Perfectly Ordinary People(2)

My grandparents had divorced before I was born, though in a rather bizarre fashion they’d continued to live in the same building. It was all, apparently, quite amicable.

Grandpa had rented a bedsit upstairs while Grandma Genny remained in the marital home, which, for financial reasons, she shared with her cousin, a woman we referred to as ‘Aunty’ Ethel.

We didn’t see a great deal of either of them, and I never really knew why that was. With them living over in Vauxhall while we were back home in Walthamstow, getting together more frequently would hardly have been a logistical nightmare, but that’s just how things were.

We would see them once before Christmas, when they would drop by to deliver our gifts, and once before each of our birthdays for the same reason. And because things had never been any different, we never really questioned it.

In the seventies, Grandma Genny moved away and Grandpa Chris reclaimed the original, larger apartment.

As I say, we’d never seen a great deal of either of them, but once Genny was an epic forty-five-minute train journey away in Brighton, she all but vanished from our lives. Oh, she’d come up to London once or twice a year and have lunch with Dad, and if my brother and I weren’t at school or with Mum or out on a play date – basically if Dad was having to look after us – then he’d take us along. But there was always a weird feeling that something wasn’t quite right. The conversations he had with his mother were shockingly bland: how was her Billy doing? Did he have a lot of work on? How were we doing at school? If you’ve ever had to have lunch with a stranger, you know the kind of mundane conversation I’m talking about.

Looking back on it, I think one of the reasons things seemed stilted was that Dad never reciprocated by asking Grandma Genny about herself, merely answering in the most efficient way possible so it felt more like an awkward interview than lunch between mother and son.

But she was lovely to Jake and me – don’t get me wrong. She always brought sweets or a toy, or some clothes, and she always gave us a lipsticky kiss and sat us on her lap for a cuddle. So I liked her. It’s just that we saw so little of her that I never felt entirely at ease. We saw so little of them both.

My mother’s family, on the other hand, were omnipresent. Being Irish Catholic and with her mother and brothers living less than a mile away, they completely filled any family-shaped void we might have had. On any given day we’d receive drop-in visits from at least two of Mum’s three brothers – usually around mealtimes – and as for Grandma Siobhan, who everyone referred to as Mavaughn, Dad used to joke that she spent so much time at ours she should pay rent. Her husband, Mum’s father, had died when Mavaughn was in her thirties, so I suppose she had her own husband-shaped void to fill.

Overall, we were a happy family, and I consider my childhood quite gilded, especially when compared with the horror stories told by some of my friends. Dad was a mellow, happy-go-lucky sort of chap, and Mum a warm, generous homemaker who liked to hug everyone constantly, and that included her kids. I got on well with both my parents and for the most part with big brother Jake as well. In a way, I think that thanks to Grandma Siobhan and my three uncles (plus wives), and their numerous children – our cousins – there was so much coming and going through our house that it was hard to concentrate long enough to develop any kind of grudge. Mum always complained that the place was ‘like Connolly Station’, but with a special half-smile that revealed just how much she loved it that way.

We weren’t rich, but we never lacked for anything, and our house was full of noise, and fun, and love.

My point in telling you this is to say that if things had been different, if we’d had needs that hadn’t been met, whether material, spiritual or emotional, then we might have made more effort to get to know our paternal grandparents, or at least to question why they were so distant . . . And knowing what I know now, that’s almost certainly something that would have enriched all of our lives. But I didn’t feel I had any unmet needs – none of us did. And so that distance remained essentially unnoticed, their absence barely felt.

Jake and I did well at school. Jake was – is – the geeky one. He excelled at physics and science and geometry: in a nutshell, the subjects that made my brain bleed. He ended up studying computer science and now works as a network engineer, whatever that might be. Occasionally he’ll try to explain it to me but something weird happens every time, and I can sense my mind glazing over just the way it used to during geometry lessons in that awful hot classroom way back when.

I, on the other hand, am the arty-farty one – that’s what Jake says. He actually introduces me that way, as in, ‘Do come over here and meet my arty-farty sister.’ He doesn’t mean it in a bad way though. I’ve always been aware that he’s proud of my arty-fartyness.

Even as a child, I was into drawing and photography and poetry, though I shan’t be inflicting any of my poems on you.

Mum pushed me towards the arts quite heavily, exorcising her own unrealised ambitions, I suspect, by enrolling me in dance classes and theatre workshops, buying me paints, a weaving loom and a sewing machine. But I thrived on it all and, as I say, we both ended up doing pretty well: Jake in Birmingham learning to be a network engineer and me at Exeter studying English lit. To everyone’s relief, we both found jobs after college without any problems at all.

Throughout uni I told friends that I wanted to be a writer, but if I’m honest it was more the concept that appealed rather than the actual work involved. I’d picture myself working from home in my pyjamas, sipping cups of tea and sucking thoughtfully on a pencil, and that seemed like a great way to make a living. The only problem was that I had no actual desire to write. Specifically, my concentration isn’t great, so the idea of sitting down to work on a single project for months on end has always given me the heebie-jeebies. So at some point in my twenties, I stopped mentioning my illusive-yet-imminent novel and gave up on ever publishing a book. Until now, that is. Let’s see how I do with this little non-fiction project.