When I used to arrive at my grandparents’ house, the first object to greet me was an imposing grandfather clock dating from the mid-1800s. My granddad bought the clock for next to nothing in Nottingham in the late 1940s. Not yet being a driver, he somehow managed to lug the clock, with the sole help of his brother Ken and a wheelbarrow, all the way up the steep slope of Sherwood Rise, on the edge of the city, back to the house where he and Joyce lived before this one: a distance of over two miles. At my primary school, in assembly, we often sang Henry Clay Work’s ‘My Grandfather’s Clock’. Its opening line, about the clock being too large for the shelf, always confused me. Only a fool – a fool much much more foolish than even the kind of person who’d choose a wheelbarrow to cart a clock two miles home – would have attempted to put a gigantic bastard such as this on a shelf. Then there was the bit in the song about the clock being taller by half than the old man himself but weighing not a pennyweight more. My granddad was only of average height and his clock had a few inches on him, but he’d have to have been a remarkably short, overweight grandfather with a very tall clock – one you’d be even less likely to try to put on a shelf – for the maths to make sense. Not far from my granddad’s grandfather clock there were some notches on a doorway made where he and my grandma had periodically recorded my height: these moved more slowly than I’d have liked them to then remained static at around 5 feet 6 inches, not because I stopped growing at 5 feet 6 inches but because, like most adolescents, during the period when I rapidly gained height I was too truculent to wish to have such progress recorded for posterity on an architrave. I often wondered if I’d end up as tall as the grandfather clock, but I didn’t quite make it, as I can verify by standing next to it in its current home, my parents’ hall. One shiftless afternoon when my dad was in his early teens, he reached up to the top of the clock and found a set of explicit playing cards hidden there, which ultimately led to his sexual awakening and that of several other boys in the neighbourhood. When my parents inherited the clock, they did not inherit the playing cards, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
If you strolled straight on past the grandfather clock further into my grandparents’ house – without being distracted by the playing cards – you’d end up in the kitchen: a culinarily austere room which always smelled of pepper and in whose adjoining larder my grandparents always kept a can or two of what they called ‘pop’ – usually ginger beer or lemonade or, in later years, shandy from the Co-op, in cans that, though still in date, had mysteriously already acquired a faint patina of age – waiting for me. My mum remembers entering the kitchen on her first ever visit to the house and discovering my granddad wearing a party hat while washing the dishes. Since it was not Christmas and hadn’t been anyone’s birthday, she thought this slightly odd. My dad later explained that making Ted wear the hat was Joyce’s scheme to curb his habit of leaving the immersion heater on for long and financially injurious periods of time. If Ted glanced in a mirror and noticed he was wearing the hat or reached up to his head and found the hat there, he’d know the immersion was still on.
If you continued through the kitchen into the backyard, past a small veg patch additional to those on Ted’s allotment, whose soil was always rich and evenly hoed, you reached Ted’s shed. In here was every tool imaginable, all meticulously organised: drawers and shelves of screws and nails, ordered by size: hardware for every emergency – a collection devoted to the art of mending rather than making. My granddad knew precisely where every bradawl, spanner, socket wrench, trowel and ratchet was in his shed, yet somehow never got quite accustomed enough to the location of the upper shelves not to repeatedly bang his head on them.
My own most memorable first-hand encounters with my granddad’s legendary doziness include the time he caddied for me on the local golf course and, arriving on the second tee and reaching for my driver, I found the flag from the first green sticking unceremoniously out of my bag. This occurred during the same year that he sent a Christmas card to my parents reading, ‘To Joyce and Ted. Happy Christmas! Love from Joyce and Ted.’
My granddad didn’t play golf but was very enthusiastic about my decision to take it up, as he was about all the numerous sporting activities of my early teens. Seconds after I’d watched the tiny, unconventional Ian Woosnam – more terrier than
