My Great Great-Grandparents

The old adage says that you should ‘write what you know’. I’ve long struggled with formulating original ideas but, by the same token, there’s not a lot of interesting stuff in my own life that’s worth committing to paper. I’ve been mulling over a semi-autobiographical novel for a while, but having written the first chapter I’ve realised that it’s neither dramatic nor interesting to anyone other than a few of the people who were involved in that period of my life. So with that project permanently on the back-burner I’ve decided to raid my memory for material which is both true and interesting. It might be a struggle – and this might be the one and only instalment...

I was lucky enough to meet two of my great-grandparents. Not only to have met them, but to have known them. They were obviously old and I was clearly very young. But I have some amazingly vivid memories of them – memories which have probably been embellished and exaggerated by the passage of time – but which I’m going to write down anyway (and wait for my mum to correct the factual inconsistencies and outright lies).

They lived in an East Yorkshire village called Wold Newton, a tiny place with barely 300 residents. Their house was a lovely whitewashed building with a crooked porch and a low walled garden at the front (which nobody ever used) and a cracked driveway up the side of the house which led into the brilliant back garden via a tangled gooseberry bush.

A small courtyard and garage provided parking room for visitor’s cars and my great-granddad’s van. To the left was a huge coal-shed and a side entrance to their home, to the right a greenhouse, ferret hutches and every kind of fruit or vegetable imaginable growing in the garden. The whole lot was surrounded by a field of bullocks which extended around their property and in which we occasionally went foraging for mushrooms – or maybe we jus went looking for puffballs to kick?

I remember very little about the house itself – largely because I was a kid desperate to play out rather than lurk inside. What I can recall is a kitchen in which my great-grandma resided. I’m not sure I ever saw her anywhere else. She may well have slept in that kitchen. She sat at one end, flanked by her blue budgerigar (which may or may not have been capable of speech) and her pantry. I assume everyone else sat at the opposite end as I can’t remember any other perspective of the room other than me gazing down its length at this fiercely matriarchal but beautiful old lady.

Before you got to her kitchen you entered the house through a thin little passageway and a low door. Turn right and you entered my great-grandma’s domain. A left turn took you into my great-granddad’s territory. For a small boy, this was arguably the greatest place in the known universe. By the door there stood a barrel of guns. Real guns. Guns that fired actual bullets. Fire-sticks capable of decapitating, maiming and killing. In a bloody barrel. Next to the back door.

Next to the guns was a cabinet – maybe you’d call it a tall-boy? It was filled with boxes of bullets. In case you’re a little confused by what you’ve just read, I’ll reiterate it in simple terms. My great-granddad had a barrel of shotguns in his passageway and it was next to a cupboard full of bullets.

To the best of my knowledge, I never saw any of those guns fired. I don’t think either myself or my brother (for we were the only Ward offspring at the time) ever played with the guns – although I’m sure we had a little surreptitious touch of the cold gun-metal from time-to-time. We knew they were dangerous and we knew we shouldn’t mess around with them. I assume we were warned early on and allowed common-sense to keep our meddling digits away from triggers, barrels and ballistics. Of course, nowadays an interfering neighbour would report such carelessness to the appropriate authorities. Myself and my brother would immediately be whisked into foster care, my great-grandfather vilified and The Daily Mail outraged. But there really was nothing to worry about. We were responsible and mature – qualities which kids nowadays seem seldom to be credited with.

The politically correct brigade of interfering busybodies would have had even further cause for concern had they seen what lived at the end of the hallway. Or rather, what used to live there. For at the end of the passage was the aforementioned coal-shed. At the time it felt like an aircraft hanger. I’m sure it wasn’t nearly that big – but I was very small. At one end was a wall of coal akin to a blackened Mount Everest. It reached right to the high ceiling and we just knew not to go near it. The last thing we wanted was to be coated in coal dust or – worse still – to cause an avalanche. This was not because we feared for our safety but rather because we knew that being covered in black powder would provide incontrovertible proof of our guilt.

Along the wooden beams in the roof of the shed hung various dead bodies. These were usually hares or rabbits, but occasionally a clutch of pheasants swung limply above our heads. They were the fruits of my great-granddad’s labours – creatures he’d either culled himself or which he’d received in payment for his services as rat-catcher, mole-killer or pest-controller.

