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Making Allowances
Chapter 8, Part 2
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With heart racing once again, I
hurried ahead of Granddad, towards the fence. I could see the St John’s
Ambulance personnel, standing around in a little huddle beside the fence.
Suddenly the figures parted and there he was, walking towards me, same stupid
gaping grin. I felt relieved, and then I felt annoyed at his apparent disregard
for everyone else’s feelings. How could he subject us to this torment and then
emerge grinning as if we had fallen for some silly caper? “Phew!” he exclaimed, “that
was lucky.” “Are you OK?” I asked. “Yeah,” he answered, “ a bit
of a bang on the backside, but I think I’m OK, I just don’t bounce like I
used to.” “Maybe it’s time you had another
think about what you’re doing,” I retorted. He just carried on fiddling with
his skull-cap, as if I’d said it to someone else. I was tired of this crap. If
he couldn’t see how it affected the rest of us, then it was time that he did.
I turned away and walked back towards the crowd. Granddad stopped to make sure
that he was OK before following me. “I know it annoys you,” Granddad
said, offering the bag of toffees once again as we wended our way home, “but
one day you will understand what it means to feel old, to feel that life is
passing you by, and that there is nothing left to live for, nothing to look
forward to. I felt like that when your Gran died, and I still feel like that
sometimes. But I have got your Mother and four grandchildren. My reason to live
is to see you all grow up.” “So why isn’t it enough for
Dad?” I asked him. “Well,” Granddad replied after a
moment, “your Dad isn’t as old as I am. He still wants to be able to do the
things he did as a young man. I know, and you know, that he can’t do some of
those things, but you mustn’t be too hard on him for having a go. The reason
you have so much fun, and so many laughs, is because he is still a young lad, in
his heart, and all those dreams he still has keeps him young. Think to yourself
what would become of him if he didn’t do this any more. He would be very
miserable, wouldn’t he? If you think this is tough, think of how much worse it
might be if he was miserable all the time.” I still wasn’t convinced. “What
I can’t understand is, how, when he knows how much we all worry about him, why
he insists on carrying on. How much is enough, how much, Granddad? What is it
going to take to make him stop?” “Something wonderful.” Granddad
replied. “What, winning a race?” I asked. “I don’t know.” Granddad
replied. “ But I get the feeling that he is looking for something wonderful to
happen. Something to make him smile when he is old, something to make him feel
he had a value.” “But we all love him?” I
protested. “No,” said Granddad, “this
isn’t about you, your brother and sisters, or your Mum for that matter. This
is something he wants for himself. No-one else. He is just looking for something
special to…” I finished the sentence for him
“To make sense of his life?” Granddad shrugged, “Probably,”
he agreed. Much later that day, I told Dad
about my chat with Granddad. “I’m sorry I was annoyed,” I
explained, “I should have known by now how important it is for you, not only
to be able to ride again, but to be able to compete. I think I’m beginning to
see how meaningless it would be just to come back and jump round, I thought that would be enough, but I understand that you need something more
now. It’s just hard to come to terms with. I still don’t know whether I can.
Why couldn’t you have been a chess player, or a concert pianist?” We both laughed. “I know how selfish it must
look,” said Dad, “it’s just that, through your life, no matter how good a
person you are, there are certain things that you sometimes need to do, just for
you. If you kept living your life to everyone else’s expectations and rules,
you would be of no interest to anyone, not least yourself. You have to learn to
like yourself, and live for yourself. I don’t want to die with any regrets. I
want to be remembered as a bright colour, not a dull shade of grey. You are a
long time old, and a longer time dead. You only come this way once and me,
I’ll take every chance I can get to make it worth passing through.” With the inglorious fall at the
local point-to-point, Dad’s comeback season ended. He would regularly report
to me during the summer term months how a number of local people had approached
him to ask if he would ride their horses in point-to-points the following
season. For all his enthusiasm, the list of personalities seemed to be all too
familiar, and I saw nothing in the list to excite me, or to make me think that
the “something wonderful” that Granddad had spoken of, was going to happen. Indeed, it was quite the reverse. In
the Autumn, Granddad died. He had been ill, on and off for a year or so, but had
lately become very poorly indeed. So in this cruel way, was my best race-going
pal lost to me. I took a week off college to return
home for his funeral. All through that week, I found myself looking around the
house for him, thinking that I had heard him whistling in the breeze. But there
was no whistling, there were no intermittent reports of football scores from
radio commentaries, no circles and scribbles on the racing pages. I even went
into the pub on the Saturday morning and ordered two pints, before remembering
that he wasn’t going to be following me in from the bookies any more. I thought about Granddad’s life as
I stood outside the church on that wet morning we buried him; how he had had
even less opportunity than Dad. He had left school to work in the mill at
fourteen, both his parents had died before his eighteenth birthday. Fifty-one
years he had worked his hands in the mills, docks and fields, save the five
years he spent at war. He didn’t see Mum until she was 3 years old. He had
never been on a holiday, he never owned a car, and just as he was coming up for
his retirement, his wife died. Not much of a life, really, I just hope that
whoever was looking after him now, realised that someone, somewhere, owed him. In the context of his own life, I
could now see why he took pleasure in the very simplest things; walks in the
fields, a couple of pints on a Saturday morning, an open fire, a day at the
races, a ride in a car. He knew there was more to life, but he had accepted
these things as his own reward. Perhaps, in younger eyes, it could be seen as a
lack of ambition. There again, he may simply have found peace with himself;
everything, after all, is relative. I surely had not found mine. I would frequently remember our last
trip, in the years that followed, understanding as I did now, what he was trying
to say to me, and how it had helped me to understand the complicated creature
that was my own father. Perhaps the
person with the fewest visions of all, saw it most clearly.
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If you would like to contact Richie, please email him at: richie@baylands.fsnet.co.uk
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