annanotbob2's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Family Someone on the telly just now said that time spent alone with a parent is the most precious thing you can give a child. Which made me remember when my dad used to drive me across country to stay with my maternal grandparents. my birth mother's parents. I just checked it out and even now it would take three hours, so I can't even imagine how long it took in the 1960s. I can't remember all the different cars we had, but at one point it was an Austen A40, then maybe a Morris Oxford estate. They had leather seats and no seatbelts and probably a maximum speed, flat out of about 60mph. We went in the summer holidays. Every August he'd drive me there and leave me to spend two weeks with my grandparents. I think he must have stayed the night and driven back the next day but I can't visualise where he would have slept. I can't say it was a highlight of my childhood - any aspect of it. In retrospect, my granny and grandad were probably still grieving - they'd lost not only my mum, but also their other daughter, so I can't imagine. I was also a bit wary of Dad. This was the time of 'You wait till your father gets home,' especially for me as I was both naughty and not Mum's blood child, so my punishments were left to him. Usually being put across his lap and having my bottom smacked, after building a sense of dread all the hours leading up to his return from work. I can't imagine how he was with all this, but when I was about to spend all day in a car with him it didn't feel like a treat. It always felt like they were getting rid of me and that with me gone they'd be a 'proper' family, real mother, father, son and daughter, like in the story books. It was always hot. I was allowed to sit in the front on the burning leather seat. No seat belt so I could wriggle about, even stick my head ut of the window. Before we left Dad would always get out his map book and write a list of the major towns we'd pass through and the road numbers. Looking at the route now, it's mainly motorways and few cities, but we'd have to go through Oxford, Northhampton, Peterborough. I can see the back of an envelope with his big scrawled handwriting, full of loops. It was my job to watch out for signposts to tell him which way to go. Did we talk on this journey? I don't remember us doing so - I must have gone every year from the age of about five till eleven - and I can't imagine we sat in silence all the way. Up towards Wisbech the land is flat for miles and miles and the sky is huge. Occasionally I've found myself in a similar landscape and it always takes me back to sitting by Dad in a hot car. When it was really hot the road would shimmer in front of us, which fascinated me - how could we see it there, in front of us, but always leaping ahead, we could never catch up and be amongst it, the shimmering, wobbly road ahead. When we arrived in Wisbech it was usually a Sunday and we'd have a Sunday dinner, sat round the table at one end of the big room. We always started with a fat slice of crusty white bread, a slice of Yorkshire pudding and gravy, gorgeous meaty gravy in a big jug that could be filled as often as we needed. Then plates went out to the kitchen and returned piled high with crispy roast potatoes, runner beans from the garden, a tiny slice of roast beef and more gravy. Grandad was always pleasant enough but didn't get involved - children were women's work. Granny didn't like it when I referred to my stepmother as Mum - she'd get really riled up, "She's not your mother!" Sometimes even. "That woman is not your mother!" But I didn't remember before her and I called her Mum - what else was a child to do then? When I was around the age of eleven my uncle Brian, the third child of my grandparents also died and my dad had a terrible car accident that hospitalised him for almost a year, and my visits to Wisbech stopped. I never saw my grandparents again. 12:19 a.m. - 05.12.23 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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