Where Did It All Go Right?

by Andrew Collins

  Unfortunately Nan was in hospital when Simon was born in 1967, and as such she never really bonded with him as a baby in the way she had with me, or so Mum reckons. Perhaps Nan was unconsciously bitter that the new baby took up so much of Mum’s time when she was unwell. Either way, it led to a more remote relationship with Simon as he grew up. Again, can’t be helped. Circumstance.

  But the fact remains: blatant and immovable favouritism held sway in the court of Collins. Nan and Pap made no secret of the fact that I was the anointed one in their eyes. It started out harmlessly enough – buying me my first watch, taking me to Blackpool – but ended in black farce, with Nan ‘whittling’ to all and sundry about me living down in perilous London, while all along Simon was on patrol with his unit in Northern Ireland, many years before the ceasefire, something that didn’t seem to concern her. (I won’t implicate Pap in this – he wasn’t the whittler.)

  As the Pet Shop Boys pointedly asked: what had I done to deserve this?

  * * *

  I was lucky enough to have all four grandparents around while I was growing up, and although I didn’t appreciate them as people until I was out of my teens (which kid does?), I enjoyed their presence throughout my early years, and not just because they bought me comics, although that was a factor.

  It was Dad’s parents who got to be called Nan and Pap Collins, family name and all that, but in a way Nan Mabel and Pap Reg were the lucky ones: they got to be identified by their given names. More personal, they were Mabel and Reg. The other Nan and Pap weren’t Bill and Win, not to us. However, here’s a bombshell: when we were younger, we preferred Nan and Pap Collins to Nan Mabel and Pap Reg.

  I am filled with the deepest remorse at the memory of this defining incident, but here it is. It happened on the doorstep at Winsford Way back in the days when the estate was still a building site. Mum and Dad were taking Simon and me to Nanny and Pappy’s (to use the juvenile). Simon asked which Nanny and Pappy. They told him: Nanny and Pappy Collins. He asked which ones they were. I told him:

  ‘The nice Nanny and Pappy.’

  Clang! Mum soon put me right on my faux pas. Both Nannys and Pappys were nice. And of course she was right – they were – it was just that Nan and Pap Collins were more obviously nice: rounder, sillier, less tidy, more chaotic, and they had pets: a sweet little dog called Sally, replaced by Butch, who we think was abused by its previous owner as he hid whenever he heard the swoosh of a golf club on telly.4 Nan and Pap Collins lived in a late Victorian terraced house, slightly worn and jerry-built (Pap had literally fashioned his own lean-to ‘extension’ out of wood and corrugated plastic sheeting). This was a fun place, full of stuff, with a musty, scary cellar where Pap made ramshackle things and effected make-do repairs. Once, on Play Away, they showed you how to make a dynamic-looking bouncing marble track out of jam jars with old pieces of balloon stretched over them. Pap Collins had made one for us the very next day.

  Now it’s not that Pap Reg couldn’t make us toys, just that he wouldn’t, and didn’t, repressed perhaps by the iron rule of Nan Mabel.5 He had been a tool-maker by trade, don’t forget, and his first ever job, aged 14, was producing and assembling parts for model trains at Wintringhams, but at Lovat Drive he had no cellar full of junk like jam jars and old balloons.

  Nan and Pap Collins did not whittle. Their house at Adnitt Road was clean but not fussy like Lovat Drive (blimey, even the street names spoke volumes: one hard and bruiserish, the other fragrant and idyllic). Both sets of grandparents were of stout, working-class stock, but only Mabel and Reg had gone up in the world, with Pap’s union job. Pap Reg drove, he had vehicular independence and they took themselves on holiday to Wales, Exmoor and Minehead (they even flew to Jersey and Canada). Nan and Pap C went on holiday by coach to the Isle of Wight and Bournemouth, or else Dad drove them.6

  The house at Lovat Drive, a trim 1939 bungalow, had a front and back garden, with a hedge and a wall and a garden path and a side entrance. The front window at Adnitt Road looked out on to the street and the back garden was more of a yard. Guess what – we played in the back yard, we rarely went into the back garden. Pap C, true to form, even made us a slide from scratch.

  This is not to say we didn’t enjoy going to Lovat Drive. We did. Nan and Pap kept some really nice Dinky toys there for us, and of course, they were first in the family to get a colour television! It just wasn’t a place where much matter was displaced.

