Strangers in a strange land

We arrived in North Devon at around Easter 1969. We stayed in a little village called Lee in a bloody awful place called Chapel Cottage that would have had the Ghostbusters working overtime. We finally ended up in a village called C'martin on the North Devon coast in a house where, for the first time, we had not only one indoor toilet but two and a bedroom each; at least in the winter.

Grampa and Nan followed us down a couple of years later and bought a little terraced house just up the road.

Grampa played the sax and the clarinet in whatever local 'big band' he could get to. I adored both him and his music. I used to sit listening to him practice for ages at a time. I'm told that he wanted at least one of us to get into music and that was me. I'd started the violin when I was eight years old and, while my mother screamed at me to practice, grampa coaxed me and egged me on.

He was my idol. A gentle man. A man with an eye for the girls who didn't mind showing it, even when nan was around. He loved the Sunday western on BBC2 and I used to sit between his knees in front of his armchair and watch the western with him. Poor bugger would often fall asleep half way through - a post-prandial stupour after nan's mountainesque Sunday lunch.

Me, dad, grampa and my nearest brother would be in the living room while mum, nan and my sister were in the kitchen. Apartheid? Of a sort. I seem to recall that grampa would sent me into the kitchen to ask nan to make him a cup of tea. Those were the days ... when men were men and women were glad of it.

As I got older, he branched out in the musical instrument stakes. He taught himself the cello so that he could join a very amateur string ensemble with me. It seems to me with hindsight that he did all he could for me and I would have done anything for him.

As the muses would have it, he died in October 1976 when I was 16. I was gutted. I wasn't even allowed to pay my last respects. Whilst I concede that my interest in women and beer were starting to wax at about that time, his death ensured the end of my violin career, if career it could ever have been. I gave it up and turned to hedonism ... if in a rather naive and harmless form.