Grandpa’s Great Escape. David Walliams

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She looked like a powdery ghost. The clean-up operation lasted many weeks. Grandpa was banned from the supermarket for life.

      Sometimes Grandpa’s confusion could be more upsetting. Jack had never met his grandmother. This was because she had died nearly forty years ago. It had been one night towards the end of the war in a Nazi bombing raid over London. At the time Jack’s father was a newborn baby. However, when Jack stayed at his grandfather’s tiny flat, the old man would sometimes call for his ‘Darling Peggy’ as if she was in the next room. Tears would well in the boy’s eyes. It was heartbreaking.

      Despite everything, Grandpa was an incredibly proud man. For him everything had to be ‘just so’.

He was always impeccably dressed in a uniform of double-breasted blazer, crisp white shirt and neatly pressed grey slacks. A maroon, silver and blue striped Royal Air Force tie was forever knotted neatly around his neck. As was the fashion with many World War II pilots, he favoured a dashing flying ace’s moustache. It was a thing of wonder. The moustache was so long it connected to his sideburns. It was like a beard but with the chin bit missing. Grandpa would twizzle the ends of his moustache for hours, until they stuck out at just the right angle.

      The one thing that would give Grandpa’s confused state of mind away was his choice of footwear. Slippers. The old man no longer wore shoes. Now he always forgot to put them on. Whatever the weather, in rain, sleet and snow, he would be sporting his brown checked slippers.

Of course Grandpa’s eccentric behaviour made the grown-ups worry. Sometimes Jack would pretend to go to bed, but instead creep out of his bedroom and sit at the top of the stairs in his pyjamas. There he would listen to his mother and father downstairs in the kitchen, discussing Grandpa. They would use big words that Jack didn’t understand to describe the old man’s ‘condition’. Then Mum and Dad would argue about Grandpa being put in an old folk’s home. The boy hated hearing his grandfather talked about in this way, as if he was some sort of problem. However, being only twelve years old, Jack felt powerless to do anything.

      But none of this stopped Jack adoring hearing stories about the old man’s wartime adventures, even though these tales had become so real to Grandpa now that the pair would act them out. They were Boy’s Own adventures, stories of derring-do.

      Grandpa had an ancient wooden record player the size of a bath. On it he would play booming orchestral music, with the volume as high as it would go. Military bands were his favourite, and together Jack and his grandfather would listen to huge classical pieces like Rule, Britannia!, Land of Hope and Glory or the Pomp and Circumstance Marches way into the night. Two old armchairs would become their cockpits. As the music soared, so did they in their imaginary fighter planes. A Spitfire for Grandpa and a Hurricane for Jack. Up, up and away, they would go. Together they would fly high above the clouds, outwitting enemy aircraft. Every Sunday night the pair of flying aces would win the Battle of Britain, without even leaving the old man’s tiny flat.

Together Grandpa and Jack inhabited their own world and had countless imaginary adventures.