  Nan Mabel could be uptight, Nan Collins seemed to have a constant smile on her face (what a great dinner lady she must have made), and she would greet us all like homecoming heroes the minute we stepped through the door. Nan Mabel would be worrying that we were ‘bringing dirt in’. Symbolically, the front door at Adnitt Road was always open (until Dad subsequently convinced them that they should probably lock it).

  So, even though it was sinful to describe one set of grandparents as the nice Nanny and Pappy, their open-door policy said something inviting about their world. Nan and Pap Collins had lots of seven-inch records, things like ‘Little White Bull’, ‘March of the Mods’ and ‘The Laughing Gnome’, and what’s more, we were allowed to ‘put them on fast’ by switching the dansette to 78 rpm. To be at Adnitt Road was very heaven.

  So why did I spend a lot more time at Lovat Drive?

  ‘I came to Nanny’s house to sleep’ is a recurring phrase in my diaries. It was a tradition: I would go to Nan Mabel and Pap Reg’s house, on my own, and sleep over, usually for two nights in a row, creating a mini-break. In effect, I would get to be an only child for a couple of days, see what Dean’s life was like. It was a fact of my life: come the school holidays, I would be packed off to Lovat Drive, where, among other things, I would be allowed to stay up late and was usually bought a gift of some nature, an Action Transfer or later an Airfix model. It was a hermetically sealed little world. No harm would come to me here, no siblings would encroach upon my limelight, and the chances are, one of Nan’s jolly neighbours like Mrs Brinclow or Mrs Hanson would come to visit and tell me how good my drawings were.

  In February 1973 (half-term), I stayed with Nan and Pap for three days and I was allowed to stay up till 9.00, aged seven, to see Bless This House. In 1974, I note that I ‘came to Nanny’s house to sleep’ twice in one month, for the weekend 8–10 February (during term-time!), and from Sunday to Tuesday, 24–26 (half-term). ‘I stayed up till 9 o’clock,’ says the entry for the 25th, ‘and played cards with Pappy.’ It’ll have been Rummy or Draw the Well Dry, and a sip of tonic will have been involved.

  Pap Reg gave me my first-ever taste of beer. He called it tonic, and I liked that. Didn’t like the beer, but I took it anyway, perhaps aware that it was a rite of passage. In the summer, Nan and Pap would invariably drive me out to a pub, and we would sit in the garden and I’d have a bottle of Coke with a straw in and a packet of crisps. At a time when neither Coke nor crisps were the kind of thing you had in the house, this was a rollercoaster ride of extra-curricular pleasure.

  In April 1974 I was back again (this time at the Easter holidays), doing ‘some Spirographing’ on Sunday, visiting Oakley Garden Centre on Monday, and coming home on Tuesday. Dean would often come up to Nanny’s too, although he rarely stayed overnight. You’d think Lovat Drive was miles away from home – but it’s only the other side of the town centre. Ten minutes by car.

  In July ’75 I came down for a record five days during the school holidays: Lego, yogurts, Rummy, two Cokes at a pub, and staying up till 9.30 to watch The Squirrels.7

  This was not a case of my own parents trying to get rid of me – I’d long since stopped being the little sod – though I expect they were happy enough to have one less mouth to feed for a couple of days. No, the Lovat Drive arrangement seems to have become routine because it suited Nan and Pap and it suited me. On the face of it, Simon seemed to benefit too – after all, no Andrew meant more attention for him from Mum and Dad. Knowing that I would inevitably be spoiled while I was away, they spoiled Simon in return (to a sensibl
e degree, of course). For instance in August 1973, when I got back from a four-day stay he’d been allowed to start collecting football stickers in my absence. He nearly had the page of Arsenal already. He was still bitter of course (not that he expressed it at the time), partly because he couldn’t understand it.

  I was a Nanny’s boy. Since Pap would be at work if I went there on weekdays, it was Nan who had the lion’s share of me. Even if she was pottering in the kitchen making treacle tart and listening to Jimmy Young (‘What’s the recipe today, Jim?’) she still had me about the place, like a surrogate son I suppose, a surrogate angel. Don’t all grandparents subconsciously treat their grandchildren as their own? It would make sense. All the advantages of being a parent again, without the hassle or the commitment or going up the school.

