A month of uncertainty – #19 Great Grandpa – Songs that Feature Water – #5

Dark Green Water – Great Grandpa (2019, Big Scary Monsters Records)

There is a photograph of me on the top of the drawer unit that sits by my bed.  I found my daughter looking at that photo the other day, and when she looked at me there were tears in her eyes.

I am aged eight in that photo, I am a shock of curly hair and terrible clothes, I have a goofy looking grin plastered over my face.  I am stood in front of my grandad.  We are stood in the back garden of the house that my nan and grandad lived in for best part of thirty years.   It was nothing special to look at that house.  It had two bedrooms, which were freezing due to the lack of central housing stuck in council houses in the eighties (“Blame Maggie”, my Nan would say, “blame the miners”, my grandad would say back at her).  It had one small fire in the lounge that was supposed to heat the entire house. 

Always the Sea (Monnow Valley) – Sea Power (2003, Rough Trade Records)

Outside, it had three gardens, one at the front, one at the back (which was basically a lawn and a vegetable patch) and unlike every other garden in that street, one down the side, which was turned into a makeshift football pitch every Saturday morning until Saint and Greavsie came on. My brother and I would perfect our volleys by throwing the ball against the wall and smacking the ball against the brick wall of the old shed.

It was nothing to special to look at, but I can remember every detail of that house, the smells of the cooking coming out of the kitchen.  The sound that the electric heater made when it clicked on and off.  The colour of the carpet, the way the old sofa creaked when you sat on it, the size of the rhododendron bush at the front, the softness of my grandads shaving brush, the awful smell of my nans Lily of the Valley bath salts, the fact that a picture I drew at school of a castle on the edge of the River Medway remained on the shelf in the front room right up to the day my nan moved out of that house, five years after my grandad died and just before her cancer really set in.  Everything.

Find Me In The Water – Cloud Control (2017, Ivy League Records)

My daughter asks me suddenly,

“What was great grandad like?”

In the photo I am stood in front of my grandad or rather he is standing behind me.  He is wearing a dark blue jumper, with a shirt and some brown slacks.  He always wore a jumper my grandad, unless he was working in the garden, when he would wear an old shirt and then when he had finished he would put his jumper back on.  He seemed to have this knack of being able to produce a pencil from somewhere, nobody knew where, whatever the situation.  Grandad always had a pencil (my brother said it was because he was always writing horse racing tips in his social club diary).

“Did he have any brothers and sisters?”

Which were this story gets sort of interesting, rather than just a misty eyed memory.  I look at her and sigh.  My grandad was the youngest of eight children, the daughter of a lady called Emma, my great grandmother if you like, I mean I never met her, my dad never met her, his brother (my uncle) did, only once though. 

My grandad’s father, was according to his birth certificate a man called Joe.  Again, I never met him, my dad never met him and his older brother never met him either.  This it turns out was because he died at the hands of a German soldier in World War One sometime around August 1917.  

The problem with that is my grandfather wasn’t born until July 1919. 

Before The Water Gets Too High – Parquet Courts (2018, Rough Trade Records)

In the photo my grandad is holding onto my shoulders with a look of such dedicated pride on his face.   Like having his photo taken with me was the greatest gift you could bestow on a person and the way he is holding me looks like I am most precious thing on earth – in reality he treated all of us grandchildren the same way and I suspect he would have held each of us the same way and I also suspect, to him and Nan at least, we were the most precious things in the entire world.   Not that he would have ever told you that.

Then again he didn’t need to, you just kind of knew. 

Lemonade Lake – Jungle (2014, XL Records)