Introduction

One late-August day, I receive a phone call from my Granny: she

has recently had an operation to improve the feeble circulation in

her leg and foot, and, although she is trying to sound upbeat

about it, she is clearly very under the weather, in pain and unusu-

ally weak. I decide immediately that a spirit-lifting visit is

required, so a week later I, my husband and our three children all

pile into the car for a 480-mile drive to the highest inhabited

village in the remote Scottish highlands, which Granny calls

Home and I call Far Too Bloody Far Away.

As we squash our bottoms into cellulite pancakes all the way

up the M6 and beyond, I am more anxious than ever to get there

and with every passing motorway service station I have a growing

regretful, guilty, wretched feeling that I should have spent more

time visiting her in the past. Like most pissed twenty-somethings

and self-obsessed thirty-somethings I have been too selfish to

make time to visit her; to connect with someone who, suddenly

in light of her illness, seems such a vital connection to my chil-

dren: through her, through my dad and then through me.

xv

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xv

As the car hugs the last few miles of mountainous road, my

daughter vomits into a carrier bag for the third time and

Granny’s village twinkles into view at the end of the final valley,

I sense that this visit is going to make quite some impact on

my life.

I just don’t know yet that it’s going to fundamentally change

how I raise my children, and how I feel as a parent.

Meet Granny … and what you’re in for

Before we meet her, I feel I should give you a brief description of

my granny, so you know whose child-raising tips you’re getting

along with my own.

Born on the 8th November, 1923, in chilly Aberdeen,

Granny was the second daughter and youngest child of a lawyer

and a teacher. Not a bad start, then. (Apart from the ‘chilly

Aberdeen’ bit, obviously. Brrrrr.) The story goes that her

parents were engaged for twelve years before finally being in a

position to tie the knot.

By the time Granny came along, her dad was fifty and her

mother forty-six, ages which would raise an eyebrow or two even

today. Nevertheless, two healthy baby daughters came along who

are now the proud holders of the title, Oldest Members of the

Family. (And also Most Likely to Buy Junk from Catalogues, but

we don’t mention that often.)

Granny met my grandfather when she was about nine years

old, on one of her family’s annual holidays to a village in North

East Scotland called Tarland. After a mere fourteen years of hide

and seek in the bushes, giggling on the tennis court, secret

liaisons, separation during the war and making sure they were

xvi

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xvi

xvii

very, very sure, they finally married in 1945. Blimey, he must have

been a catch! And he was.

My granddad was an impressive man: intelligent, sporty and

as handsome as any Hollywood star of the day – though, to be

brutally honest, a star who’d been eating rather a lot of pies in his

latter years – and when I knew him he smelled sweetly of pipe

tobacco, had white hair and bushy eyebrows, a huge model train

set in the attic and a musty study crammed with artefacts from

ancient lands and strange objects from his science labs. He ate

lots of cheese and biscuits by the fire in the evenings, and had

more stories of faraway places and eccentric characters to tell

than anyone I’ve ever met. He also carried a mystical air of unpre-

dictability that meant you never quite knew how far any childish

silliness would be tolerated before he’d make it very clear that he

wanted you out of his hair. Now, Lassie! In short, he was in every

way the perfect grandfather in my eyes, and I still miss him and

wish I had spent more time talking with him.

He died four years ago of a heart attack, just after walking the

dogs across the moor. All that cheese and biscuits didn’t help,

they reckoned.

I digress . . . Granny studied languages at Aberdeen University

but spent the last years of the war code-breaking at Bletchley

Park, a time she never talks about except to comment grimly on

the lack of mountains and fresh air and the intolerable excess of

English people. (I did once try to point out that Bletchley is actu-

ally in England, hence the English people, but that went down

like a lead balloon.) When she finally escaped back to Scotland

she completed her teacher training and then taught for two years,

before having her first child – my dad – and settling down into a

life of motherhood from then on.

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xvii

xviii

I’m not sure if this true, but certainly it seemed to me that for

at least the first twenty years of my life Granny thought I was a silly,

giggly, empty-headed, directionless ninny. Certainly my love of

daydreaming and making up dance routines when there was a

table to be laid didn’t help matters, but I think the clincher was

when I started watching Neighbours in my teens. That, dear reader,

in my granny’s eyes, won me the Idiot of the Year title hands down.

As a consequence of this grandmotherly disapproval, at least as

I saw it, we spoke very little; I didn’t really know her, and what I

witnessed of her quick tongue and lightning-fast reactions made

me a little nervous around

her. But about ten years ago

everything changed: in a

move that shocked even the

most radical, optimistic

thinkers in my family, I met

a fine young chap, got

married, had a baby, and all

but gave up work to stay at

home and be a Mummy. Ka-

pow. The New Liz was born.

Suddenly, Granny and I

found common ground:

motherhood. Our shared

experience of having kids

young, working hard to

keep the family together, our

children happy and healthy

and our outside interests

going without going bananasLiz, aged five, her brother Andrew

and Granny, 1979

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xviii

xix

during the process created a bond between us that had been

woefully absent previously. We started talking on the phone

about schools, violin lessons, what my kids were up to and any

worries I had about them. The children sent her little pictures.

She sent them back letters in old-fashioned handwriting that

they couldn’t read.

What I gradually realised was so special about this growing

mother-daughter-like relationship was, crucially, that she was not

my mother. Mothers can say more to their daughters in one look

than the entire script-writing team of Desperate Housewives can

in a series. Oh, you feed your baby like that, do you? Oh, she still

sleeps in your bed, does she? Grrrr. My mum is actually brilliant

at letting me raise my kids my way but still, as we all know, the

subject of child-rearing can be prickly indeed, even in the

kindest, most caring hands where mothers and their daughters

are concerned. But a grandmother stands apart from this, and

can dole out advice, criticism and support free from any compli-

cating undertones. She’s your gran – just listen to the lady, and be

glad she’s still here sucking pear drops!

