6. Bob and Me

I was born in June 1942 and for the next sixteen years my grandfather and I lived barely feet apart. For my first five or so years, with my father mainly at sea, my mother and I lived with her parents at 62 Richards Terrace. This house, as we shall see in the next chapter, had been purchased by Nana’s parents, and, after the death of her mother in May 1939 and an acrimonious fight with her siblings, became Nana’s house. My father never felt comfortable in his mother-in-law’s house, and in 1947 or 1948 he persuaded Nana to sell the Richards Terrace house and invest with him in the purchase of two newly constructed flats, one atop the other, at 232 Newport Road. The original house on that site had been destroyed by a German bomb in the German bombing raids on Cardiff early in World War 2, and it was just a few hundred yards away from Nana’s old house. We Scobies--my father, after he left the Merchant Navy in the early fifties, my mother, me, my sister Rose, born in October 1946, and my brother Harry born in January 1955—occupied the upper flat and Nana and Bob (plus, for some two years, Tom and his new wife Joan) had the bottom flat. We lived at 232 until Bob died and we five Scobies plus Nana moved up Penylan Hill and upmarket but still in my mother’s native Roath.

In Great Britain, in the post war period, it was far from unusual to find three generations of a family all living, as ours did, on top of one another, in a house significantly smaller than the unremarkable 1950s suburban colonial American home that Stuart and I live in now. Two world wars had cut a swathe through the British housing stock and the nation had paid a savage economic and social price for its victory over Nazi Germany. Thus, my family’s way of life in Cardiff between 1942 and 1958 was less like that of an established middle-class family in the U.S.A. and more like that of a newly arrived immigrant family that included resident grandparents.  

Growing up, I had wo grandparents and that will seem a pretty meager collection to my own seven grandchildren who have enjoyed a grandparental cadre almost equal in number to their own. But people of Bob’s generation had got mown down successively by the Great War, the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918/1919, the Great Depression of the thirties, and the second World War so I was lucky to have two older people to love and care for me in my childhood.

One thing that was special to me about Bob was his title—not grampa but “Bob”. Everyone (except Nana, who, in formal communication, called him Reub”, called him Bob. Now, to call one’s grandfather by his first name was rare at that time, and, as a painfully obedient child, I took a certain relish in yelling up the stairs, “Bob, Nana says to come at once. Your tea is on the table.”  It was a little cheeky, a little fun. The strong preference Reuben Henry Lewis Croft showed for the casual, unpretentious, jolly name “Bob” tells us, I think, a lot about the character of the man.

As I run through my memories of my grandfather, it seems clear that we were closest in my first four years—before I learned to read and went to school. Knowing our family patterns of childcare across the generations, I am sure there were times when baby Gilly was plonked in Bob’s lap while Nana was getting the dinner on, and he joggled me up and down and played “This little piggy went to market” and “Here’s the church and there’s the steeple”. When I was little a bit older, I remember sitting at the kitchen table near Bob and watching as he ate his “tea” which always, of course, included a big cup of tea. Bob would pour some of his tea into the saucer, soak some chunks of bread in the tea, dip them into the sugar bowl and feed them to me. I called them “boats”, and even today, if I am feeling a bit low and have a loaf of white bread to hand, I can still find comfort by eating chunks of bread dipped in tea and sugar.

One of the stories told me about myself by my mother or my grandmother was how one day, when I was very young and had been out in the sunny back yard with my grandfather, I sighed and said, “Oh Bob, I’m so happy.” This incident was related to me as a comic anecdote. Instead of “tired” I had said “happy”, I was told by my elders, but I wonder how they knew. I came into language early and it seems rational to me that, when I said I was so happy being with Bob, happy was in fact what I was feeling.

But, if I was a little chatterbox, Bob was a man of few words, and I think our relationship in those early years was largely silent. As I got too big to sit on his knee and ventured deeper into the world of words that would become so very much MY world, he and I drifted out of touch, quite literally. As I move on in time to our early lives at 232 Newport Road, only two other memories relating to Bob stand out—the boils on his neck and the food he loved to eat.

Bob suffered from a series of large carbuncles on the back of his neck, close to his collar, and these were an object of horrid fascination for me. To try and give poor Bob some relief in those days before antibiotics, my grandmother would boil the kettle and press steaming hot wet cloths onto the boil to encourage it to burst. I would watch what she was doing and was once rewarded by seeing the yellow seeds of pus pour out.  That this procedure occurred in the room where we ate is just one thing about my early life that now astonishes the (overly?) hygienic American me.

As for the food, my Jarrow heritage came to me largely through the Geordie “dinners” which were one of the trials of my early years.

Bob loved the food of his childhood --black pudding (a sausage made of congealed blood and studded with lumps of fat), pigs’ trotters, tripe and onions, liver and bacon, and, worst of all, faggots and mushy peas—patties made out of minced offal served with reconstituted dried peas. Nana cooked or bought these things for Bob for Saturday dinner (i.e. lunch), and when my father was at sea, my mother and I would sit down at my grandparents’ kitchen table and, to my silent horror, be expected to eat them too. You will get how much I hated Bob’s favorite foods when I tell you that, when my father, who had spent a good deal of time in “the States”, served me and Rosie Heinz baked beans or Heinz tinned spaghetti on buttered toast, we thought we had died and gone to gustatory heaven.

It seems clear from what Uncle Tom tells me today and what I gathered from my mother and grandmother when I was young, that Bob was a sporting man who lived his essential life out of the home. He worked as the manager of a garage nine to five, came home expecting to find his “tea” ready, and then spent the evening at the Conservative club or the bowls club. There he and his mates would have a few pints and play cards and snooker and darts. Bob was good at cards, and Nana, who played whist herself, once remarked to me In awe that Bob “counted the cards”--which today, being a bit of a card player myself, I find very funny.   In the 1930s, greyhound racing was a key interest and hobby for Bob, and he and Nana kept at least two racing greyhounds, named Jacko and Golden Jacko, in a kennel in the back yard. On weekends, Bob liked to go to the track and placed bets on horses and dogs. He continued to follow the soccer news and did the football “pools” every week.

