There's no way to describe my grandparents' immense gift for loving without including one of the main reasons for that surplus of love.
Both my grandmother's and my grandfather's families were systematically beaten, robbed, starved, and eventually, brutally murdered by the Ukrainian militia and the Nazi death squads during the Second World War. In the space of three years, parents, grandparents, brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, nieces and nephews, and cousins were murdered. All gone.
I would never have found the strength to carry on.
I would have died of grief at such a loss.
But they didn't.
Like unmilked cows, my maternal grandparents were so filled with love that they were almost bursting with it. And with nowhere upward or outward to spread that love, it rained down on us in floods. We were drenched in unconditional love at every opportunity. We could taste it in the food my grandmother prepared, and we could smell it in the geraniums that my grandfather grew in his garden. You could see the cloud of love floating above their heads.
You see, there was no past for my grandparents, only the future. And that future was us.
When I was a child, visiting grandparents was something we did every Sunday afternoon. One Sunday we would visit my father's parents, and the next one my mother's parents. My father's parents were like the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but in duplicate. This, coupled with my grandfather's 'spare the rod' mentality, my grandmother's obsessive Roman Catholicism, and the fact that they were both chain-smokers, made them every child's worst nightmare. They believed that children should 'mind their P's and Q's', and be 'seen and not heard' (preferably not seen either), so rain or shine, we were always banished to the back garden to 'play nicely' and 'not get into mischief'. A strange thing to say to children, because as we all know, in order to play nicely, getting into mischief is a fundamental requirement. They may as well have cut to the chase on our arrival, smacked us soundly, and sent us straight to 'the other room' (as they called their formal sitting room) to sit in silence and 'think about our behaviour', because this is what always happened. My father's cold and formal parents were the product of generations of emotional icebergs, even touching was something they found uncomfortable, and hugging was considered to be only one step from full intercourse. My father would briskly shake hands with his father on arrival, and once again on departure, whilst my mother hovered uncomfortably in the background wondering whether she was also going to be smacked for some imagined transgression. My pious grandmother had almost certainly written her off already as the genetically-damaged off-spring of immigrant Christ-killers, and probably foreign spies as well.
Sundays at my maternal grandparents could not have been any more different. My grandparents would be hovering anxiously at the front gate ready to pounce on my sister and me. We would then be hugged,kissed, cuddled, rubbed, stroked, and tickled until the skin on our faces was almost raw and our ribcages almost shattered. From there we were swept into the house on this tidal wave of love, where we could be studied and admired in greater depth.
'Look Daddy, he's a feet taller already, I can see him growing in front of my eye. Oy, you must have mustard in your shoes'.
'Have you seen this little chicken Mummy, she's turning into a real beauty. The boys will all be after her'. Little did he realise that, from the age of fourteen, the boys were already after my sister in droves. And although she had been fully exposed to the moral rantings of my father's family, she was still, at the end of the day, half Jewish and therefore not naturally athletic enough to outrun them.
During our visits, there would always be a fairly constant steam of physical contact. If we were within arms-reach of either of my grandparents, which in their small house was most of the time, we were either going to have our cheeks pinched by grandad, or a sweet popped in our mouths by nanny. My mother had grown up with this and was perfectly comfortable, but for my poor affection-starved father, it was his worst nightmare. All that kissing and touching sent him rushing, rain or shine, to the garden where he would smoke furiously and contemplate the horror that was taking place inside. Even to this day, I can't think what brought my parents together when they came from such different worlds.
My grandparents always called each other Mummy and Daddy and frequently kissed, not only us, but each other. The kisses they gave each were the sweet, non-sexual kisses of couples who, despite being together for years, still absolutely adore each other. And they did. Even right up to my grandfather's death several years ago, they just couldn't bear to be apart.
If there's one thing I remember from my grandparents, it was the feeling of being totally and utterly surrounded by love.
