When I was a boy I had the great fortune to have lived at my grandparents home for a while whilst the family was in-between houses.
The times I liked most was the mornings. I would hear grandma in the kitchen as she made the breakfast, she would often hum or sing a tune as she worked. Grandad would call us down and we’d have scrambled eggs on toast or boiled eggs. Grandma and granddad were a great team.
Being the first grandchild I suppose I got the benefit of his own feeling of grandfatherhood. We spent a lot of time together and he would often ask me “Robert, do you know how to….” Whereupon, because I most often had no idea, he would launch into a demonstration of something or other. It was granddad who held the saddle of the little bicycle, on which he taught me to ride a “two-wheeler”. It was granddad who introduced me to books without pictures, who gave me a passion for literature and reading and who introduced me to authors like Charles Dickens and H. G. Wells. It was granddad who showed me how to use an index so that I could look for information on my own. He gave me many of the starting points in my young life.
The job I do today is with computers, using math and complex graphics or calculations. All of my skills are rooted in his teaching me how to use a slide-rule or what good the sine and cosines are for and the value of precision in engineering.
In short, I have a deep sense that my granddad contributed a great deal to who I am today.
Later in life I continued my relationship with this man but as an adult. Whenever we saw each other, we would talk at great length on many subjects. Once, he came flying with me when I qualified as a pilot and we flew over his house on the Isle of Wight in a little Piper plane.
Recently, I myself became a grandfather and someone asked me if it made me feel old. I replied that I had actually been looking forward to it a great deal and only hoped that I could be as good a grandfather as the one I was lucky enough to have.
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