My grandad always used to say that the world was full of twits.
He was born and grew up in a poor mining town in the north of England, near Durham. He was viewed as something of a child genius. His parents made his younger brother, Eric, sleep in their bedroom so that grandad could have a room all to himself. After his best friend died suddenly, his hair turned white overnight, and he biked across Europe. He emigrated to Australia sometime after WW2 and became a psychology lecturer at the University of Sydney, eventually convincing my grandma to leave her then husband and two children behind.
I knew him as a short, scary man who always wore the same blue, woolly sweater and shouted at me when he caught me cheating at my maths homework, or shouted at my brother when he conjugated his French verbs incorrectly. When we went to his house as children, he was often doing laps of his living room, and for every lap he would put a pen stroke down on a piece of paper. Sometimes there would be pages and pages of paper streaked with hundreds of pen marks. When my mum was a child, he used to cut his front lawn with a pair of scissors, getting down on his hands and knees to make sure each blade was perfectly even.
He was verbally and physically abusive to my grandma and my mum, at least until mum was old and brave enough to kick him in the groin. But grandma never left him. Even when he had an affair, she decided to stick with him. But when she knew that she was going to die, and we all went separately to say our goodbyes, he was the only person she refused to see or have brought into her room. When they were cleaning out the old house, my mum and aunt found a note grandma had written.
“She stood in the shower the tears running down her cheeks, down, down, to be washed away into the ocean. It had been so long, so hard, but he had called her a fool for the last time. Quickly she dressed, a quite nice lace teddy, present from her husband. Blue suit, rushed make-up, one had to be careful at eighty-eight. She picked up her overnight bag, a quick look around, that’s enough no more tears. Hello love, “leaving home are you” many a true word spoken in jest.”
He died in 2022, so the joke’s on him, I suppose. For someone who thought everyone else was an idiot, he was the one who wasted his life wallowing in superiority.
But then, he wasn’t always bad.
He came to our house at 6pm every day, and always left us with a chocolate each, even if it was a chalky, expired Moro (or Bounty). If it wasn’t for him, I’m not sure I ever would have known who Stanley Matthews or George Best were, and I know I never would have learned French had he not insisted on teaching me verbs and conjugations.
And although he thought he was smarter than anyone else in the world, I think he actually might have been. I used to play games of chess with him over the phone. We would make one move each, every day. They were long games. When we went to visit, I would always see the board set up, and he would stand at it, considering all the possibilities. In all the games we played there was never a possibility that he was going to lose. But it gave me a rush of excitement that he considered the board like I could even maybe, possibly have the slightest chance of winning, or giving him something to consider.
And I know that mum misses him too. Even though they were opposites in their kindness and empathy, I think she was the only person who he ever knew might have understood him. When grandma discovered his affair (with one of his students), and confronted him about it, he didn’t have the words to describe how he felt, which was like him. But when mum explained to her that, really, he loved this woman, and that maybe the best thing grandma could do was move on with her life, he pointed at her with a crooked finger and exclaimed “See! She understands!”.
***
Lately I find myself worrying that I’m destined to end up like him. I think of him when I am on a crowded train in an especially bad mood, and a particularly loud, spotty teenager with BO warmly sidles up next to me while squinting at his phone and hacking up what must be an immense amount of mucus. In that moment, I think I understand how grandad could think that the world was full of twits. But I also feel close to him when I watch Monty Python, or get to the bottom of a box of Favourites and find a neglected Moro; or indulge in my love of football. I see myself either turning out as (hopefully) someone who is generally content and healthily concerned with the people around me and making their lives better; or as a grumpy old man, discontented with the feeble-minded people around him.
But I think if there is one thing that I can take from all of grandad’s lessons, both deliberate and accidental, it is that an existence based on thinking you are fundamentally better than everyone is an existence wasted. For all his smarts, he was fundamentally a deeply unhappy person. And he would have thought all of this was complete rubbish, but somewhere along the way, he forgot, or never knew that it was a lot simpler than he made it.
So, if ever faced with a choice between being hateful or being kind, shouting at your grandson or giving him a dusty chocolate, or throttling a teenager on a train or taking a deep breath and just imagining it, then try to make the right choice. Give yourself permission to be happy. I’m certainly trying, and I think I will be for the rest of my life.
