"Grandpa Wilf never once moaned about the fact he'd had his little toes cut off during the war, because, in wonderful army logic, his boots didnt fit."
Douglas Field is a lecturer at Stoke College and is originally from Shrewsbury. He enjoys watching films, travelling, going out and doing magic tricks.
My story is about the old people in my family that have recently died. I've been thinking about them lots lately, about when they were young and about what I can learn from them now. At a certain point in my life I realised their eccentricities were really expressions of strength of character. I wanted to tell this story as I thought people might relate to it.
I thought Inside Lives was really stimulating and exciting.
Growing up I always thought the rather eccentric old people in my family were there to be humoured. As a long-haired teenager with piercings', I'd sometimes think of it more as a duty to spend time with them than a pleasure. But at a certain point I realised that their eccentricities were often expressions of their strength of character and general old-world hardiness and that they were something to be admired, even to aspire to. Like Grandpa Wilf who never once moaned about the fact he'd had his little toes cut off during the war, because, in wonderful army logic, his boots didnt fit. He took cold baths every morning for circulation, and put salt in his coffee instead of sugar--he said it brought out the flavour. On the other side, there was Grandpa Dickie who smoked 60 filterless cigarettes a day and even grew a moustache so that he could still smoke while he was having a shave. Dickie was in his eighties when he drove me on an eight hour round trip to university. It was a white knuckle-ride that will never leave me. Clutching the steering wheel with fingers amputated from gout, Dickie was King of the Motorway--or so he believed. On his last ever drive, he drove straight into a brick wall, wrote off his car, and called it a prang. Dickies wife, Granny Peggy was more than a match for my granddad: she had learnt to drive, aged around 13 by leaping into Dickies car and speeding off into the sunset. She later learnt to fly a plane in much the same fashion. I can't help but think the senior citizens in my family are a kind of breed apart, and that they just don't make 'em like that anymore. My granny's cousin Astrid's another one...She never married and some might call her an old maid, but I like to think of her as a mermaid. Astrid could be found swimming in the sea near her home most days, whether it be a beautiful summer's afternoon or a freezing winter morning. They're all gone now, but even in their dying they were still teaching me: they each went in their own ways with charisma and dignity. Like Astrid, who, just before her ninetieth birthday, took her towel to the beach, dived into the sea and never came back. | 