Tom Croft, aged about thirteen, in the backyard at Richards Terrace. (Croft Collection)

Just recently, my uncle Tom came up with a funny story about Bob’s sporting love of games and gambling. Like his dad, Tom as a teenager was good at sports and games, including snooker and billiards, and, in a version of a classic betting game, Bob would challenge any man gathered about the table to beat his baby-faced son at snooker.

The first bet was a quid (a pound sterling), and Tom had to play to lose. A second challenge then was made, double or quits, which Tom had to win. This led to a third decisive game when the bet was five pounds—big money in those days--and Tom would again play to win. This set of snooker games would occur between eleven a.m. and two p.m. on a Sunday, and Bob and the victorious Tom would head home for lunch feeling very pleased with themselves-- only to find the table cleared and their food drying up in the oven. This was a big deal. Sunday lunch was by far the best meal of the week, featuring a roast (commonly a leg of lamb), stuffing, roast potatoes, two “veg” and, on the best of days, Yorkshire pudding, all, of course, drowned in brown Bisto gravy. Bob and Tom were hungry for their dinner and felt they had earned it, but Nana was adamant. Dinner was at one, and if you were not at the table ready to eat it, too bad!

These various sporting activities were not unusual for men of Bob’s time and social class, but what was less usual was that they did not stop him from fulfilling the expectations laid upon him as a husband and father by society and his wife. As Nana boasted to me several times, Bob brought his wages home to her every week, and all his activities outside the house were paid for out of his gambling money. Thus, if the Croft family was hardly rich on a garage manager’s pay, they never lacked for anything important and never went into long term debt. Bob liked a drink, but rarely drank to excess. He loved the thrill of the racetrack but was savvy enough to place his bets so that he was never deeply out to pocket. He loved his wife and was faithful to her. Both his children loved Bob very much, finding, I would say, his undemonstrative but undemanding affection and quiet sociability easier to deal with than their mother’s self-sacrificing love and acerbic temper.

And, If Bob spent many of his leisure hours outside the home, he had his reasons. Between 1931 and 1939 he lived in the house owned by his mother-in-law, Catherine Salmon, who tyrannized the family. Then, after Mrs. Salmon died, 62 Richards Terrace became Nana’s house, not his. Men of his generation were not expected to do any household chores, Bob was not a reading man, except for the sports pages, and the constant rows between his wife and their daughter were enough to drive any sane man out of the house.

When on August 4, 1958, Bob died quite unexpectedly in Cardiff Royal Infirmary after surgery for a stomach ulcer, my grandmother and my mother were not only grief stricken but shocked and bitter. The surgery was minor and had seemed to go well, and what the family learned from the hospital convinced them that Bob had died because no one was attending to him. There had been a staff party that Saturday and the nurses were too drunk to notice that one patient in the long ward was in fatal distress.

I have no memory of grieving for my grandfather. I am sure I shed some tears in response to the grief of Nana and Mummy—after all, the mere mention of Lassie or Black Beauty would bring tears to my eyes in those days--but my heart was not touched. Bob had always been THERE, served by his wife, deferred to by his daughter, chumming around with his son, sitting at the top of the family hierarchy until my father left the sea, integral to the structure of my material life. But then he was suddenly gone, and his death signaled the end of the first chapter in my life when I was as much Croft and Scobie, and the welcome beginning of a new one.

Fate did not dictate that I should become a stranger to the grandfather I lived so close to—all around me in our family circle today I see grandfathers and granddaughters finding ways to communicate—and I blame myself for letting it happen.  By the time I hit my teens, I was deeply self-absorbed, an inveterate bookworm, depressed to find myself a bony, flat-chested girl in a world of Gina Lollabrigidas and Marilyn Monroes. But education had given me the words I needed to reach out to my grandfather, I just did not use them.

For example, as part of my English “O” level exam curriculum at Cardiff High School for Girls, my brilliant English teacher Catherine Carr introduced our class to some of the poems written during the First World War. This was the war Miss Carr had lived through as a young woman and which probably changed her life as it did the lives of so many other women, and she inspired me. One of the poems we read was “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, and Miss Carr told us that its author Wilfrid Owen, aged twenty-five, had been killed on the battlefield barely weeks before the armistice was signed.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

– Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs, –

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Now, I had been told that Bob had served in the ambulance corps during the First World War--my mother and grandmother would point with pride to his photo in uniform on the mantelpiece--but it never occurred to me that an eyewitness to the warfare I was learning about at school was sitting there at the table kitchen doing the football pools. I never thought to say, “Were you ever in the trenches Bob? Did you hear the shrill demented choirs of wailing shells?” And by the time I was a university student and would have both liked and dared to ask questions, my grandfather was long dead.

And so, I would love to be able to pass on to my grandchildren the tales I was told about their great-great-grandfather’s wartime experiences--but I cannot. In all my years living close to him, I never heard Bob talk about the First World War, and, since my grandmother and mother never relayed any anecdotes, I think it quite possible that Bob never said much to them about his war either. This silence, I think, is typical. War, as Virginia Woolf once noted, has been a man’s world, perhaps THE man’s world, and while men might reminisce and joke about it among themselves at the mess or the club or the pub, they protected women and children from knowledge of it.

My grandfather Bob, unlike millions of young men his age all over Europe, survived Word War I. He was able to found a family and live a good life. He was one of the lucky ones, and he knew it. What was there to say?