Lockdown Day 4: Thursday March 26th, 2020
Next?
Grandpa – emphysema.
I was seven by then. He was bedridden as long as I could remember, wreathed in a constant Capstan full-strength fog, assuring the doctor on his frequent visits that he’d really, really given up smoking this time despite the dead-give-away haze you could cut with a sgian dubh. He’d been smoking since he was a rickety, malnourished seven-year old in the slums of late 19th century Govan and was never, never in danger of quitting. Coughing and spitting and hacking up blood, guts and vile black bile all the time. It was not a pretty sight and I could never forgot that acrid tang of tarry blood. I could never get past it. Ashamed to say it but I hated visiting him because of that stench. I can still taste it in the back of my throat.
Now you know why I never smoked.
Don’t laugh, you know what I mean. Never smoked cigarettes.
Dad watched his father just rot away, unwilling to kick the habit that was leeching him away from family. But he couldn’t do anything to change his mind. Neither could granny, despite forty years of marriage or her steely suffragette determination.
All arguments evaporated as grandpa retched up the last of his life, till that story was ended by the mustard gas emphysema he’d first had in Flanders’ trenches fifty years before during the Great War.
Ironic. It was the emphysema that brought them together and the emphysema that tore them apart.
Grandpa was invalided out to the 2nd Western Hospital in Manchester to recover. There, when fit enough, he borrowed kit and took part in the hockey games that were part of the recuperation regime. Whether he was motivated by a desire to get well sooner or by the fact the games were with a local girls hockey club are forever now for the universe alone to know, but while he and granny met on opposing sides on a muddy field in Manchester they soon teamed up for life.
I sometimes wonder, which actually killed more of that generation over time, cigarettes or the Somme. You and I were both born around forty years after the end of the Great War, a decade and a half after the end of the Second, what do you think killed more people over that time – total warfare a la Von Clausewitz or their own bad habits? The Spanish flu certainly did for more folk than World War 1. Dad’s uncle Robert survived the carnage trenches only to die in the pandemic three weeks after discharge.
After registering grandpa’s death we took a drive along Govan road because Dad took a notion to see the streets grandpa grew up in. We lived across the Clyde on the north side of the river so he hadn’t been there for years. He told me how he had once come over to visit his grandmother when he was home on leave in the late 40s. Being so close to the shipyards, the Nazis had carpet-bombed the area during the war and the old slum tenements had finally died horrifically. Condemned as uninhabitable at the turn of the century they had readily surrendered as the rotted mortar gave up the ghost, collapsing as all structural integrity deserted. Dad was confronted by a Dali-esque landscape where all that stood among the rubbled desolation were tenement staircases. Forlorn and forsworn, troubled steps carried no promise of shelter, no entrance to long-gone parlours and cramped single-ends. Stairways to heaven or the devil’s descent, the battled field of stilted stairs climbed only now to undead secrets and misting memories, lost generations, torn families, faded friends and forgotten dreams.
We cut round the corner and there to Dad’s astonishment stood the tenement grandpa grew up in. Condemned in 1906 yet still home to a lively pack of yelps, skelps and whelps sixty years later, kicking a can around as Grandpa might have done at their age.
Glancing over at me Dad paused, threw down the Senior Service he was about to light up, and packed in smoking that moment to never touch them again.”