Hallelujah! Let us sing it from the rooftops. Who – parents aside – has the strongest positive influence on children? The Social Mobility Commission says it’s the Grandma – particularly the child’s mother’s mother. Oh yeah, baby! That’s me.
Did I happen to mention the icing on the delicious cake of my life are my four gorgeous-looking genius grandchildren? Am I biased – of course and ecstatic to be bedazzled by their delightfulness. Zekey, 12, Neroli, 10, A.J., seven, and Cecily, three, are an energy-boosting, exciting, exacting, often worrying adornment to everything.
In their company, I find myself belting out music hall songs my own Grandpa sang to me in 1965. “Don’t Have Any More, Mrs Moore.” “Yes! We have no bananas”, “I Can’t Do My Belly Bottom Button Up” and, from my Grandma Babs: A Rabbi Sat One Evening: and Percy French’s heart-rending “The Mountains of Mourne”.
Why do I inflict my questionable renditions of ditties composed circa 1896 on innocent 2026 children when we Feltzes have not been blessed with perfect pitch? I’m not sure. It must have something to do with continuity, relish for a humorous lyric and feeling that singing – especially “Green Grow the Rushes Oh” and “Dashing Away with a Smoothing Iron” – wards off bad-temper like nothing else.
I don’t believe in public legacy. You wouldn’t either if you worked with teams so young they’ve never heard of Morecambe and Wise or Cagney and Lacey. “Wow!” I say “We have Lorraine Chase on the show today. Did she fly in from Luton Airport?” Cue blank incomprehension from colleagues born too late for Crossroads Motel, Southfork Ranch, Barbara Cartland, The Queen Mother or Mrs T. Politicians, poets and philosophers are all speedily forgotten. Even if you invent penicillin or build the Forth Bridge, a few decades on no-one will give a fig.
The only legacy that might endure is private. It’s whatever you manage to instil in your descendants. According to the SMC grandparents enhance grandchildren’s lives by providing caregiving and financial and emotional support. To that list, I would add chocolate, homemade obstacle courses, ‘rude’ jokes, questionable limericks, bespoke one-on-one time, marshalling infants to form a human chain and unfurling a catalogue of anecdotes about their great and great-great grandparents so they feel connected to their own family’s history, plus lashings of device-free fun.
Grandmas-R-Us and obviously, the kids give us infinitely more than we could ever give them.
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