The Tomato.

And a generation gap.

This summer we grew one tomato. We were kindly given two tomato plants, which were potted up and staked. They produced lots of yellow flowers, but I neglected to feed them, and we had next to no sun. They bore two fruit and one small unripe green ball fell and provided a feast for the slugs and snails.

The successful, solitary tomato is sitting on the kitchen windowsill where I thought it may ripen to a suitable vermillion. Every time I look at it, I think of my Grandfather George. George was born at the turn of the 20^thcentury in October 1899. The year that the Boer war started. The year that Henry Ford set up his automobile company and the year that the German company Bayer patented aspirin.

George lived in Liverpool on one of the main arterial routes, Queen’s Drive in West Derby with his wife, my Granny Ada. They lived modestly and happily in a flat above a shop, which changed hands several times in my lifetime. The front door faced on to the busy street and Ada was of the generation that donkey stoned the front step. I remember her with her bowl of water scrubbing it on her hands and knees and talking to the shopkeeper and neighbours.

The house was always tidy. The front room was a living and dining area with a piano, settee, armchair and a dining table. There were vases filled with dried Honesty and a companion set on the hearth, where George would tend to the fire.

Their bedroom was decorated with a pale green bedspread smoothed out perfectly and on my Granny’s dressing table sat a matching art deco hairbrush and looking glass. In the spare bedroom George would sit at the bureau and paint with watercolours. The spare bed had an extremely high mattress, and my cousins and I would treat it like a piece of gym equipment and vault on to it for hours on end. Next to the bed a copy of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

The bathroom was very cold. The toilet had a pull chain. The bath was filled maybe only once or twice a week and there was a bar of Lifebuoy, pink carbolic soap in a dish. I do remember bathing and the water being surprisingly hot. I would read the poem on the wall by Mabel Lucie Attwell Please remember don’t forget never leave the bathroom wet.

My granny did the cooking in the kitchen and George would routinely have half a grapefruit and toast that was frayed black around the edges. Ada made some comment about charcoal being good for the bowels. The kitchen overlooked the back yard with his homebuilt greenhouse, which was not big enough to stand in, but was filled with tomatoes, and then beyond the yard were the garages where the youths kicked footballs around and climbed onto the flat pitch roofs.

My father would drive us over to Liverpool at least once a month, usually on a Sunday.

We would gather with great aunts and uncles and cousins from their extended families. A generation of people, which are now largely lost to me. We would huddle around the dining room table and my granny would make two dozen cheese scones and a huge pot of tea.

We would hear what everyone had been up to. My grandfather sometimes sang while my granny played piano. Men of Harlech or Joy Bells. I remember his voice as he stood in his trousers and knitted waistcoat. I can hear him now as if it was yesterday.

On the way home from Liverpool my eyes heavy from the excitement of the day, would squint at the motorway lights, and watch them whizz past like they were taking off. Flying lights.

George was one of nine children, and I would often see his siblings - my great aunties, Lilly, Hilda, and Nelly were all spinsters. They were the war generation and had never been lucky enough to find love or even a partner. They all lived in Liverpool. Croxteth, Toxteth and around. In the summer months we’d go to the beach at Formby together they’d sit on deckchairs, and they would take it turn to paddle with me in the shallow water.

As I became a bit older, I was allowed to stay with my grandparents. I have great memories of these visits. One time I was taken to Southport for the afternoon with my cousin Danny. We went on fairground rides, and I remember my aunties’ smiling faces when we asked them to go on the big wheel as we stared up at the towering attraction.

It was the company of my grandfather though, that I treasured. Ada suffered with arthritis and wasn’t anywhere as nimble as George. He would play hide the cushion with me, an exhausting game that I never tired of. As I grew, he would take me on the double decker bus into Liverpool city centre. We would go to the Library and Liverpool Museum. It was a total revelation for me.

