Goosegogs And The Gun

 

 

He stood head and shoulders above everyone, dwarfing his team mates in the works cricket team photo hanging proudly in his hallway, his huge protruding ears earning him the nickname 'potato man'. He told beguiling stories and gentle, self deprecating jokes and when I was fourteen, he suddenly fell ill and I was devastated.

 

His name was Tom Emery and he was my maternal grandfather and because he stood six feet five inches tall we called him big grandad; and I adored him. He was the life and soul of every occasion and he sang with a deeply rich and resonant baritone voice, especially in the Crown and Anchor every Friday night. This was his one selfish pleasure at the end of each working week, his reward for five days of hard graft in the railway workshops producing the greatest steam engines of the twentieth century. Three pints of mild and a sing-us a-song-Tom session for him, and a pint of Guinness for Scamp, his gorgeously shaggy Old English Sheep dog. Scamp went everywhere with grandad, apart from work and the bathroom, and only then because, 'grandma pulled a face.'

 

He was a skilled craftsman at The Plant, apprentice trained in an occupation known as a brass finisher. He made the whistles, gauges, name plates, valves and everything brass found on legendary locomotives like the Mallard, Sir Nigel Gresley and the Flying Scotsman. This was a role that required not just engineering talent, but an eye for artistic proportion. Grandad had both in spades.

 

He was born in the year nineteen hundred and took up his apprenticeship at age fourteen. I have one of his photographs to this day, of him with his fellow apprentice boys in their long aprons and flat caps, glowing with pride, expectation and mischief, completely unaware of what was about to happen to the world and their role in it. Apprenticeships lasted for seven years and covered every aspect of the many complex engineering skills required to produce those magnificent leviathans.

 

Two years into his apprenticeship and now half way through WWI, Germany was under naval blockade and their navy penned into their Baltic bases, with access to the Atlantic denied by the Royal Navy. Desperate to break out, the two great navies faced each other off the coast of Denmark, in what became known as The Battle of Jutland and spent two days in intense combat. Ships were sunk and seriously damaged and nine thousand personnel killed in action, with both sides ultimately claiming victory. The German navy were forced back and never attempted to break out again for the duration of the war.

 

Several damaged Royal Navy warships limped home for repair and one in particular was to change grandad's life dramatically. HMS Chester, a light cruiser, had sustained damage to its deck and its guns and was the ship on which sixteen year old boy sailor Jack Cornwell had been awarded the Victoria Cross for manning his post while seriously wounded, when the rest of his gun crew had been killed. The ship was eventually berthed in Liverpool and grandad and many of his young apprentice friends were sent there from The Plant, as part of the war effort, to provide the desperately required skills to repair and refit.

 

During his time there, grandad worked with a team repairing the deck gun that  young Jack Cornwell had manned with such bravery during the battle, and in doing so, became very familiar with its dimensions and functioning parts. He eventually returned home, a much wiser and more experienced young man and he brought with him the drawings of the deck gun that he'd worked on and indelible first hand impressions of Jack Cornwell's bravery. The young sailor had sustained eighteen shrapnel wounds and died shortly after his ship arrived back in port. He and grandad were the same age.

 

It came as no surprise then, that when having to choose a subject for his apprentice piece at the culmination of his indenture, grandad made a working model, in solid brass, of the very gun he'd worked on in Liverpool, the shattered deck gun on HMS Chester. He built a working model, with the capacity to fire live ammunition and proved his ability by demonstrating the gun's prowess in the kitchen of his newly acquired first home, shortly after he and grandma married. Apparently, he'd procured a 303 calibre rifle round from somewhere and loaded it into the gun to see of it would fit. It did, and when he accidentally set off the firing mechanism they ended up with a hole in the kitchen ceiling that became local legend. I am pleased to say that more than a hundred years later, I have the gun sitting proudly in my home today. Handsome, accomplished, impressive and minus a firing pin.

 

My most endearing memories of grandad were in his shed at the bottom of the garden. It was his domain, his man shed, his sanctuary. It seemed to house at least one or more of every useful thing known to man and I had no idea what most of them were. But it didn't matter what they were, or whether I knew or not, they were grandad's and he knew, so that was good enough for me. And it smelled of nothing I'd ever known before. Of engineers' oils and sweated overalls and soil and creosote and Empire St Julien and honest endeavour. Of potted new life and sawdust, Blanco and joyous freedom from the daily grind.

 

He took a pride in growing soft fruits in his garden and in particular, gooseberries. They were huge and green and weirdly luminous in the sunshine and had veins like old people and they scared me. They were aliens and bizarrely hairy and made no sense whatsoever, but I slowly came to terms with them because grandad grew them, so that meant they made sense to him. There were two dear memories of grandad's life which defined him in my eyes: his wonderful hole-in-the-kitchen-ceiling brass gun and his weird friends, the scary goosegogs.

 

At Christmas family gatherings, when presents had been opened and lunch devoured, port and lemon fuelled card games took possession of the afternoon, with Newmarket being favourite. Grandad always took centre stage, dealing out the cards with a humorous quip accompanying every card and running commentary on every play. His energy fired us all and his amusingly baffling sayings as he dropped winning hands onto the table kept us amused and forever baffled. Tickled her end and away she went, he would say; and we never failed to laugh. And then he would sing to us, launching into song seamlessly from the end of spoken sentences. Emotional, resonant and meaningful in such a way that it became another form of language, mesmerising and connective.

 

And then, when least expected, he fell ill and his years at The Plant came to an end. Gone were the days of him arriving home in blue overalls wreaking of Eau d' Endeavour and sitting down to meat, potatoes and two veg, followed by steamed treacle pudding. He now spent his days sitting by the fire and slowly turning into someone that frightened me; smaller and paler. An imposter pretending to be grandad, breathing heavily and coughing up lumps into squares of cut up newspaper stacked on the table beside him. He twisted them into little pockets and they sizzled when he threw them into the fire. I would sit with him for an hour, during long Winter evenings and we talked Len Hutton and Cyril Washbrook and Alec Bedser and googlies and chinamen.

 

He read, in the local paper, of a benefit cricket match taking place for the great  Yorkshire and England left arm spin bowler, Johnny Wardle and he gave me five bob to get there and watch the match. I remember catching the bus for the six mile journey to the ground and, after paying entry, spending the balance of the money on hot dogs, dandelion and burdock and chocolate. The long walk home was forever a salutary lesson in forward planning and gluttony.

 

I don't remember a great deal about his death, because I think I must have buried it somewhere, ensuring that I would never come across it again. I was in my early teens at the time and I have no memory of a funeral, probably because I was never invited. It wasn't the done thing at the time. Funerals were for adults only. All I remember is them saying that his heart had grown the size of a football, so I looked it up and it was called cardiomegaly. It was an alien and meaningless word and in my mind had no relevance to my grandad whatsoever. He was loving and funny and gifted and head and shoulders above us and that's exactly how I think of him to this day.