  I was happy: if it meant missing my friends for a couple of days, at least I got lots of drawing done at the little fold-out table in the living room (I considered it my table, just as the spare bedroom was my bedroom). Here at Lovat Drive was a bit of peace and quiet, something you don’t usually appreciate as a kid, but I soon learned to. There was plenty of time to go down the field and ride my bike when I got back to Mum and Dad’s. I think being packed off to Nanny’s was a sophisticating influence on me. When we weren’t playing Scrabble (they had the Deluxe), we watched grown-up telly like Columbo, Kes and – a strangely ultra-vivid memory, this – The Shoes of the Fisherman (a 1968 epic starring Anthony Quinn as a Russian bishop who becomes Pope, which taught me about the white smoke).

  I bonded with Nan over mid-afternoon telly like Houseparty,8 and with Pap over the strawberry nets at the allotment. I was their pidge. They even took me away for long weekends to Blackpool, easily the most glamorous place on earth, where we stayed in a hotel (years before Jersey). We rode on a tram, thrilled to the illuminations, went up the Tower and saw Mike Yarwood and Freddie Starr live. I ate my first toffee apple in Blackpool (and promptly threw it all up again). It was like a filmed montage designed to convey fun, leisure and abandon.

  So it was a win–win situation – at the time. I only became self-conscious about the bare-faced injustice of it all vis-à-vis Simon when I grew up a bit and stopped going down Nanny’s. How they must have hated that day, when I was suddenly too grown-up to want to go down Lovat Drive any more – when I didn’t ‘lovat’ any more. The day my voice broke. That was the day they had to wave parenthood goodbye for ever and accept mortality’s fate.

  The ritual continued through 1976 (a four-day stay in August: ‘Pap got me a load of paper, a Whoopee and three Tempos’; three days in October: ‘I had four fresh cream chocolate éclairs today’), 1977 (February: ‘Had chocolate éclairs for tea’; August: ‘I helped Pap do the potatoes’) and 1978 (January: ‘Nan, Pap, Mrs Hanson and I went up Harlestone Furs for a blow’;9 August: ‘We watched Out,10 it was magic’). But in 1979, it was suddenly and without ceremony all over. My age – 14, a funny age – had caught up with me, and the allure of cards, Columbo and tonic ran out, superseded by punk rock, girls and hanging round the shops.

  Without any of us realising it (although Nan and Pap must have sensed it coming), the Sunday to Tuesday I spent at Lovat Drive in August ’79 was my last ever stopover. It had it all: trifle, a visit by Dean, a trip to Auntie Jean’s, Moving Target,11 and Litchborough Garden Centre. But that was it. Goodnight, Nan, goodnight, Pap. They were my own personal grandparents no longer, their privileges were taken away, no more access, no more weekends. I was off to chat up Cindy Offord, listen to The Ruts and get hot under the collar when Sarah Brightman and Hot Gossip came on The Kenny Everett Video Show.

  It was a difficult time, especially for Nan. I started to wear my hair spiky, a very real cause for concern. I still visited Lovat Drive, but only with the rest of the family, and like any teenage Kevin, I could think of about twenty places I’d rather be than at my grandparents’ house. Boo-oring.

  * * *

  Where had the nice Nanny and Pappy been all this time? (Talking of whom, it’s clear to me now that I innocently distinguished them as nice because it’s Simon who wanted to know – to him, they probably were the nice ones.) Well, even though we never once slept over at Adnitt Road, we were there without fail every Wednesday during the school holidays for dinner and tea and a walk in the park – more ritual, more institution. Though of course I had to share Nan and Pap C with Simon and Melissa, and share we did. No dangerous favouritism here. A comic for one, a comic for all.

  Was it dangerous though? In the final analysis, did the routine act of spoiling me actually spoil me? (As in: you’ll spoil your dinner.) I think not. It drove no wedge between my brother and me – we were great mates through it all, even though he admitted to me recently that it did trouble him as a child. It didn’t turn me into a little public schoolboy, demanding a hand of Rummy and a glass of beer at all hours and greeting every parental injustice with a snivelling cry of, ‘Well, Nanny lets me!’ In fact, my regular disappearances seemed to help maintain the equilibrium of the Collins household. No lasting harm was done. Not even the two Blackpool mini-breaks in ’73 and ’75 – on both occasions much play was made of buying everybody presents while I was on the Golden Mile (soldiers for Simon, a book for Melissa, a flower holder for Mum).

  My special relationship may have pushed Pap C and Simon closer together (what use did he have for a Pap who watched the war go by from a factory in Jimmy’s End?). But they were old combat-buddies to start with. Pap C saw some of himself in Simon.

