Stories from Grandma

A couple of welcome sunny days and M & I took a walk yesterday; I also spoke to my offspring – one today and one yesterday and my middle granddaughter (GD2) today. Talking of granddaughters, I was amused last week by the other two. For as long as GD3 as been old enough to have a voice, there has been conflict at the seating arrangements when we’re all together. GD1 would say, ‘I want to sit next to Grandpa,’ and GD3 would say, ‘No I want to.’ Negotiations would then take place, whereby one sat next to him during the main meal and then they would swap places for pudding. On this occasion, GD3 said, ‘I want to sit next to Grandma,’ and of course GD1 disagreed and the usual rules applied. However, I thought it showed an interesting and individualistic side of her personality – and of course, also that their feelings for the pair of us are irrelevant – it’s just an additional round in the battle of the siblings.

Sometimes I’m asked to tell them a story – and we have a few good ones about M going on a steam engine in Wellington, Somerset – like the railway children - and emerging with a soot blackened face; pushing his little sister’s pram down a hill (full of coal), and letting go the handles in order for it to get to the bottom faster. But I have one or two as well; they seem to like the one about me driving into the back of a police car – which of course is in The Fruit of the Tree. I give them a simplified version, as GD3 is only 5. I’ve wondered about getting these stories into a book form; I could call it Grandma and Grandpa get up to mischief or something like that. Setting up, of course, if I did it though a printer, would cost around £100 and I couldn’t illustrate it.

Last week, Anne, (http://annebrooke.blogspot.com/) made some very nice comments about The Fruit of the Tree, which, as she rightly pointed out, you can get from Amazon. Certainly, if you want a second hand copy, then Amazon is the place to go, but for a new copy, my own website is better. That’s at: http://freespace.virgin.net/jackie.luben. Amazon put an additional charge – a sourcing fee, they call it - on new copies, as my publishing house is unknown to them. Whereas I send mine out post free in the UK – and if you ask for it, signed too. Fruit has always been an important book to me, and therefore irrespective of whether it’s bought first or second hand, I am glad if people are reading it. That’s what I wrote it for.

Before my daughter telephoned, I was listening to Desert Island Discs with castaway, Ben Helfgott – a Holocaust survivor - and I was moved to tears by his story. He described how his mother and sister were shot by the Nazis and how his father was subsequently also shot, and even though this man was in his seventies, you could hear in his voice how these tragedies were as fresh to him today as when they happened, more than sixty years ago. His first choice of records was Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance, and I was also moved when he said how much he loved England. We are often critical of our own country. We expect better of it than it sometimes delivers; people sometimes get rather po-faced at the jokey patriotism of Last Night at the Proms. Sometimes, we should listen to an outsider who has spent most of his life here, but who is very much aware of how it compares with another regime, to get a fresh perspective on it. You can hear a repeat next Friday on Radio 4, though not available on ‘Listen Again.’