And so there grew, over a number of years, a camaraderie

between Granny and me that I never imagined I’d feel, and we

have become firm friends.

She’s still a tough cookie with a fierce brain though, and it’s a

brave person who contradicts her, or says anything stupid in her

presence. Allegedly . . . This lady suffers fools about as gladly as I

suffer my own stress-related dandruff, and I’ve learned a thing or

two about being idiotic in front of her. Thing one: don’t. Thing

two: see thing one.

I realised, as our friendship grew stronger, that I was in the

very lucky position of being able to ask my grandmother all the

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xix

questions about her life, and about how she raised her children,

that many mums of my generation either feel they can’t ask, or

don’t have the opportunity to ask because their grandparents

have passed away.

This wonderful old lady, this suddenly ailing powerhouse, this

mine of information who had successfully raised four strong,

independent people, could be the key to answering the question

asked by thousands of stressed, confused, desperate parents every

day: how has it gone so wrong for our children and what can wedo to put it right?

If you need evidence that something has gone wrong – and

you’d really have had to try hard not to have heard any of this

before – then consider the following:

� In 2007, a Unicef report on the wellbeing of children and

young adults put the UK bottom of the league of twenty-one

economically advanced countries.

� The same report found that children growing up here suffer

greater deprivation, worse relationships with their parents

and are exposed to more risks from alcohol, drugs and unsafe

sex than those in any other wealthy country in the world.

� Only forty per cent of the UK’s eleven, thirteen and fifteen

year olds find their peers ‘kind and helpful’, which is the worst

score of all the developed countries.

� More than thirty per cent of fifteen to nineteen year olds are

not in education or training and are not looking beyond low-

skilled work.

xx

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xx

� According to the children’s charity NCH in 2007, one in ten

young people suffers from significant mental health prob-

lems, and the prevalence of emotional problems and conduct

disorders has doubled since the 1990s.

� According to a Children’s Society survey in 2008, a quarter of

children say they often feel depressed, and seventy per cent of

fourteen to seventeen year olds say they feel under pressure to

look good and are on a diet some or all of the time.

“British children . . . are more tested, more punished, more

imprisoned, more unhappy and more generally disliked, distrust-

ed, feared and demonised than they are pretty much anywhere else

in the developed world.”Deborah Orr, writing in The Independent, June 2008

Yikes! The grim, bleak picture painted above is one that many

of us already suspected was there, and fret about daily. It starkly

illustrates that our twenty-first-century children are losing out

on one of the most important phases of their lives; a time that

sets them up for life; a time that is irreplaceable and invaluable.

In short, children are missing out on a proper childhood.

Now then, before we get too depressed, it’s important in any

discussion about childhood in times past to be very careful not to

mythologise it – to see it through the rose-tinted glow of Time; to

imagine it was perfect and lovely and happy and jolly for all chil-

dren. It wasn’t. Times really were tough for many kids, even fifty

years ago. There was real hardship. We may remember our own

childhoods as a time of sweet innocence, uninterrupted hours of

playing with hand-made toys, cooking with mother, climbing

xxi

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xxi

trees and watching Fingermouse, but it wasn’t all wonderful!

Things our kids take for granted like hot water on demand,

central heating making every room in the house toasty and cup-

boards full of fresh food whenever they’re hungry were not the

norm for many of us growing up.

But children were at least given the chance to be children and

to enjoy this childhood beyond their fourth birthday – and that’s

what’s missing now. Getting that experience back for our kids is

the crux of what we’re going to be seeking to do in this book.

Asking where it has all gone wrong is all very well, but whatwe really need to ask is, how can we put things right? How do youensure children have a happy childhood these days? Why has itbecome so difficult and so complicated? And is there anythingsimpler from previous generations that we could try to implementin ours?

In a bid to answer these and many other pressing questions of

the day I decided to ask Granny, while I still could. I talked to her

at length about all of this over a period of a year, while her toe-

related illness went through it ups and downs, and it’s these con-

versations that are recounted in this book. I wasn’t sure what I

would get: maybe a few snippets of useful information here and

there, a funny story or two about tin baths or halfpenny sweets,

or a memory dug up from the depths.

What I actually got outstripped all expectations – Granny’s

stories and details taught me so much about the essential ele-

ments of child-rearing that all of us could put into practice today,

and in doing so, remove much of the stress, worry and hair-

tearing that seems increasingly to accompany modern parenting.

Of course the world is very different now and I’ve allowed for

twenty-four-hour TV, internet chat rooms and fast-food chains

xxii

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xxii

in my own tips and advice. But I’m now completely convinced

that there is much about raising kids and about family life in

general we can and should learn, simply by talking to the oldest

generation alive today. They generally offer biscuits and limitless

tea while they’re at it, so it’s not such a bad deal really.

I hope some of it proves useful and effective to you and makes

your experience of raising your own troublesome brood a good

deal simpler and more enjoyable than it was proving before. Who

knows – we might even manage to raise a generation of kids who

can spell ‘No ASBO for me today, thanks’ properly.

I also hope it makes you think about where you come from,

how you, and your parents before you, were raised and how you

might try to use some of their wisdom and experience in your

own children’s upbringing. It’s best to discard the ‘kids up chim-

neys, regular beatings with sticks and general misery’ and try to

stick to the good, sensible bits instead.

But they’re your kids. You decide.

xxiii

Liz and her Granny in Scotland, November 2008.

SPOONFUL FINAL:A Spoonful of Sugar 1/9/09 12:15 PM Page xxiii