Third Age
December 2013
I ate my grandson’s chocolate frog. It was an unusually large one, given to him by his father as he left for work. I was meant to see him and his sister off to school happily, but things went wrong and I sort of confiscated the frog, giving the poor boy the evil eye when he dared to ask about it as the bus he catches to school arrived.
There was no question of replacing it because of its size. There was nothing to do but to confess.
“I ate it,” I said, some days later. “I am sorry.”
“Did you, grandma?” he asked. He has a slight English accent, which reminds me of John Howard Davies, the child actor in Oliver Twist and The Rocking Horse Winner (important films of my childhood).
He even looked up from his iPod, which showed there was something going on in his little red head.
We looked at each other. It was a moment.
This old woman in his life was not only capable of greed but also theft. I no longer felt like one of those grandmas in the kids’ books who are short, fat, rosy-cheeked – and absolutely above reproach. I was just Shirley. I think I saw this in his eyes, along with some amusement. After all, chocolate doesn’t mean all that much to him. His life is full of amazing things and amazing people.
He has never known something like Shout Night, the highlight of my childhood, until my father got bored with it, when a few sweets, such as musk sticks and bobbies, still available in Sydney despite the war, were shared out in the family as a huge treat. Shout Night was actually payday. I was the youngest by eight years, old enough to experience nice traditions like these, but too young to know why they ceased. To explain Shout Night and the scarcity of sweets in my childhood, I would have to take my grandson on a short tour of WW2, rationing, being hard-up but not quite poor, with a WW1- angry dad… and he would be bored stiff. So a lot of the time we pretend my childhood was just like his and his sister’s: full of discoveries, travel, getting out of music practice, about goodies and baddies (my baddies were Nazis and “Japs”; his are fictitious characters from films I would never sit through).
I watch for eye-glazing when I talk about being young, but mostly it is the eyebrow-lift of disbelief. No car? No telephone?… but we had the beach, the tram rides, a dog, the backyard full of fruit trees. I can see them thinking they don’t need to feel sorry for me and that is a relief to them.
But who am I to him? He is careful of me (“Mum, grandma needs help” – their stupid car is too low for me); he likes my house full of stuff, my overprotected cat… What will he remember of me when he is a man? It is worrying. Will he remember that I ate his chocolate frog? I suspect he will.
We old people are working away on how we will be remembered. Not in obituaries, but in the minds of our descendants. And sometimes of younger friends. But this column is about my experience of old age and being a grandma of three is the most important thing to me. I can see I need to buck up. The chocolate frog affair was a Lesson. Here endeth
Little Christmas Cracker…
As we get closer to the end of the year, I can’t help but think that 2013 has been most unsatisfactory. Not even the election was properly sorted. There is so much violence on TV and other entertainment that even a milk advertisement is ugly with it. I suppose we will go on telling ourselves that this doesn’t affect our sensibilities, but we are wrong, and just too lazy to do anything about it.
Hanging over us all is the shame of our treatment of desperate people and sad animals. You will need to be pretty thick-skinned to rattle on about the joy of Christmas, but no doubt we will, and put our hopes in children and grandchildren to improve our civilisation.
In which case it is the ultimate folly to prejudice their attempts by pulling the rug from underneath the planet, so to speak. We can do better, as our end of school year reports used to say. Handel’s Messiah is not the music for Christmas, to raise our spirits. Try his Fireworks twice daily instead. Squeeze a bit of joy out of this wicked, disappointing world.
Forgive me: old people find optimism hard at this time of year. So be nice to your granny. Indulge her. Go on.
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