Strong, but Milky

You might think it would have been confusing for me, when I was a child, having two grandfathers called James, but it didn’t work out that way. From – well, from as soon as I was aware of them, I never mixed them up. They both absolutely doted on me, and I adored them back and looked forward to visiting both Granddad James and Grandpa Jimmy.

     But they were entirely different. Granddad James, my Mum’s father, was a retired professor, and lived in a house full of books and pictures and though never oppressively so, the town house in a cathedral close in an old university town was a quiet place. Grandma Mavis was still alive when I was a child, and she was a retired professor, too. Yet I don’t want to give any kind of wrong impression about being a bored little girl in a house of intellectuals. They treated me (though this might sound silly about a small child) with respect and did not consider they always needed to entertain me, but listened to my views about all manner of things with an air of gravity and not the least condescension. 

     Grandpa Jimmy was a retired railway signalman, and when I was little, he still lived in his cottage by the railway line. Yes, when I was little, the railway line was still there. It isn’t any more. To everyone’s surprise, including Grandpa Jimmy, it had survived Dr Beeching’s axe, but had closed down later. Grandpa Jimmy was a widower – I never knew my Granny Betty, though it seemed as if I did. He called her a Grand Lass, taken before her time. 

     When I was a child and visited him at the cottage, he was still a decidedly handsome man, with a magnificent handlebar moustache, and didn’t lack for lady friends. But he never remarried. 

     Let’s get this straight, Grandpa Jimmy was never a hoarder. You wouldn’t have found piles of old newspapers or empty tin cans in the cottage, and he kept it clean – at least, clean enough for me not to notice otherwise! But he didn’t believe in throwing things out for the sake of it and that suited me nicely. I was delighted to find such things as a kaleidoscope that was slightly rusty, but still made light and colours play and shift when I put my eye to it, and a one-eared teddy he’d had since he was a boy. 

     Granddad James and Grandpa Jimmy didn’t necessarily meet up that often (as Mum liked to say, we lived somewhere in the middle of them) but they got on very well, and were both inveterate card players. I know I played cards with both of them, and even before I started school was of the firm opinion that cards came in hearts, clubs, diamonds and spades, not that Happy Families business, but somehow I remember playing cards with Grandpa Jimmy more. 

     That cottage was a contradictory place. There was a wonderfully old-fashioned large radio, the kind with a dial telling you about stations called Athlone and Beromunster, even though you could no longer tune in to half the promised channels, and a log fire burnt in the hearth in cold weather, but Grandpa Jimmy was very fond of his microwave, and was a surprisingly early mobile phone owner. “Anything to make life handier,” he said, with a mischievous smile. The cottage had the kind of garden that wasn’t much good for playing in, being narrow and steep, and Grandpa Jimmy wasn’t much of a gardener either, but there were things he could grow, and these included oversize vegetable marrows and clumps of gaudy tulips at rakish angles in the spring. 

     It would be easy but too simplistic to say that unlike Granddad James, Grandpa Jimmy treated me more like a child. It would be nearer the truth to say that he was more like a child. He genuinely loved playing snakes and ladders and ludo, and sucking creamy toffees. 

     At Granddad James’s house I drank water or milk, or occasionally well diluted orange squash, and was allowed to sip little cups of coffee younger than some would say was good for me. At Grandpa Jimmy’s I drank water to quench my thirst, but more often than not joined him in a mug of tea. That was a standing joke, and to this day I can’t hear the phrase without seeing a surreal mental image of Grandpa Jimmy and me swimming round in a mug of tea. Sometimes when I tell folk his drink of choice (not that he was averse to a tot of whisky!) was strong milky tea, they look at me askance as if that’s a contradiction in terms. But it isn’t. He liked to make his tea very strong and then put a hefty slug of milk in it. “Best of both worlds!” he said. I never did really develop a taste for it, and though it would be very nice and sentimental to say that it’s now my own favourite drink, it isn’t – I don’t drink tea that often, and when I do, it’s quite weak and without milk! But it was a part of visiting Grandpa Jimmy. As I grew a little older I thought Grandpa Jimmy’s tea was a bit like the man himself – strong, single-minded, irascible sometimes, and not always to everyone’s taste, but with a nourishing gentleness flowing in his veins.

     Though he loved his clutter, he never retired to bed without doing the washing up, even if it was only a couple of mugs. And though I’ll never be in the Domestic Goddess Stakes, that’s one trait of his that I have inherited. 

     He never pretended to be something he wasn’t. Though he could remember the age of steam, and had a framed print of the Mallard on his kitchen wall, he wasn’t over-romantic about it, and said that there was a great deal in favour of diesel and electric trains. He told me that though he had once nursed dreams of being a train driver (a mild heart condition ruled him out, though it didn’t stop him living life to the full and to a ripe old age) he had never thought there was anything that wonderful about being a stoker. 

     Grandpa Jimmy was ambivalent about the so-called heritage railways that began to spring up. He was more tolerant of them than his old colleague Job (who most certainly didn’t share his biblical namesake’s patience) who was scathing about what he called the “Tinkering Toy Train Timmies”. Grandpa Jimmy said if it made decent folk happy and did nobody any harm, then fair enough. But he did think that “There’d be more sense to the kind of trains that get people to work and stop there being so many traffic jams”. If he went on holiday and discovered there was one nearby, he visited it, but never planned his holidays around them.

