Grandchildren

I had X yesterday – you can’t take your eyes off him for a minute – even when he’s ‘asleep’! His father put him to bed when they came the other day – after 1/2 hour I said I could still hear him talking so Y decided to get him up. He’d turned on my bedside light and I suddenly saw what looked like strips torn off the wallpaper – then we smelt my new large pot of hand cream. He’d put the lot all over his face and hands and a square yard of the wall, 3 pillow cases, sheet and my candlewick bedspread. We scraped it off with a knife – fortunately it was a washable paint on the wall and it doesn’t show!!

The infants v. good – X is a really delightful and responsible little boy and Y is much improved though I gather a constant source of worry to the parents as to what she’ll say or do next! She was cut off sharply once or twice before I could gather what she’d said – maddening!!! Z is a nice cuddly little thing and ties her mother round her little finger.

There’s a constant whirl going on from 5.30 a.m. on. One morning at this time X crept into the family room where I slept and excused himself in a penetrating whisper, as he wanted his song book. He crept back to the room they all three share now and they quietly shut the door and went to it, the lot, but the lot, from Yellow Submarine to Lily the Pink in a really wall shattering chorus.

We had X to stay over the weekend a week or so ago, which was interesting. We hadn’t seen her apart from one or two hours since before she went to Canada, and she has grown up a lot; in fact she is a very different person from the rather whinging schoolgirl she was ten years ago. Now she knows it all (with admittedly more justification than most nineteen year olds, for she has got herself around a great deal). She is planning to go to Vietnam, on some sort of biological research team, to work in the forests next January, together with her boyfriend. I would be heartily glad if the whole plan falls through, for it seems to offer a variety of dangers: but I suppose one can only just express an opinion and leave it at that. She is a nice affectionate child (young woman).

She is the oddest baby. Her mother said she wasn’t at all what she expected – and she looked just like her g’mother! I think she looks like a cross between Grumpy of the 7 Dwarfs and Queen Victoria. Enormous dark eyes she turns on you in a very critical way, dark brown curly hair – lots – and she ruminates all the time with her mouth well turned down and pokes her tongue out and licks her lips. She has a little round bullet head and long fingers and lovely nails.

[Outing with young grandsons] The lunch was super and we all ate hard for 2 hours! … We played racing demon until it was time for tea – ‘We’re really not hungry – just a small piece of pizza please’ all the boys said – but it was remarkable how hungry they felt once more after all – and went on happily to drop scones, flapjacks and burnt house cake most in the plural: an outstanding performance after the lunch they ate!

Praise be X is now really friendly and very sweet and actually knows me – I couldn’t cope with Y – we just don’t ‘take tea’. I laughed and laughed last week – he came for 2 hours whilst his mother went to the hairdressers. He seemed v. chatty and was in fact being quite pleasant and friendly – and all in the same chatty voice said to me, ‘mummy says I mustn’t say I don’t like granny’!!

We had X up here for a couple of days this week. She is most exhausting, and delightful, though with a frightful accent and not very usual table manners, which she has acquired from her flatmates, I suppose – they both work in the builders trade, so eating becomes rather like feeding a concrete mixing machine. But X is determined to find some sort of vocation in life: and it obviously ought to be concerned with people, as she seems to have a way with her.

We’ve had X here from Thursday evening until this evening. He is a great giggler (in a raucous way reminiscent of his mother at his age) and very quickwitted – with quite a facility for making Limericks, for instance, which I thought surprising for his age. He has also got much more agile in recent months – runs quite fast and far. We did a few jobs, like planting out the strawberry bed and visiting the water supply and went a long walk up a new track the neighbour has had bulldozed right up to the far end of his hill, on which he was setting the pace most of the way. He got himself soaked 3 times (in the stream, filling the watering can and finally slipping and sitting down on the walk in a very wet patch of grass which he said very indignantly was ‘camouflaged’!!!). I think he enjoyed it all.

X wanted to tell us his news! And of course, I couldn’t get a word of what he was saying! However Y then suggested he tell me what he had done at the play centre this morning. I was duly surprised to hear he had played with some gold dice, but Y enlightened me when she came back to close down. It was cold ice they had been playing with! But when I think that I was quite frightened of the telephone until the age of about fifteen, I marvel.

Talking of the way professional families are turned out, do you remember the photo of my family on holiday circa 1920 – scruffy wasn’t the word for us. And come to think of it, X tends to appear in jeans which are more hole than cloth, and all the boys wear terrible gym shoes all the time.

I think we shall have to give up offering meals to her brood. They all came in to tea yesterday on the way back from their parish weekend, although to begin with X just stayed in the car apparently asleep. Y came in and managed two or three ham sandwiches (very ladylike – no crusts) before we eventually produced the biscuits, and then he did quite well on them. Later X wandered in, and of course got the choice straightaway: he managed two nibbles out of a cream cheese and pineapple sandwich, and deserted it for a chocolate biscuit. We had all the crusts for supper!

He gave X a big polystyrene surfboard and Y a recorder – Y burst into tears and said, ‘I want a BIG present too’! All was saved when a swimming ring was in Y’s parcel too and his mother quickly blew it up – BIG!!