My great-granddad was a lovely, lovely man. Known as Sunny (presumably for his cheerful disposition) he was a flat-cap wearing, shotgun toting character with a cheeky twinkle in his eye which belied his status as a local murderer. The murders he committed, of course, were not those of people. Instead, he helped local landowners rid themselves of problem pests. My dad recently told me of accompanying Sunny on a rat-killing mission, but my memories are of his mole-murdering.

As well as coal and corpses, the shed also housed a large bucket of rat-poison. This was used for many genocidal purposes, but the one which is lodged in my mind is the ingenious way it was used for managing the local mole population. My great-granddad would collect a bunch of wriggling earthworms, chuck them into the bucket of rat-poison, allow them to coat themselves in the toxic dust and then transport them into the fields. There, he would dig up a mole-hill, drop the wrigglers into the tunnel, wait until the moles chomped down their free lunch and then send down the ferrets to drag out their little furry corpses.

The part with the ferrets might not be true. They might have served some other purpose. But I do know that they must’ve been kept for a reason. Because nobody in their right mind would keep such a stinky collection of animals unless they served a purpose. Although the exact make-up of the group might have changed over the years, my memories of the ferrets sees a mixed trio – one albino and two brown streaks of vicious fur in a large hutch halfway down the enormous back garden.

It was, in fact, more like a large allotment or a very small farm. I guess nowadays a generation of Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall fans would refer to it as a smallholding. Although exact details of the layout remain elusive I remember it being partitioned by thin grassy walkways. These led through different patches, sheds and greenhouses and were great fun for two small children to race around. The real fun, however, lay in doing some work.

There were some crops which I distinctly remember harvesting. Potatoes were great fun – a combination of forking, pulling, shaking and collecting which left an amazingly earthy smell in the nostrils. It seems strange that I can remember the smell so vividly when it’s such a common one – even now when I’m doing my own gardening a nostril-full of that scent can take me back to Wold Newton.

Another vegetable which made for particularly enjoyable work was collecting, shelling and eating peas. I’ve never been great at growing them myself, but my great-grandparents’ garden produced bucketfuls – even after we’d stuffed our faces with them. It’s worth having a go at planting some yourself even if it’s just for that amazing feeling of popping the pods and stripping the fresh peas from their case. It’s such a satisfying feeling on your fingertips – and they taste bloody great too.

At the time, gooseberries were a fruit I didn’t understand. They grew in abundance but I’m not sure what happened to the ones we picked. They were hard, hairy and really bloody sour. I assume they were turned into jams, chutneys or fools which we children had little interest in. Similarly a greenhouse full of tomato plants was warm and fun but ultimately pointless – at that age there was no way I was ever going to put a tomato anywhere near my tastebuds.

The front garden was another world altogether. Although not quite abandoned it was certainly more ramshackle than the well-maintained vegetable plots out back. It was circled by a dry-stone wall and this, it transpired, was probably the reason for the lack of maintenance. My great-grandma, rather surprisingly, was petrified of frogs. I have no idea why. She certainly didn’t seem like a woman prone to fear about anything much. But for some reason, frogs frightened her. On many occasions my brother and I would be provided with a screw-top jam-jar each and sent on a dangerous frog-finding mission in the front garden. Should we find any lurking in the cracks of the wall we were to take them down to the village pond and let them loose there.

I don’t think we ever captured a single amphibian despite many hours of fruitless searching. What we did find, more often than not, was a large baker’s van. It would pull up outside the house, inviting residents inside to but bread, cakes and other more essential items. I can remember exactly how the yeasty, bready smell would signal the arrival of a treat for us – often a fat oozing vanilla slice or a heavily nutmegged egg custard.

On the rare occasions that we ventured further than the house or garden we would play by the village pond. There was a small stream which fed it and across it a large metal pipe which we would climb across. I’m sure some healthy and safety pedant has probably cordoned it off by now, but back then that pipe was the source of great amusement. We would occasionally cross paths with a couple of other kids, one of whom was a small blonde girl. We would play with each other, grateful for seeing non-adult faces in the tiny village. With the passing of time it has occurred to me that this girl was almost certainly Gemma Davison – a former resident of Wold Newton and the finest neurotic Grey’s Anatomy fan I have ever met.

Of course, my great-grandparents have passed away now. Someone else will be growing potatoes in their back garden and collecting coal from their shed. Chances are their guns will be under lock and key, too. And most of what I’ve written here is based on half-forgotten, romanticised memories and an element of wishful thinking. But the sentiment is true and I’ve been as honest as I can be. I doubt many children ever get to meet their parents’ grandparents. But I did and I’m extremely thankful for it.