Panic

No Time to Panic

“Panic? Time to panic? Who said anything about time to panic? Bosh!”

Dear old Gran, all of five foot small, bantam weight, hands on hips, heels dug into the ground, poised forward like a fierce fighting cock, daring anyone to contradict.

“The good God gave us a head on our shoulders and He meant us to use it, and use it we must; there’s never a time to panic!” Useless to point out that the good God had put heads on all His creatures, that we humans did not have exclusive possession of that commodity. That would be to invite a cuff over the ear, one of the few times she could be provoked enough to do so. Funny, but even back then, any of us might have picked her up and set her, squawking, on the front fence post; none of us dared.

“Stay calm no matter what! Think! Act! Don’t just stand there! Pray if you must but, like the sailor, row like hell for the shore.” Gran’s own praying was of that practical kind and though she might wax a little sentimental, harmonizing beautifully when Crimond was the hymn (and thought none of us was watching), she would draw herself up to all of her five feet and give full vent to hymns like “Onward Christian Soldiers”.

I can still see and hear her after all these years, declaiming her “No Time to Panic” chorus and its accompanying verse: “Think ahead. Foresee trouble. Be prepared.” Gran was probably ahead of her time: she would have appreciated the concept, but hardly the word, ‘proactive’. “Hah! Typical Yank lingo,” she would have sniffed. “We Brits practise it, them there Yanks blab about it with fancy words,” –forgetful that many of ‘them there Yanks’ were of Brit origin. I’m not sure she’d quite forgiven ‘them there Yanks’ for winning the War of Independence.

‘No time for panic’ was the great lesson her knock-me -down, pick-me-up life had taught her; a lesson she was determined to pass on to all her brood. “Life ain’t no picnic! Grab it, get on with it, learn from it and stop snivelling about it.” And if that message needed a bit of reinforcement with a cuff over the ear, so be it.

We knew very little about her early life. We got the impression that being born in 1870, the year of the Public Education Act in Britain, she’d endured whatever ‘learning’ had been doled out. Once when she saw me scribbling on a slate she commented: “Best use I ever had for one of them was sliding down t’street in t’snow on me bum.” Tiny as she was, she’d probably still have fitted on one. She never said a word against teachers though; her cousin, Jonathan, was one: his name was only ever mentioned with reverence.

We knew a little more about her adult life, mainly from aunts. She’d lost three children, two in early infancy, the third in childhood; she’d taken on a sick relative’s daughter who was stone deaf; she’d looked after an elderly mother for years; she and her husband had bought a fish shop, “open all hours”, which she and her children ran, even before her husband died, lost one Saturday afternoon in a snow-storm out on the moors, after insisting on visiting a distant pub “just over t’ next county, on a bit of business”.

“Business, my foot!” an aunt once snorted. “He was over there drinking more than his share of the shop’s profits!”

The Methodist Minister it was who paid for the funeral and kept a Christian eye on the family. An Anglican herself (“Low Church,” she always insisted), she never converted to Methodism, but sent her youngest children to the Methodist school where they did their family best.

She had several bouts of illness and when the children began to have these same bouts of bronchitis, she decided matter-of-factly (no time to panic!) to sell up and sail for Australia. And that was that!

I think my own first lesson in this “No Time to Panic” thing was after Japan had entered the War. The radio announced that everyone should make preparations for the eventuality of air-raids; gas masks were issued, together with rolls and rolls of brown sticky tape for gluing over our windows. Gran ordered all of us about, a proper little sergeant major; even us kids had a share of jobs to be done –windows to be ‘stickied’ to minimize flying glass, black-out curtains cut out and ‘run-up’, Lactogen tins cleaned, painted black and fitted over light bulbs, and so on. Old spare mattresses were brought out, given a good beating and piled under the big mahogany dining table. When I asked who was sleeping under the table, I was chided: “Don’t be daft! When the air-raid siren goes, we’ll stack mattresses on top of the table - can’t have them ‘orrible little Nips scratching it! - then we all get under it, lounge cushions tucked behind us.” Curious, I asked where she’d got the idea. “It was what we did back home in England when them rotten Huns came over in their blessed dirigibles and dropped bombs down our chimneys. Now shut yer cake-hole and get on with it. Let’s be prepared.”

I never did find out whether this was strictly true: Gran could be a bit fanciful with the truth sometimes. Once when I was scribbling some bit of nonsense, she wanted to know what ‘lies’ I was writing down now. “It’s what we call imagination, Gran, not lies, and I’ve probably got you to thank for it!” She gave me a quick squeeze, then realizing it was a dig rather than a compliment, flicked my ear and said: “You more likely got that from your other, Irish, grandmother, what with her leprechauns and her bits of Catholic superstition. You can thank me for knowing that there’s no time for..”

“Panic,” I chorused.