     In one of those scenarios that seem sepia-tinted, even if they’re not, nothing would change as I grew up. But things did change. My Dad’s job took us further away from Grandpa Jimmy (and even further away from Granddad James) and visits became rarer, though for a long while he was a lively and regular exponent of the good old fashioned letter. Visits to the cottage by the railway line became rarer, and it was less easy to slip into the routines and rhythms of life there. And I did this disturbing, wonderful thing called growing up.

     Still, I was shocked when Grandpa Jimmy moved into a bungalow in town of his own volition. It was true that there were rumours the railway cottages might be demolished to make way for a bypass, but these rumours had been around for years and nothing came of them. There was another rumour that one of the bigwigs on the council was a railway freak, and that as long as he had any say, the cottages were probably safe.

     I sometimes remember this as the first “grown-up” conversation I had with him, though of course it wasn’t. These things evolve, they don’t happen all at once in a moment’s transformation. “Listen, Cassie,” he said, “I love this cottage, but I never planned to end my days there – come to think of it, I don’t think I made any plans one way or the other. But there’s no point to beating about the bush, though I still have my wits about me, thank the Lord, my eyes and my reflexes aren’t as keen as they once were, and for my sake and everyone else’s I’ll have to give up driving pretty soon – you know this isn’t the best of places to live without a car, and I wish it was otherwise, but wishing doesn’t make it so. And Job and Alec and Rodney and the rest of the old railway gang have either passed away or moved away. I don’t fancy being an old codger living just on his memories in the middle of nowhere.”

     It made sense, and I realise now it was a brave decision that hadn’t been reached easily, but though I was now all grown up with my own driving license I was still child enough to feel betrayed even though it was quite a long time since I had visited the cottage. 

     I did visit the bungalow a couple of times, and was pleased to see that the old radio and the framed print of the Mallard and quite a few bits and bobs from the cottage had found their way there, and Grandpa Jimmy was undeniably happy. He did wax lyrical about the big “picture” windows letting in the light after the small ones at the cottage, though he added that he was still glad he had nets at them!

     Grandpa Jimmy has passed away now, with all his wits about him, just as he would have wanted. Towards the end of his life we became very close again (he was an enthusiastic silver surfer) and I’ll always be glad about that.

     But though he’s no longer with us, the cottages are, even though the Railway Freak is no longer on the council! Oh, they came within (to use one of Grandpa Jimmy’s expressions!) a flea’s whisker of being demolished, but they survived, and now they’ve been bought up by a property developer and turned into a restaurant.

     Oh how I had mixed feelings about that! I was glad that they survived of course, and yet there was a part of me that felt in its way this was just as bad as them being demolished. So I didn’t know what to do when my own work (I’m a saleswoman for a stationery firm – both touching and annoying how folk can be surprised to discover that both salespeople and stationery firms still exist!) took me to a conference in the town where Grandpa Jimmy spent his last years – and, of course, not too far from the railway cottages. They were only a couple of minutes off my route, into town but right until the last minute I didn’t know what to do about going to see them in their new incarnation. In the end, I did. The road was better now, though they never did get round to building a bypass of any kind.

     The cottages were still whitewashed with small windows, and I was glad that the outside hadn’t been changed much. As you approached, but for a blackboard outside displaying the day’s specials, it was hard to tell that it was even a restaurant. This made it both harder and easier. I could have checked online, but I hadn’t, and I supposed they might have called it something like Railway Cuttings (which I could have lived with, even though I knew enough, thanks to Grandpa Jimmy, to know that the word Cuttings would have been inaccurate) or some laboured pun like Filling Station. 

     But as I got nearer, I saw that the sign – and they did incorporate a picture of a steam train, for which I couldn’t, in all honesty, blame them – said simply “Jimmy’s.” Well, I could have blinked furiously and not been sure how I thought about it at all, and gone on my way, but I thought, you’ve come this far, don’t chicken out now, and pulled into the car park. The specials sign also said they served tea and coffee and snacks all day. Crossing the threshold was the hardest bit. Of course it was different inside, not least because the two cottages had been knocked together, and walls knocked down, and there were tables and a bar. It felt strange, but it didn’t jar. I ordered a coffee from the very pleasant lady who welcomed me, and though I had most definitely never intended to do so, told her about my connection to the cottage. “Oh, my dear, how wonderful!” she exclaimed, plainly sincere. “We’d heard so much about your Grandpa, not so much about the gentleman from the other cottage, and it seems he was a real character – and in a good way! We never doubted what to call the restaurant. I hope you don’t see it as a bit of a cheek!”

     “Not in the least,” I replied, also sincere. It was, suddenly, okay. I knew he would have approved, though he might have gone through a show of saying that calling it after him was silly. 

     I chatted for a while with the owner, who was called Patty, and she even asked me if I had any suggestions about the restaurant. I told her that everything seemed absolutely fine as it was, which it did, but though I didn’t voice them, I did have a couple of thoughts.

     That I would prefer it to be called Grandpa Jimmy’s.

     And that I would like them to serve strong, milky tea.