My Maternal Grandparents

George and Dorothy Jane Slemon

Both of my grandparents have now died but I can just remember them.

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These were my favourite grandparents. My Nan was blind and she never saw me, which I always thought was a shame. She used to feel my face though and she taught me several things, like walking around the house with my eyes shut and not bumping into things. Even today I don't use lights at night when I go from room to room and it annoys Mike that when I go into a dark room I can find what I'm looking for instantly. I can also fill a glass with water in the dark without spilling any! She also had terrific hearing and playing hide and seek with her meant getting found instantly because even if I hid in the wardrobe and held my breath she could still hear me. Mind you, looking back it was probably because as a three-year-old I always hid in the same place!

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My granddad was in the Royal Navy for 43 years and left as a chief petty officer (writer) to work in a wine merchants. Even after he retired from there they used to send him bottles of sherry and whisky every Christmas. Whilst he was in the Navy he travelled all around the world visiting such places as Greece, Algeria, Venice and Egypt. I remember the fantastic stories he used to tell me and even though I knew they were embellished I would sit enthralled for hours. My favourite was the tale of his journey to Jerusalem and how he saw Bethlehem and the manger where baby Jesus was laid.

Although he was the son of a dockyard labourer he was a very wise man, he taught me a great deal and it was the saddest day of my young life when he died. I was just 17 and his was the first funeral I had to attend. It was dreadful when earth was thrown onto the coffin because I knew then that he had gone forever. He made learning fun by quizzing me constantly and then rewarding me with chocolate or pennies when I answered correctly. It is due to him that I have a mind full of useless information, still one day it might come in handy!

On the odd occasion I was allowed to stay the night at his house I would sleep on the floor in front of the television. This was a real treat as we didn't have a set at home and here I was allowed to watch all evening. He would sit in an armchair behind me, puffing away on his pipe. Even today when I catch the smell of pipe tobacco in the air I think of him. When Nan died he bought a colour set and gave us the old black and white one but that wasn't until I was nearly 10. My girls can't understand why even now I don't watch much television. Growing up without it meant I read a lot more and was happy in my own little world.

My Nan had never had good health during my lifetime and her legs often swelled so badly that she often couldn't get out of bed, but when she did she loved to go for a walk around the streets where we lived. The other thing I remember is how she used to sing me to sleep. This stopped when I moved to a bedroom upstairs and she wasn't able to climb them. It was after her death in 1969 that for the first time I saw a man cry. My granddad loved her so much and had cared for her for so long that he was devastated by her death. Walking in to the dining room one afternoon I caught him sitting at the table with tears streaming down his cheeks. I couldn't understand this as I had been told that it was only babies that cried. It also made me feel very guilty as I hadn't cried, I think I was too young and naïve to realise that I wouldn't ever see her again. All I thought about was that my birthday was coming up and I doubted I would get a present. Give me a break here, I was only 9 years old.

As I grew up I began to find out things about him that I would rather not have known, although even at the time I laughed about them. He used to go to the cinema in the afternoons, at the pensioners' cheap rate, to watch dirty movies. I caught him coming out of one once and when I challenged him he said that he had mistakenly thought it was a film about Christmas. The film was Emmanuelle. He also used to like me inviting my school friends to his house when we were on the way to play hockey so that he could give us all an apple. I soon learnt that this was so he could feel our bottoms as we walked through the narrow hallway. It became a standing joke at school thankfully, and it was always me that had to walk directly in front of him and try to beat him out of the door. The strange thing is he never tried it on if I was alone. The other girls thought it great fun to try and avoid his grope. Nowadays he would probably have been prosecuted but then it just seemed comical somehow, after all no harm was done.

I'm sure he must have had his bad points, he was only human, but I never saw anything that was bad about him. He had patience, tolerance, wisdom, a sense of humour and generosity in bucketful's and was a very popular man. I can't remember him ever shouting at me, even when I was naughty. All in all I count myself lucky to have had him as a grandfather. I think it was to his standards that men I dated had to meet, not my father's as is more usual.

This is the house my grandparents lived in. How I loved that place. The door was so big that it was a long time before I could reach the knocker, there was a small wall around the front that I spent ages balancing on and jumping off.

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Inside, the rooms were huge with high ceilings and the windows had wooden shutters on. I lost count of the number of times I trapped my fingers in them whilst playing. In the living room there was a half size snooker table on which I learnt to play billiards, there was also a piano that I could never master, although my mother played beautifully. The stairway had a long curved banister on which I was occasionally allowed to slide down. In the dining room was every child's dream, a walk-in cupboard filled with toys and other goodies. I still have some of the games I used to play and I did have a fez that had been brought back from Egypt, until mum thought it was too tatty and threw it away. I probably have more happy memories from that house than anywhere else and it was heartbreaking when we revisited several years later to find it had been made into two separate houses. I would have liked to ask to look around but I wasn't sure which door to knock on!