One trip, he decided that he would take me on the ferry across the Mersey. I was very keen to do this as it sounded like a great adventure. The trouble was my mother had only packed dresses and this wasn’t suitable attire to go on the ferry, for God forbid my skirt might blow up. It was decided that Ada would get me a pair of kex.

Kex as I understood it, could be my opportunity to finally get a pair of jeans. At this point I was around seven years old, and I had longed for a pair of drainpipes. I thought this was my chance, so I planted a little seed in my Granny’s mind that jeans would be just the ticket.

The next day we walked along Queen’s Drive and looked in some of the shop windows. No jeans were on view. We called in at a fabric shop. Ada asked the woman for a couple of yards of the navy-blue crimplene, and she ran up a pair of kex with an elasticated waist and a wide flare.

Above Pier Head By Tom Wood (screenshot)

The trip across the Mersey was not anywhere near as glamorous as I anticipated, due to the mortifying kex. But I did thankfully have a coat to wear over them. On the way home that evening we came across my great uncle Joe, George’s eldest brother, who was walking along the Pier Head with his unmistakeable stoop and walking stick.

Joe had started out as an office boy in the corn trade, and he was as much a part of the Liverpool skyline as the internationally famous Liver birds. He even appeared in Terence Davies’ beautiful homage to Liverpool, Of Time and the City where his distinctive silhouette can be seen for a few moments along the waterfront, as Davies laments a Liverpool that has long since gone, but is captured for posterity in his beautiful film and in my memories.

Joe always carried a bag of boiled sweets in his pocket so, as a child you knew it was a good idea to stop and chat before getting on the bus home. It is one of the pleasures that I have carried over into this century. I love nothing more than wandering around a city looking at it with a bag of sweets in my pocket.

George was incredibly skilled at making things. He had a small workshop on the ground floor just at the back of the shop, where Ada did the washing and ran it through the mangle. When I was very small, he presented me with the most glorious dolls house that he had made. It had a front that slid off revealing a two-up, two down complete with knitted dolls made by Ada.

For my seventh birthday I was lucky enough to choose a rabbit. A black and white Dutch buck who we called Crawford as he came home in a cardboard box bearing the biscuit makers’ brand. When we got him home there was a huge green double storey hutch in the garden which had been made by George. It was exceptional, and Crawford couldn’t have wanted for a better home.

Around eighteen months later, I was back in Liverpool. The mood was solemn, and I remember Ada explaining to me that my Mum and Dad needed to spend some time together talking. I had, by this point, realised my parents were getting a divorce and I was incredibly sad. My grandfather was also sad, but I think he knew that I knew. My grandparents never had much money, and I would never ask them for anything. On this occasion though I remember being in the newsagents on Queen’s Drive and they had some pocket-sized teddy bears hanging up. He could see one had caught my eye and he bought me this little sandy coloured bear. That gesture at that time meant the world to me and it is something that I will never forget.

My grandparents were never particularly demonstrative. They were not big huggers and kissers, but I felt their love. I often think about them and their world. I feel now, as a 53-year-old Gen X-er, that I am stood straddled between family that have never known each other. My daughter is named after both of her great grandmothers who she never met. I am Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man with arms and legs outstretched touching base with different eras and generations. Their stories rippling around me. So many stories untold. Many secrets.

I never thought I would feel the generation gap, but I can see the void widening before me as I walk down the street. The Kardashian premise of beauty, music that sounds as soulless as an out-of-town shopping centre on a Saturday afternoon, most television. I want to remain interested, and I am still curious, but I guess part of the process of ageing is that there are somethings you naturally discard.

I wonder what George would make of the world. At 14, my daughter’s age now he left school and went to the juvenile employment office.

They sent me to Mount Pleasant to Madame Moody’s. I discovered that it was a firm specialising in cleaning Ostrich feathers for customer’s hats. I was the only male in the factory and most of the girls were 16 or 17. They each had a desk in front of them that was full of white Borax powder. They pushed their hands through the holes in the desk and shook the feathers in a thick cloud of white dust to clean them.