  Nan Mabel and Pap Reg saw some of Brian in me. Uncle Brian was the proverbial apple of their eye, the eldest and their only son (Mum and Auntie Janice used to have to share a bed as kids, while Brian had his own room – the room I would eventually come to think of as mine). It was a hard day for them when Brian finally got married and left home. Though older than Mum and Janice, he was the last to fly the nest; he had been a resident of Lovat Drive for 30 years. He also worked within walking distance at the Express Lifts factory as a draughtsman and he would still pop back to Nan’s for lunch when he was married. The force was strong in this one, and he clearly left a big hole, particularly for Nan. I was a substitute Brian.

  It all makes sense, as these things invariably do. Philip Larkin advised to ‘get out as early as you can’ in ‘This Be the Verse’, but Brian obviously never read it. He did it in his own time.

  I ‘got out’ of Nan and Pap’s at exactly the right time. Our relationship never really soured, even during punk. Nan would whittle about my appearance, especially when I discovered hair dye at 16, but I remained her favourite to the end, and Pap and I belatedly bonded over our socialist ideals, his deep-seated, mine ‘discovered’ at college. We were very much isolated within the family, but that made the bond stronger.

  I carried on making birthday cards for the both of them right through college, because to have stopped would have been taken as a snub. (I was under no pressure to make cards for the nice Nanny and Pappy, although I drew them a cracking caricature for their golden wedding which I hope compensated.)

  I’ll be honest, some of these cards I made for Nan M and Pap R are pretty good. They are surprisingly satirical, many of them gently taking this piss out of Nan’s ways. After some impersonal early efforts, with Top Cat (‘love from Andrew, Boss Cat, Spook, Fancy, Brain, Choo Choo and Benny and Officer Dibble’), Monster Fun influenced spooks and Peanuts characters on them, they begin to feature cartoons of Nan and Pap themselves. For instance, on the occasion of Pap’s 60th birthday I have pictured him addressing a union meeting; ‘What do we vote, brothers?’ he is asking the assembled flat-capped ‘workers’. Open the card and he is being blown off his platform by their response: ‘We vote that we wish a happy 60th to Brother Reg!!’

  The Christmas card for 1979 lampoons Nan’s recurring fantasy about me being a choirboy. In the drawing, spiky-topped, I am singing from a book marked ‘Punk Hymns by S. Vicious’. Inside there’s a PS under the greeting: ‘Don’t forget to show this card to Mrs Brinclow and Mr a
nd Mrs Burt and all the girls at Guild and all at Lovat Drive.’ A cheeky reference to Nan’s tendency to show me off which became postmodern when, presumably, she showed it to Mrs Brinclow and Mr and Mrs Burt and all the girls at Guild. (Perhaps she never did!)

  In 1981 I have combined Nan’s 60th and Pap’s retirement into one huge card – with a poem for each occasion (what am I, the Poet Laureate now?). In Nan’s half there’s a Marks & Spencer gag (‘I hope you like this card – you can’t take it back!!’), and in Pap’s it’s more union laughs (‘Now Brother Ward/Will never get bored/If you want to see Reg/He’ll be cultivating veg’). I have by now turned them both into serviceable cartoon characters. They were flattered of course, and despite her reputation for being highly strung, Nan took all this ragging in good spirit. The same year’s Christmas card sees the pair of them snowbound, inching along in Pap’s car with Nan giving it the full whittle: ‘Ooooh, Reg. Careful. Watch this bit. Oooh-er. There’s no salt on this road. I’m all worked up. Watch it, Reg. Be careful!! Slow down a bit. Not so fast. I shall get no sleep tonight. We’re late, Reg. We’re missing Blankety Blank, Reg.’

  What fun we had at Nan’s expense. By 1982’s birthday card I am mocking her neuroses relentlessly, comparing myself (‘the arty one’) with Simon (‘the army one’). In cartoon form we stand side by side, me with my henna, drumsticks and rolled-up jeans, Simon in cadet uniform and ‘smart regulation haircut’, saluting if you please. ‘In a few years,’ runs the legend beneath my likeness, ‘when he’s a star you’ll be proud of him.’ Under Simon it reads: ‘In a few years when he’s an officer you’ll be proud of him. What more could you want?’

  It borders on the tragic, this card. Simon and I have both signed it (‘from your two lovable grandchildren’), and yet of course, it’s all my own handiwork, so I was in line for all the praise anyway. There’s so much hope and optimism in this card – not that I would be a ‘star’ (doing what?) or that he would be an officer, but that Nan Mabel would be equally interested in our fates. I’m desperately trying to make her proud of my brother, pushing his very real achievements like a PR. It would all be for naught.