The Ill-Advisable Yet Life-Affirming Benefits of Recruiting a Stand-in Gran
“Oh shit! I hate children! They’re ghastly!” said Avril, in response to the news I was pregnant. “You’re a bloody idiot. I thought you weren’t an idiot, but you obviously are an idiot. Christ, I need a drink,” she added.
“Thank you,” I said graciously. “And because we are a bit short of grandparents, I wondered if you would like to be honorary Granny?”
She went ballistic. I can’t remember everything she said but, to summarise, children are like pigeons in the way they carry disease, they smell, they wail, they’re tiresome and they should be abolished.
I asked her to think about it.
Avril was 76 and I had met her on holiday. Though I was almost 40 years younger, we had become firm friends. Mainly because I admired her swearing skills. Plus, I’m always a fan of people who are angry about absolutely everything. Avril lived in Scotland and swam 50 lengths a day, cycled 20 miles a day and went for long angry walks. Then she would get on her motorbike, go to the co-op, buy the strongest gin she could find and, at five o’clock, she would have a quadruple gin and tonic and sit down and be infuriated by the television.
It was after one of these quadruple gins that she rang me. “All right. I’ll do it. But only because you’ll be such a terrible mother that I feel sorry for the little creature.”
When my son was born, Avril observed that he was the ugliest baby she’d ever seen. He had a massive head, no hair, acne and cradle cap. It started badly. As she had predicted, he often smelled, he sometimes wailed and he did indeed carry disease like a pigeon, passing on various colds, fevers and coughs on a regular basis. Worse than that, he threw up on her draft excluder (she NEVER put the heating on), lost her taxidermy mouse with bagpipes and knocked over an entire bottle of gin. I thought there would be no coming back from this, but their shared love of Balamory brought them together.
Soon, she was taking him out on long walks, singing him unsuitable songs and showering him with pro-Scottish (and anti-English) propaganda. He had his first kilt before he was six months old. I had to talk her out of buying him a sgian-dubh (knife) to keep in his sock.
When my second son was born, Avril was apoplectic. I’d proved what a useless mother I was so there was REALLY no excuse. But this just made her up her game.
Avril called the boys (and everyone else, really) “sausage” because she couldn’t be bothered to remember names, so she quickly became Granny Sausage to them. The first time I picked the boys up after they had spent the day with her, they chorused “oh, shit!” as they answered the door. On the way home, they sat in the backseat of the car exhausted from trying to keep up with her.
“What’s divorce?” asked my older son.
I tried to explain.
“What’s skinny-dipping?” asked my younger son. Uh oh.
I tried to explain.
“What’s a brazen young hussy?” asked my older son.
It seemed like they had learned some interesting things. Including, they told me, how to make the perfect gin and tonic.
Granny Sausage lived on a diet of gin and tonic, Irn-Bru and KitKats, but when the boys went round, nothing was too much trouble.
“I’ve made them a homeopathic chicken,” she bellowed when I took them round to see her one day. “Daylight robbery. But I don’t want them growing bosoms or whatnot with all the shit they pump into the cheaper ones.”
Granny Sausage had high hopes for the boys. Maybe they would be rugby players? She had been Matron (of course) at a boys’ boarding school where pupils would be carried in from the rugby field with broken necks and she would send them back out and tell them to pull themselves together.
Or maybe they would be doctors? She had been a theatre nurse, too, and had worked with some of the greatest surgeons, including one who had performed some groundbreaking surgery on patients and had also put her bubble car in the lift and then onto the roof of the hospital as a joke.
Or maybe they’d join the Royal Regiment of Scotland, learn the bagpipes and play at the Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo? Nothing better than doing a weird marchy dance and playing a tune that makes you think the Two Ronnies are about to appear.
So when I found out that both boys had autism, I was very worried about Granny Sausage’s reaction. She was the type of person who insisted that allergies, dyslexia, ADHD, etc, had not existed in the “olden days” (despite clearly suffering from at least two of those things herself ). But she immediately embraced the situation. She would spend hours stroking moss with my older son, collecting gravel with my younger, lining up pencils with my older, singing songs to a bucket with my younger. She declared these activities to be much more interesting than standing on a windy rugby field or watching music recitals.
Similarly, the boys embraced Granny Sausage and all of her quirks. As she got older and even she had to slow down, they took it in their stride. She gave up her beloved motorbike, but she got a stairlift that they “pimped” and had races on. She stopped being able to swim 50 lengths a day and to their delight had to join them in the kids’ pool, which she declared was 99 per cent wee-wee.
She couldn’t cycle any more or walk, but she got a remote control chair that could tip her up onto her feet and the boys enjoyed doing so until she was dizzy (though that could have been the gin).
When she took to her bed, my younger son drew her a card, showing her lying crossly in bed with a speech bubble that said “OH SHIT, ME ILL”, which, I think you’ll agree, encapsulates what it feels like to be unwell.
And when the day came when I had to tell them she had died, they went very quiet and then chorused “OH SHIT! I’M DEAD!”
Georgia Pritchett was a writer and executive producer on Succession and is he author of a memoir, My Mess Is a Bit of a Life. This piece appears in the Winter 2024 issue of Esquire, subscribe here.
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