The past week has incurred a fair bit of change: I've gone from living in Cardiff with friends to moving back home to Basingstoke and now commuting over 70 miles twice a week to work in Bristol. It's a bit of a trip and rather a long day but doable. The day I moved back I was welcomed with a Sunday dinner at my grandparents' - something I miss hugely when I'm away and I felt so happy and actually a bit emotional to be back after three years at uni.
While I was there I chatted a bit to my Grandad about his childhood; I knew he'd lived an incredibly colourful life and didn't have the happiest childhood, and I expressed that I'd love to go to London (where he grew up) and put all these stories into context. So he agreed to take me up to the big smoke on the Tuesday and show me round all the places he used to 'hang out'.
I've always had a great relationship with my Grandad, but the trip gave me further respect for him and provided opportunities to ask the questions I'd maybe been too shy to ask about before. He's one of the most interesting people I know and pretty great company for a septuagenarian ;-) so here's a little bit about what we got up to.
After we arrived at Waterloo we took a bus up to Peckham, with little to no faffing about which service to get. I learnt throughout the day that for someone who hasn't lived in London for at least 40 years, he really knows his way around! After alighting at Peckham, we wandered up towards Dulwich, where Grandad showed me where he went to school.
One of them is no longer a school, but still a nursery and a center for adult education, but the building itself still evokes many memories. Grandad told me he finished school at 15 years old, which was standard procedure in the 1950s unless you were particularly bright, and those people would stay on until 16 and complete what we would now call GCSEs. It's amazing to think how many more opportunities we have nowadays that we take for granted.
Next we popped into the Catholic church where Grandad went for Mass during school. He said a lot of the service was in Latin (hardly understandable for a group of 12-year-old boys!), and the place had barely changed since he went there. A very nice lady who worked in the church let us have a look around for the sake of tapping into memories despite it being closed. She said the place is now 'liberal Catholic', meaning they now employ female priests, and services are no longer in Latin.
Despite it not being the nicest area while my Grandad was growing up, parts of Dulwich are now quite stylish and upmarket. We stopped at a gorgeous little cafe called The Blue Mountain on North Cross Road, where I had the nicest scrambled eggs and smoked salmon I've ever had (quite niche, but I've sampled a lot of scrambled eggs and smoked salmon in my time!).
After lunch, we carried on wandering around the area. The first thing we stopped by was an Indian restaurant called the Curry Cabin; it was a Chinese restaurant when it first opened, and the first restaurant to open in the area at all. While we're there Grandad tells me he had his stag party there as a young man, he then says quietly "I'm very ashamed of what I did in there..." I panic slightly that he's going to reveal something distasteful about a strip-o-gram, but instead he tells me he tried to throw a chicken ball into someone's drink on another table... and succeeded.
We then carried on walking round the residential area. Grandad stopped me at one point and pointed at the block of flats in the picture below. He told me that area was bombed during the war and used to be a wasteland. He and his friends used to play on the wasteland as young boys and said it was a kid's adventure heaven - sometimes they even found old gas masks among the rubble.
Next we found the house he lived in as a kid with his mother and step father, before moving into his aunt's house to escape home life. He looks fairly happy to pose for a picture outside, but I imagine it brings back some unpleasant memories of suffering physical abuse at the hands of his step father. He told me his step father split his lip by punching him in the face and once told him he 'should have been in the ground long ago.' His mother suffered similar treatment, but the decision to leave your husband at this time was incredibly difficult, as there was less protection for single mothers and women couldn't maintain the same level of independence as they do nowadays. Feminism still has a long way to go, but this is a reminder of how far we've come.
Coincidentally, Grandad's sister Margaret still lives close by and we decided to drop in for a cuppa, Considering we turned up uninvited and I haven't seen Auntie Marg since I was about 9, she and her husband Phil made us incredibly welcome. It was so nice to hear Grandad and Marg chat about their childhood and still reflect on it with good humour.
On another note, Margaret and Phil have lived in that 3 bed terraced house as long as my Grandad has lived in Basingstoke, and it's now worth a cool £1.1 million - to give you an idea of the increase in house prices in London!
We then hopped on another bus to The Horniman Museum; I'd never even heard of the place before, but it's a lovely little museum with an incredible collection of new and old musical instruments, so I was absolutely in my element. It's free entry and has some lovely surrounding gardens, so well worth a visit.
After the museum, we carried on wandering, had a nose at some of the houses around the area and took a trip up One Tree Hill. Grandad nearly slipped on the mud several times on the way down but managed to stay upright - not bad for an old dog.
The last thing he wanted to do was walk to Camberwell New Cemetery to find his brother Percy's grave. I always find cemeteries quite creepy and sad places to be, but the last time Grandad had come here he hadn't been able to find the grave so I was happy to have a look with him. The reason he hadn't been able to find it became apparent after about ten minutes of searching - the gravestone had been knocked over (presumably by some kids) so we managed to stand it back up.
Grandad told me that Percy's home had been bombed during the war, where his mother died. He also witnessed his sister getting trapped between some rubble, but before she could be rescued a wall collapsed and she was killed. Percy never spoke about what he saw, and Grandad wonders to what extent the incidents he saw impacted on his personality.
We managed to fit a lot into the day, and there was even more Grandad wanted to show me. His memory absolutely amazes me, as I struggle to remember what I did last week let alone 50-60 years ago. It's given me a renewed appreciation for him, and given the circumstances he was raised under, I'm so very proud that he has become such a kind and selfless man. I'm lucky to have him around.
-PB
