I had a dose of reality this week with the passing of my Grandfather, aged 88. Thankfully it wasn’t a sudden thing and sadly, had been on the cards for some time.
Granddad was a tough old bugger. He was cut from cloth that we Metrosexuals would consider too harsh for our delicate skin and yet sadly, despite having a hide tougher than chainmail, it was skin cancer that killed him. All those years he spent outside in the hot Hawke’s Bay sun, slaying dragons and building castles from the ground up, came back to bite him on the arse. I always remember him as wearing a hat but the damage was probably done well before then it would seem.
In writing a eulogy for him it struck me just how extra ordinary his life and others of his generation was. Quite rightly by the time I’d finished I felt like a little girl and proceeded to cry myself to sleep that night.
He spent six consecutive years away at war with the New Zealand Navy. Six years! Imagine walking out the door tomorrow and not returning to your families for that period of time. And here I was thinking that the three tours I did of ‘Nam was impressive. How many of us can honestly say we have done anything for six years by choice, like lived in the same house, stayed in the same job or shagged the same bird?
Even if you have, now imagine spending a good part of that period bricking it in the fear of being shelled or torpedoed by the Hun, or kamikazed by the nut bar Japs. He was torpedo actually, very early in his naval career and not only did he live to tell the tale but to serve four more years helping to liberate the Pacific from the rice rollers. Oh how he must have enjoyed seeing the proliferation of sushi bars around the place now, after all that sacrifice....
After the war, he, like so many others, shunned the attraction of the big cities and returned to his rural hometown where he would spend the next fifty years building it up to be more than just a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it you would pass through on your way to somewhere else.
He wasn’t the type of guy to be worried about keeping up with the Jones’s like so very many of us are these days. In fact he would be more inclined to help the Jones’s build their place up before he even thought of touching his and even then he’d be moving on to the Jones’s neighbours in between, to help with theirs.
It drove my Grandmother mad that it was community first; home second with him but that was just how he was. Incidentally they were married for 55 years, another milestone that you and I are going to be hard pressed to match with our achievements when the time comes. The closest we’ll come to being anything for 55 years is having been completely sucked in by the rampant consumerism that would have peed its pants in fear, if faced by a man like my Granddad in his prime.
Admittedly they spent the last 20 years in separate beds and separate rooms but still, that’s a lifetime to be putting up with someone else’s shit. These days we struggle to give it five minutes before we’re on the internet looking for someone else, or porn, to help alleviate our swollen testicles which have expanded to watermelon size in that time.
Granddad would not have been much of a fan of the internet, especially Google. Back in his day if he’d have asked too many questions he would’ve been beaten with a stick for being so bloody nosey. Back then you learnt by doing, not by wanting to know the answer to everything all the time. As for my blogging, well, he’d probably tell me that he went to war, it was grim, but he didn’t need to write a novel about it.
He was the only guy I’ve ever known to come back from the town tip with more than when he left. Sometimes I wondered if the character Del Boy from the TV show Only Fools and Horses was based on him because he was always arriving home with a thousand of something he had just managed to procure with some fantastic barter. He always had a plan for the steal of the century too but not surprisingly we came across the bulk of them the other night, still in his shed and still without a use.
Like most Granddads he was a great man. A very different man than you and I could ever be but yet he taught me more than any one single person ever will again. Like never trust the Japs.
I shall miss him.
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