Opening the car door at half past one in the afternoon and sitting down instantly took me back decades, to being in my grandad’s Morris Minor. It was the smell that did it. The smell of a car baked by the sun. I had not actively thought about my grandad for weeks, maybe even months, yet in that instant he was there. I was somewhere else entirely. Not outside my house. Not in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

It was not a bad memory. Not a bad flashback. Far from it. But it reminded me how deeply the body stores things. Smells, sights, heat, textures. How one tiny moment can lift you clean out of the present and place you back somewhere you have not visited in years. Most of the time that feels frightening. Most of the time it comes with pain. But today it did not. Today it brought him back to me in a way that felt almost gentle.

My maternal grandad was my light in the darkness. I did not get to see him often. He lived in Surrey and we were up north, so our time with him was rare, usually just a couple of weeks each year. But those weeks stayed with me. They mattered.

He was a quiet soul. He did not raise his voice. He did not argue. If something concerned him, he spoke with care. He was thoughtful, calm, the kind of man who made the world feel softer simply by being in it. He loved his dogs and always had a working spaniel. In shooting season he was a beater, and he would come home with pheasants, rabbits, grouse, sometimes pigeon. He would skin them all.

He would take me up to his shed at the top of the garden, and I can still remember that smell too. Creosote and varnish. Warm and thick in the air. A smell that filled your lungs and somehow meant safety. Sanctuary. He would show me how to pluck and skin the birds, how to remove the shot. Though sometimes one still made its way onto your plate after my grandma had cooked it. A tiny black pellet hidden in the meat. I can still hear the little chink it made against the plate when you spat it out, almost cracking a tooth. Strange, the things that become precious. Small details. Tiny sounds. The ordinary pieces of memory that survive.

I adored each dog at the time. I would sit in his immaculate garden, the garden he took such pride in, with its neat lawn, carefully tended plants and fruit trees. He grew Victoria plums, and even now seeing them in a supermarket takes me straight back to the huge tree at the bottom of his garden. I would spend hours with the dog, grooming her, playing with her, lying beside her and cuddling her. I was content in those moments. Properly content. Even if they were few and far between, they were mine.

We would go on long walks that felt endless when you are a child. Through woods, over fields, by rivers and through denes, climbing stiles and opening gates with those old metal latches you had to lift up before they would swing free. At the end of those walks he would often take me to the park and put me on the swings. I would kick my wellie boots off high into the air and the dog would fetch them back. He showed me how to bowl a cricket ball properly too, because I was mad about any kind of sport. He always carried a thumb stick, and one day he took out his pocket knife and made me one of my own. I wanted to be just like him.

We would fill our pockets with mints and suck them as we walked. In those earlier years he still smoked, rollies, Golden Virginia rolled in Rizlas. He would roll his own cigarette and then take another paper and roll me an empty one so I could pretend too. Such a tiny thing, but I felt included. Seen. Special.

He was there for important things too. My grandad took me on my first day of play school, a small detail to some perhaps, but not to me. It mattered. He was part of the fabric of my childhood, woven through it not only in the grand memories of woods and dogs and long summer walks, but in the ordinary milestones too.

He taught me the trees. He knew them all and showed me how to recognise them by bark, by leaves, by shape. We would collect conkers in the October half term and sweet chestnuts too, which he would peel and hand to me as we walked. I loved eating them raw. I loved the simplicity of being with him. I loved that he was my grandad, and I loved him deeply. He never hurt me.

For years those memories sat in me untouched. They were uncomplicated in the way childhood memories can be when you have held onto someone as one of the safe people, one of the bright spots. When I thought of him, I thought of gentleness. Dogs. Gardens. Walks. Trees. Mints in coat pockets. The kind of love that asked for nothing and left no bruise. I never imagined those memories would one day be forced to sit beside something so dark.

Then last year my cousin messaged me to say that my mam had told the family our grandad had been sexually abusive to children. And with one sentence my world cracked.

Because what do you do with that. What do you do when beautiful memories are suddenly placed beside something so ugly. He never did that to me. But my mam was his daughter, and she was severely abusive to me, physically and sexually. Behaviour like that does not come from nowhere. It comes from somewhere. It can be learnt, and repeated, and at times passed down. So I am left suspended in uncertainty. My grandad has been dead for eighteen years. There is nobody to ask. No way to know. No way to untangle it cleanly.

So I sit with two truths that refuse to settle neatly beside each other. The first is that some of my most precious childhood memories belong to him. The second is that I cannot ignore or excuse harm done to any child, no matter who the person was, no matter what they were to me. Someone being kind to me does not erase cruelty to someone else. Love does not cancel out abuse. Good memories do not place somebody beyond question.

And there is another truth too, one I cannot escape. My mam has always known how to poison good things. She has always known where to strike. So there will always be part of me that wonders whether this was truth finally surfacing, or whether it was another deliberate act of damage, another way to reach into something safe and leave her fingerprints all over it. That is the cruelty of growing up with someone like that. Even memory becomes unstable. Even the past no longer feels untouched.

I will not let go of the beauty I knew. I cannot. Those moments were real. The warmth of the car. The smell of the shed. The neat garden. The Victoria plum tree. The dogs. The woods. The chestnuts in my hand. The wellie boots being fetched back to me. The stick he carved for me. They happened. They were mine.

But I also will not become someone who defends harm simply because the person who may have caused it once made me feel loved. I know too well what silence costs. I know too well what children carry.

Generational trauma is real. It lives in families for decades, passed hand to hand like something unnamed, something hidden, something people are too ashamed or too frightened to speak aloud. Years ago many people endured horrors without language for them, without protection, without justice, and that is heartbreaking. It does not stop being true just because it is uncomfortable. It does not stop existing because families would rather look away.

So maybe this is what remains. Not certainty. Not closure. Just the grief of loving someone who may not have been who you thought they were. The grief of not knowing. The grief of understanding that even your gentlest memories can be touched by darkness.

And still, for this afternoon, when I opened that warm car door in the afternoon sun, he was simply my grandad again.