My job was to bring the feathers to them from the rear stock room and to keep them supplied with white powder. Every time I contacted them, I was asked a question in a whisper. By the time it came to lunch there was not much about me and my family and future that they did not know. I went out for my dinner, and never came back.

He knew he was going to war. He was even preparing for it by the time he was 15, leaving his apprenticeship to earn more money for the family. He was just 17 when he signed up to the Royal Navy Reserves to support King and country in the First World War. I am lucky to have his notes that he wrote, probably on the bureau in the spare room, in 1976. He looks back at a time we don’t know and shares details we may no longer recognise. A time where Blacksmiths shoed horses and bosses gave turkeys to families at Christmas. This is not Dickens but the memories of a special man who like too many others had their youth stolen from them.

I’m sharing some extracts here about his life during the First World War. George was stationed at Crystal Palace in London then named HM Victory V1 where he underwent training with thousands of men who slept in hammocks and he was in constant search for free meals, due to the diabolical food served on site. He knew which church halls served tea and cakes.

One night we went to see Brewster’s Millions at the Shaftesbury Theatre and another night at the Whitehall Theatre where Ralf Lynn and Tom Wallis were appearing in The Farces. When I look back at those four months it was a tremendous experience. Every journey to Euston from Lime Street station was full of men on their way back to France. Most of them had had more to drink than usual to enable them to say cheerio to their loved ones, knowing full well that the chances of seeing them again were well below 50%.

He passed his wireless tests and was posted to a naval base in Larne in Northern Ireland.

Life on a RN ship was a new experience; one of the differences was the meal. It was the best I had had since joining up. Basins were used instead of cups and the first dinner I was served included a basin with a brown fluid, which I thought was gravy, and poured it over my dinner to the astonishment of my mates. As I was teetotal, I hadn’t recognized the rum ration.

The army was struggling to recruit radio operators, so George was one of 25 men who were urgently transferred into the 16^th Brigade Royal Horse Artillery a mobile unit. He swapped his bellbottoms for puttees and had to lug a lot of kit across to France, discarding it on his journey as it became too much to carry in the heat. His uniform was a mismatch as he had been kitted out for the navy and had to appropriate what he could. The 16^th Brigade RHA had the smallest guns in the army and were all horse drawn. He was stationed near the Somme.

At 4am the following morning we were all up and had breakfast (I can still smell the piece of fried bread). Right on the dot the barrage started, the greatest so far and the colours in the dark morning sky were as impressive as the sounds. We were not far from the village of Cléry.

When the barrage ceased and we were waiting for orders the first prisoners began to trickle in and they were obviously in a bad way, some wounded, some stunned by the shelling. There was a casualty clearing station alongside us and they were not short of work. We heard that our infantry was held up by some machine gun positions that covered the surrounding terrain.

Within their sights we were issued with our rations, and I had noticed that the prisoners were sorted out and those that appeared fit were ordered back to no mans’ land to help those needing assistance. Many regarded one young white-faced man as a joke because he had fastened his haversack to the two buttons on the tail of his tunic. I called him between two vehicles and gave him a drink of tea and a piece of bread. When he had done three or four return journeys and I had managed another drop of tea for him the time arrived for him and those who were similarly placed to be passed further back to a prisoners’ cage. When he realized it was all over for him, he slipped out of the crowd unbuckled his belt and gave me his pliers and the frog that they filled, with a handshake and a smile.

I was feeling sickly myself and looked for the remains of a trench to answer the call of nature. I was in the sitting position isolated and relieved when a shell burst some distance away, almost at once I heard a whine and felt something hit the earth between my knees. It was a jagged red-hot piece of steel about five inches long. Had it been two inches in any other direction, I should not be here to tell this tale.

Later that day I came across a young German who I was sure was no more than 16 years old, who had died reading a German New Testament.

Thank you for reading.

George Blackburn my grandfather