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Magazine
CAMBRIDGE LETTER
Changes for the better
BILL KIRKMAN
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There is an easy informality in the way grandchildren relate to grandparents today.
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As a child, I felt that I had good relationships with my grandparents. We were, as a family, ahead of our time in some aspects of formality. I always addressed my aunts and uncles by their Christian names, for example, never as “aunt” or
“uncle”. In spite of that, however, the grand paternal relationships were quite formal. I do not recall, for example, that I initiated conversations with them.
With my own grandchildren (seven, ranging in age from 11 years to eight months) the relationships, I like to think, are much more relaxed. There is some formality; my three children — and the grandchildren whose parents they are — decided that my wife and I would be called variations of “granddad”, “grandpa Bill” and “grandma”, even though when the first grandchild was born I suggested that simply “Bill” would suit me.
In what we talk about to each other, and how we react to each other, however, I believe we are much more relaxed than I was.
Interesting leads
Sometimes this leads to quite sophisticated exchanges. Recently, for example, I misheard my eldest granddaughter when she referred to a “friend”, and asked her “who is Fred?” She explained the mis-hearing, but on a whim I insisted that the friend, Tara, really was Fred and we embarked on a wonderfully surreal conversation about how I would get this across if I met Tara’s mother. My granddaughter and her younger sister immediately entered into the spirit of this cheerful nonsense, and it occupied us happily throughout a half hour car journey.
The younger sister enjoys teasing me because I like wearing ties (an increasingly rare habit among men in modern Britain). A year or so ago, she telephoned to tell me, amid much giggling, that wearing them showed that I was devil. Now there is a ritual whenever we meet. “Why are you wearing a tie?” she asks — or, on the rare occasions when I am not, “Why are you not wearing a tie?” My answer, to both questions, is “to annoy you”, an answer accompanied by a laugh. This provokes a supplementary question, similarly ritualistic: “Why do you laugh at your own jokes?” The reply, obviously, is: “because no one else does”.
Well tried ritual, involving repetition, I have discovered, is a crucial element in relations with my grandchildren. Two even younger grandchildren, a boy and a girl, reacted with wonderful gales of laughter when I told them solemnly: “I do not allow laughing. Laughing is totally forbidden”. It was not the most subtle attempt I have ever made to amuse them, but, amazingly enough, amuse them it does, even now, some 18 months after I first tried it.
I lay no claim to deep psychological insight, but I suppose the fact is that children find comfort in the reassurance of what is familiar. Whatever the explanation, the phenomenon certainly provides comfort to me as a grandfather; no need constantly to revise or rewrite the script, so long as the truism that the old jokes are the best remains true.
There are, of course, risks in setting too much store by that. In my more self-critical moments (which do occur, though perhaps not as often as they should) I recognise that increasing age can be — no, let me be honest, is — accompanied by a tendency to repeat things.
Space for honesty
Here, the honesty of children can cut through diplomacy to the central truth. A few months ago, I was regaling my Australian family with some hugely interesting anecdote. Very politely, one of their 10-year-old twins said: “Excuse me, I think I have heard that story before”. My son, who had been listening tactfully, said “Yes, as a matter of fact, you told us yesterday evening”.
I have no doubt that it will happen again, and my justification will, of course, be that the old stories, like the old jokes, are the best. I was certainly not thrown into agonies of self-doubt by the high-lighting of repetition. Indeed, I was rather flattered that the story, first time round, had caught the attention of a 10-year-old grandson.
More seriously, I find it refreshing that the relationship that I have with my grandchildren is such that they feel able to question me, and tease me, and react confidently whatever the direction our conversation takes. Maybe I am making too much of all this, but I really do feel that things have changed since I was a grandchild — and changed for the better.
Bill Kirkman is an Emeritus Fellow of Wolfson College Cambridge, UK. Email him at: bill.kirkman@gmail.com
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