Here, I’ll explore the next generation of my family, the kids of Big Nan and Big Grandad. In particular the people who had a pretty big influence on my dad, and by proxy, on me.
Big Nan and Big Grandad had four sons and a daughter, all of whom ended up leading very different lives. These are my great uncles and my Little Nan. The eldest, Paul, was in a Mersey Beat band in the sixties and has his band’s name on the wall of fame on Matthew Street. He ended up moving to France to become a well-known local radio DJ, where he met his wife, the love of his life. He moved back to Liverpool after many years in France. He was an alcoholic and wanted to try and sort his head out, get better, give himself a chance of living longer with his COPD – a pulmonary disorder that inevitably finishes you off at some point if you don’t stop smoking. It didn’t happen. Everybody desperately tried to help, most especially his wife. Even after he developed emphysema he continued to smoke and drink. I remember him always on the cadge for a spare ciggy or a couple of quid. He had the gift of the gab. He was a blagger, but the person he blagged the most was himself. He died too young, breathless and grey in the Royal Liverpool Hospital, surrounded by his family.
Little Nan is the second eldest, my dad’s mum. But more about her in the next post
The third eldest, George, is the great-uncle I know the least about. This is partly due to somewhat of a distance from the family as he got older, though he seems to have led a relatively normal life. He has a long term wife, grown children and grandchildren who make a loving family unit.
The fourth eldest, John, joined the Irish Guard, and served tea to the Queen Mother once. He tells the story of how the Queen Mother asked him to pour her tea whilst he was on guard, and at first he refused because they were not orders from his superior. On the second time of her asking he did pour her tea, and got a bollocking later for not pouring it the first time she asked as the Queen Mother apparently outranked his direct superior. He now lives in the countryside with his wife and children. He wears a Barbour coat and a farmer’s cap. He has a no-nonsense approach to life and language. John will tell you what he thinks in as few words as possible. His wife, Joan, is a breast cancer survivor. They’ve had to adopt their own grandchildren due to their daughter’s drug addiction and chaotic behaviour, which was stressful and traumatic for everyone involved, especially the kids.
And last but not least it Robert. Robert is the youngest of Big Nan and Big Grandad’s five children, and probably the most like his dad – aka Tommy the Safe. Robert made his living as a criminal. My dad has told me stories of boxes full of brand new leather boots, sheep skin coats, and electrical goods stacked in the rooms of dad’s childhood homes. Respected on the streets as Robert was, he had quite the impact on my dad.
Robert made a name for himself as a hard, savvy, professional criminal. He was sentenced to thirteen years jail in the 1980s for armed robbery. It wasn’t his first armed robbery, but it was the one he didn’t get away with. The place he held up, with a shotgun, was the fruit market on Edge Lane. It’s still there today. Robert and his associates waited until the end of the week when they knew the takings would be at their highest, and went in to grab them before they were banked. He served nine years of his sentence.
When he came home, Little Nan put specially made banners up in her pub. It was a big event. It was like the homecoming of some mythical character. Odysseus comes home to Ithaca, a changed man. He has been on his night sea journey, battled a giant, resisted the sweet music of the sirens, lived with a goddess. See how much he has changed, the strength he has gathered from his trials. Robert’s return wasn’t like that. His journey had changed him, but not for the better. The years in prison had turned him to drugs, which would be his Nemesis. There was no reformed character, only a person who had suffered nearly a decade behind bars, locked away from anything he ever really cared about.
Robert had a friend, Gav. Gav was a milkman. That isn’t some criminal code word for a get-away driver, or torturer or something. He was actually a straight forward, up and out at 4am milkman. Gav went to visit Robert in prison regularly, without fail, for nine years. Gav once drove me, my little brother Anthony, and my dad to see Robert in a countryside prison. It was a long drive for a fidgety kid like me. And the car was small. Affordable cars in the nineties were bad. When you see the cars we have now, it makes the cars of past decades seem like experiments in minimal comfort.
Prison visits are awkward. You’re going into a place which is normally painted a neutral, non-stimulant colour; beige, grey, cream. And there’s this person who you just want to go and have a drink with or take home. There’s all these other people around too, doing the same thing. Cheap plastic tables and chairs are planted around on a floor made of hard-wearing carpet tiles. Locked steel gates. Big metal doors that have little thick windows in them. Prison guards, who you hate and fear with an equal gut instinct, scrutinise any move in case it’s used to slip something to a prisoner.
In a prison visiting room there are mothers with new babies seeing fathers who can feel nothing but guilt, the sexual frustration of young lovers unable to touch, the hidden truths, the concealed emotions, the forced conversations.
Going to see Robert in prison was similar to visiting my mum in her mental hospitals. Or the visits my brothers and I would have with her when she’d be driven the four-hour journey to Liverpool from Kings Lynn just to spend a few hours with us, before she was driven back to the hospital again. We’d go to McDonalds, under the supervision of two mental health nurses she had with her, and were told we could order whatever we wanted. The McDonalds visits were just as plastic and dismal as any prison visit. These raw, private and desperate moments of connection between people who loved and cared for each other would shape my early emotional landscape.
It was weird to me that I was going to see someone I had only ever heard stories about. But as great as those stories were, or at least they felt like stories about a great man, there he was locked up like an animal. It was a poor end for this legend of the family. I watched him and I noticed how he didn’t look great at that moment. He could only look at the green and pleasant land that surrounded the prison through the dirty windows of the concrete complex he was locked up in.
At that point Robert had been in prison for about six years, and Elly, the mother of Robert’s two children, had started seeing somebody else. We all knew. Everyone on the outside knew, but Robert didn’t. Gav and my dad had been talking about this on the drive there. Gav was strongly considering telling Robert about it.
Not long after we’d sat down with uncle Robert and said our hellos, my brother Anthony, who was around six, blurted out, ‘Auntie Elly’s seeing someone else, you know.’ I think he thought he was doing everyone a favour. Me and Anthony were told to go to the naffy (tuck shop) to buy some hot chocolate and biscuits while Gav explained things to Robert.
After Robert got out of jail he went back to a life of crime. He would snatch cash boxes from security guards picking up money in their white armoured vans. He also had his fingers in other pies. The tops of the cupboards in Big Grandad’s bungalow were stacked with boxes of Valium. I was about fifteen at the time and I’d been smoking weed for over a year. I wondered what it was like to take one and came close to pocketing a box or two, but never did.
By this time Robert was smoking crack, and probably heroin, something he’d never done before he went to prison. I should have known there was something wrong with his head when I was sitting in Big Grandad’s shed using nail varnish remover to get rid of red dye from hundreds of twenty-pound notes. It didn’t work very well as it tarnished the little hologram, but he insisted I keep at it and salvage what I could.
He got caught when one of the guards he was robbing managed to grab the baseball cap he had on. They got his DNA from it, and he served another eight years in prison.
Just another aging, traumatised millennial. Exploring trauma, mental health, addiction and "recovery" through the voice of lived experience.
Bad Glue for Broken Bones 
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