My maternal grandmother was a difficult and demanding woman. She lived in another seaside resort along the coast from our house. I have not one happy memory of her to relate, except perhaps the garden. She had a fuchsia bush and I loved to pick the flowers and turn them into ballerinas by pulling out the extra filaments, leaving just two, like slender dancer’s legs. She had a narrow, square paved path running down the middle of the lawn which was perfect for playing solo hopscotch but I had to remember to wipe the chalk markings after I’d finished or there would be trouble.

It was strangely cold and dark in her house, even in summer. There was red Linoleum in the lavatory - she called it a lavatory - and I could hardly reach the flush chain. The paper was hard, in a box on the floor. The kitchen was cramped, smelled of stale bacon fat and, to protect it, the prized Robert’s radio was covered in a dusty, crumpled, polythene bag. Curled inside a mauve towelling shower cap in her bedroom wardrobe was an exceptionally long rope of her plaited auburn hair, cut from her head when she was 30. Sometimes she uncoiled it and held it against my own head and it brushed the back of my calves. She maintained her hair was so long and heavy she was forced to have it cut to assuage her headaches and back problems.

She was sour, her mouth turned down at the corners. Her small eyes squeezed together in a constant disapproving frown. She must have been badly wronged in her life to make her so mean, mean spirited as well as ungenerous.

She never read me stories or bought me sweets, or baked a cake with me. She did teach me how to knit but the lessons were fraught, she was impatient and would snap like a cat if I didn’t catch on to an instruction immediately. I don’t ever remember hugging her or her cuddling me. There would only be a polite peck on the cheek, when I would smell that fusty, old lady smell, a mix of moth balls, a little body odour and lavender water.

There are letters my father wrote during WW2 where he mentions her fondly, so perhaps she wasn’t always miserable.

29 September 41
I was very sorry to hear that your mother had to have as many as 16 teeth extracted–what a horrid appointment it must have been to look forward to! It was bad enough when I had one pulled out so I dread to think how very painful it must have been for her.

From time to time I was sent to stay with my grandmother when my parents had the occasional escape from their boisterous children. I dreaded it. I was with her on 15^th February 1971, the day the United Kingdom embraced decimalisation. She sent me to the butchers on the parade to buy sausages for our lunch and I ran excitedly all the way back to her house. I wanted to show her the shiny new decimal coins I had been given as change which jingled in my pocket. She was absolutely furious, ordered me straight back to the butcher to insist on her change in ‘proper money’. I was twelve years old, shy, cowered and so ashamed of my grandmother’s wrath.
On her sideboard in the dining room she had a large silver ball, about the size of a small bowling ball. It was never dusted because the dust that collected on top was alleged to have magic powers. Very occasionally I was allowed to place one finger on it, wipe off a little dust, and then make a silent wish. Needless to say the wishes never came true: mine was probably Please can someone come and fetch me home in the next five minutes?

2nd October 1942
Are you going to French classes this evening or going straight home to finish a pullover and listen whilst Mummy recounts her experiences that afternoon in an air raid shelter?

I was transfixed by her underwear which consisted of layer upon layer, summer and winter, no matter the weather. Voluminous knickers went on first, followed by a heavily boned corset with dangling suspenders on which were hung thick beige stockings, 60 denier, with seams up the back. The corset ensured she always sat ram-rod straight, and walked with the deportment of a debutante even in her 80s. Her brassiere was satin, shapeless and offered little if any support to her sagging breasts which lolled over the top of the high corset, and had thick straps and multiple rows of fastening hooks and eyes at the front. She would pull a woollen vest on top of the bra and corset and long woollen bloomers on top of the stockings and suspenders, and finally a silk petticoat to smooth the silhouette of whole ensemble. It took her a very long time to get dressed and undressed each day.

We used to visit her neighbour, an ancient paraplegic called Mrs Goddard, who lay on a day bed in her geranium filled conservatory, her spidery veined hands clawing at the heaps of hand-crocheted blankets covering her skeletal body. If my grandmother perceived me to be naughty she would pinch my thighs and order me not to cry or you’ll end up with legs like Mrs Goddard’s. I never actually knew what poor Mrs Goddard’s legs looked like, hidden as they were under the blankets, but I knew she couldn’t walk and I’d seen her awful hands which was plenty enough grist for my imagination.

June 1942
What thousands of happy memories come back to life as soon as I give our double bed a thought! Watching your pretty little face deep in slumber, making love to you in the afternoons at Blakewood Court, straining our ears for Mummy’s unexpected arrival…

There was another time that springs to mind. Rarely was I allowed in the dining room with its dark wood sideboard and matching dining table and chairs. Her knees were old and arthritic so I was given a yellow duster, stiff with polish and a tin of bee’s wax and told to clean the furniture, starting, crouched on the floor, with the barley twist table legs. She watched me, upright, beady eyed, her now salt-and-pepper hair crimped into artificial waves. I must have been about seven or eight and I said something like,

“Mummy doesn’t make me polish the furniture, she just dusts it.”

“Your mother was a harlot in the war!” she replied.

I didn’t know what a harlot was. It didn’t sound like a very nice word and I was too frightened to ask. I couldn’t make head nor tail of the definition in my children’s dictionary: A woman of the night. A prostitute. 

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