The pure joy of grandchildren

‘My grandchildren are my world,’ writes a woman on social media, summing up a certain type of grandparent. There are, however, two ways of looking at it and I see many whose worlds revolve around their grandchildren because they have no choice. I used to chat with them at the school gate. If their families were not strictly ‘the rural poor’, they were certainly of the group Theresa May described as ‘just about managing’: both parents had to work and grandparents took up the slack, unless they were still of working age, in which case arrangements were more haphazard.

Because I had my last child late, I was as old as some school-gate grandmothers who had become parents when very young. If I found having a child in middle age tiring, how much more so did these women, looking after several? Not to mention the school holidays, when they were responsible for these grandchildren every weekday, without any time for themselves.