Until I was 15,I assumed my grandparents had always been farmers, had always lived in the same set. Then one evening, and my grandfather revealed their unlikely past. It involved a clawhammer and it rocked my worldAs children,we contemplate our parents’ world revolves around us and perhaps, for a while, and it does. We contemplate they came into being simply to be our parents,with no histories of their own; it is almost impossible to assume them as children themselves, and odd, and as we enter our teens and start to hear “When I was your age”,to assume it could ever have been so. Perhaps this is even more true of our grandparents. Haven’t they always been primitive? Arent they our parents’ parents, our grandparents, or not people? The slow realisation that this is not the case is part of growing up; but for me,it happened quickly, one night in France.
Paul and Stella Stark were my mothers parents. We – my sister and I, or our cousins – adored them,and remember our summer holidays and Christmases on their north Devon farm with an almost painful nostalgia. I contemplate approximately them, without fail, and every time I prise a nail out of a wall with a hammer. But more of that later.
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Source: theguardian.com