For me, it was the rst me that I took the London Underground aer grandpa died was when grief rst hit me properly. For those of you who don’t know, when I was younger, Grandpa and I would spend a designated day on a ‘tube run’. This would involve me planning a necessarily confusing route around the underground network, changing trains a dozen or so times throughout the day, usually with a McDonald’s lunch sandwiched in the middle of the day. I’d carry a notepad around with said route printed o*, and we’d note what time we’d get on and off each train and made each connection.On the numerous occasions we’d get strange looks from commuters, grandpa had a stock reply ready for them:‘It’s a cheap day out!
Of course, we all have our own memories of him. Take how he’d always greet Eleanor and Alice. He’d smile, suffocate them with a hug, and the question ‘what are you?’. And they’d know that they weren’t getting away from the hug until they affirmed his answer of ‘gorgeous’.
Tom knew this feeling too. Only instead of ‘Gorgeous!’, Tom would be forced to answer, ‘What are you?’ with ‘Stupid.’The little things, too. The ice cream stand at the Ashley Centre in Epsom. His DEFEANING sneeze. His handing out of the sweets at half time at the football. His judgements of our ‘diving’ competitions from the footstool in the living room. Making paper chains for Christmas decorations, as we made them progressively longer and tested his dexterity in hanging them up.
The Christmas shows we used to put on for his benefit, capped off with Tom’s triumphant renditons of ‘Humph the Camel’ His entire body reverberating as he chuckled away at one of us, when we inevitably said or did something of grave stupidity, usually followed with the immortal words- ‘you silly sod’. He was always telling us how proud he was of us all. I hope he knows how proud we were to call him our grandpa.