There is something quite special about relationship with one’s grand-children, perhaps most of all in earlier childhood, when one slips into the garden of Eden with them for a spell. I don’t even want to analyse what is so happy-making about this two-way relationship, although I constantly dwell upon it as one of the remarkable bonus joys of these later years of life. It is an experience that I have tasted for more than twenty years now, with six very different variations on the same theme.

Ruth Fawell, 1987