The tinkerer
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My granddad on my mum's side was a man of many hidden talents. During the second world war, he was deployed as an army chef, and, for many years afterwards, he was an inspector at Alfred Herbert Ltd; then one of the world's largest machine tool manufacturers. By the time I knew him, he was already retired, but the echoes of his various talents were still dotted around the house. Throughout my childhood, for example, there was always an organ in the living room, and, after he died, I learned too that there had been a piano accordion hidden in the attic. I never saw him play either, though the musician in me wishes I had. My memories were of his enthusiasm for all things mechanical.
I remember him as a very quiet man. In all the time I knew him, I rarely heard him say more than a few words at a time, and it is his laughter I recall more easily than his voice. I knew him instead as a man of routine. He'd rise at the same time every day, go through his morning ablutions, then, eventually, arrive in the living room to take up his usual seat on the sofa, where he would remain for much of the day. My nan was a serial organiser of dances and indoor bowls events at the local community centre, and he'd regularly spend his afternoons there while she did her thing. Whether he had once been more active, I couldn't say. By the time I knew him, various ailments, along with series of heart attacks and strokes from his sixties onwards, had left him somewhat subdued. And yet a certain spark remained, given the right provocation.
As a child, I spent my summers at my grandparents' house while my parents were at work. In the absence of anything more interesting to do, I would often follow my nan around while she did whatever needed doing. From time to time, we would wander into the garage, where I would find all manner of weird and wonderful contraptions that she would then have to try and explain. My granddad, I discovered, was an avid tinkerer. Anything mechanical fascinated him. He had a passion for taking things apart to find out how they worked, before putting them back together. He was a collector of watches and mechanisms, and had a toolbox almost as large as the garage-spanning workbench it sat beneath. He was also a builder and inventor, in his own quiet way. I'd regularly find odd little contraptions, whose function and purpose baffled my childish mind, and which my nan wouldn't even try to explain. My favourite, and one that was easier to figure out, was a Ferris wheel that would turn under its own momentum thanks to a series of hanging weights around its circumference.
Perhaps my fondest memory, however, was on a day one summer that I took a set of Lego to their house to keep myself amused. The kit in question was a set that built either a JCB digger, or a combine harvester, complete with functioning pneumatics that—depending on the vehicle—would raise, lower or rotate its various working parts. I spent most of an afternoon disassembling one vehicle, and reassembling it as the other while he watched on in silent fascination. For reasons I can't recall, I left the room to talk to my nan and, when I returned, the kit in question was on a tray on his lap on the sofa, being deconstructed. What followed was perhaps the longest conversation I ever had with him about how it might be further improved. Here was a kit that, presumably, a team of talented engineers at Lego had put a great many months of work into designing and building to be the best it could be, while remaining suitable for anyone aged eight and above... and my granddad made an even better version with the same parts after about twenty minutes of tinkering.
It was my youngest cousin who reminded me of him today, on what would be the twentieth anniversary of his passing—at the time, just under four weeks after his eighty-third birthday. Sadly, she would never have known him, having been born a little over a year after he died, but I have no doubt that he would have adored her, in his own quiet way, the way he did the rest of us. It occurs to me that, despite him being around for at least the first sixteen years of my life, I perhaps didn't know this quiet individual all that well either. What memories I do have of him, however, are of a kind, smiling man, sat in his living room, thinking up ways to improve the world around him by tinkering with it. I like to think he'd be okay with that.