to the best of my ability, that war being clearly a failure of American intellect and a horrific waste of 2.5 million Vietnamese, and over 58,000 American lives. Not to mention the many French, Chinese, Soviets, Australians and others, whose governments were not as wise as that of Britain’s then Prime minister Harold Wilson, in refusing to participate.

My grandfather gave me this, an ability to discern right from wrong. It has often been a burden to me, but I could not face him one day in heaven if I hadn’t somehow found at least a portion of the courage he taught me, silently, to store.

And I so look forward to that day. I have so much I want to tell him.

My mother remembers him too, a stronger influence in her life than in mine. She remembers how, laid low and breaking down from the stress of British nursing school in the fifties, she came home after what the doctors of the day called "a nervous breakdown". Grandad, predictably, had a compassionate and effective cure. He walked her three miles each day to a local country pub, conversing, on and off, in his slow Yorkshire way as he went. At the pub, he sat her down, made her drink a glass of stout, rest a while, and then walk back home. Of course she recovered. Our prozac-dependent generation could use a few thousand doctors with as strong an intuitive understanding of the human psyche, and similar strength of character. Grandad had character to spare, more than enough to lend to others as occasion demanded.

Other poignant anniversaries, in the same first two weeks of November as my Grandfather’s birthday: On the eleventh: Armistice day, Remembrance Day in Britain, Veteran’s Day over here; on the second, the anniversary of the day that Quaker activist Norman Robert Morrison immolated himself in front of then Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara’s office in the Pentagon, to try to end the Vietnam War by the ultimate protest, the ultimate sacrifice.

On the fifth, my mother’s Birthday; Grandad’s only child.

I am saddened by anniversaries each November, but their concurrence helps me remember so much that has to be remembered.

What was it about his ways, his ability to mentor others and help them, that my mother and I both grieve so over our loss of him, even today, even after all these years? My father is a good man, as strong a figure in my life, and yet far more gentle and loving. I loved my grandmother, and she certainly showered love and attention on me as a child. Yet Grandad hardly spoke. Sometimes, when he did speak, he could be brusque, even rude. To the end of his days, when mad at Grandma, he’d tell her crudely to "shut up, woman!" Hardly a model for the new man of today. He never, to my memory, told me he loved me. Rarely did he pay me a compliment on schoolwork, or choices I made in life. I remember when I joined the military, he said merely, in Yorkshire understatement "Well, Mike, ah reckon tha’s done the right thing, the best thee can do."

How was it that he was such a role model, so powerful a figure in my life?

Some of it at least must be genetic. He was a natural gardener and good horseman, so, by some freak of God and nature, am I, saving graces in an otherwise ungraceful life. He was an athlete in his youth, a runner, and loved the woods and hills. I too was an athlete, a runner, and love the woods and hills.

He was an organic gardener long before it became fashionable. I am too. He occasionally wrote letters to the editor, to my Grandma’s eternal embarrassment, so do I, mostly to my own embarrassment.

We are so alike, he and I, in so many strange and little ways, even though his direct influence over me waned quickly after I started to be too old and too cynical to accompany him on his walks to the garden. I’m glad I’ve lost some of that cynicism, but I wish I could walk to the garden once more.

Most of it, I think, was that he was just quiet, and let experience do the talking. Somehow he knew that book learning was good for some things, but for real learning, you had to feel. And that is what he did, let me feel, including the pain of bad decisions. Yet he was always there, safe, strong, silent. A rock you could lean against.

I miss my grandfather more than I know how to say. I wish he was here now, so I could talk to him, and tell him about my life from time to time. Or even just talk about gardens and tools and horses. At times, his influence has been a burden, because I’ve had to make difficult decisions from time to time, with the knowledge that one day, I’d have to explain it to him (and doing the right thing has never helped me financially or socially, that’s for sure). But my early experiences walking up to the garden with this good old man have stayed with me so strongly, I know I can never loose them, or him.

My Grandad was the best of men, a man who lived through 82 years of an awful century with extraordinary modesty, grace, and courage. Today he would have been 100 years old. I miss him. God bless him.