Some things are too important to leave unsaid

Emily,

It’s half past six and I’ve been up since five, which you’ll say is nothing new.

I’m writing this at the kitchen table, the one with the burn mark from your Easter cake. You were nine. You cried, then you laughed and ate the middle out of it with a spoon. That’s more or less how I’d like you to go about being married.

Your grandad proposed to me in a bus shelter on Leith Walk, in the pouring rain, because he couldn’t wait the two minutes till we got home. I said, “Are you daft?” before saying yes of course! He brought me a cup of tea in bed every Saturday for forty-one years. He never once got the milk right. And I never once told him.

So here’s the only advice I’ve got. Notice the small things, and say so. Don’t save them up.

You’ll be in the dress by now, with your mother fussing at your hair. Let her. She’s waited for this as long as I have.

I’d have been the one dancing too long to silly songs. Somebody has to. Have one for me, and make it a daft one.

And mind and eat something before the speeches.

Gran

Callum,

You’ll not remember much of me. You were four the summer we went to Loch Tummel. You ate only the crusts off your pieces then threw the middles to the ducks. You called them “the gentlemen”. Why? I’ve no idea!

So let me tell you who your grandad was, in case nobody’s said.

I was a joiner for forty-three years. I’ve a thumbnail that grew back squint and a bad knee from kneeling on other folk’s floors. I could never sing, but I sang anyway, mostly Kenneth McKellar and, by all accounts, usually badly.

At your age I thought I knew everything. I left the school at fifteen and spent two years being angry at my father before I worked out he’d been right about most things. I hope you get there quicker than I did.

Your mother will tell you I was strict. She’s right. She maybe won’t tell you I sat outside the hospital in my van the night you were born, because they’d only let one of us in. I didn’t mind though - I had a flask and the radio.

Eighteen. Away you go, son.

And keep the heid.

Grandad

James,

So. You’re somebody’s dad.

I’m trying to picture your face, and all I can see is you at six, standing at the back door in your wellies and your pyjamas, telling me very seriously that you were “nearly a grown-up”. You weren’t. You’d lost a wee welly in the burn.

Here’s what nobody told me. The first night home, you’ll lie awake listening to your wee one breathe. You’ll get up three times to check. That doesn’t stop. I was still doing it when you came home from Glasgow at Christmas, aged twenty-six, snoring like your father.

You’ll get things wrong, and you’ll be fine. I shouted at you once in the supermarket for running off. You cried, and then I sat in the car park and cried for a lot longer than you did. You won’t remember. I do. That’s how it works.

Give the baby a cuddle from me. Not a wee one. A proper one, the kind you used to pretend you were too big for.

And don’t let your dad buy them a drum kit.

Mum