Great Granny Webster (12 page)

My grandmother had developed an obsessional interest in what she called “the little people.” When she first claimed she could see them, her family thought she was joking. They imagined that, as an Englishwoman who had taken up residence in Northern Ireland, she must in some silly, whimsical way, be trying to adapt herself to Irish superstitions.

Soon it became clear that her belief in the forces of the supernatural had become a genuine fixation, for she tried to convert everyone to her beliefs and became snarling and hostile if she felt her audience was patronising her. She claimed that she could understand the language of the fairies, that they were continually sending her messages, that it was important only to listen to the instructions of the good ones for they could help you avert the terrible spells that might be put on you by demons. Tommy Redcliffe found her intolerably exhausting and boring when she went on talking like this.

When my grandmother spent most of the day shut up in her bedroom, she sat cross-legged on the floor and cut out coloured pictures of elves and fairies from her enormous collection of children's books. What everyone found blood-curdling was that she herself had started to look very like the model fairies that you see on the top of Christmas trees. She had the same frozen blank expression, the agelessness that made her seem neither child nor woman. Her face was china white, and her curls were still very blonde and arranged in a way that made her appear to be wearing a golden wig. When she entered a room she never walked, she always flitted. Often she kept a fixed smile on her face, and when she talked through this smile in a tense and impassioned manner about spells and curses, potions and magic, it was as if she were incapable of relaxing it because it had been painted on her face in order to radiate her own inner notion of fairy-like goodwill.

My grandmother's eyes had unnerved Tommy Redcliffe. He had found them much too bright and artificial, and they had given him the disquieting impression that the poor woman had lost her real ones and had had them replaced by two rounds of glass.

My grandmother liked to wear white diaphanous dresses and she covered her shoulders with a silver-lace shawl. As she darted noiselessly round Dunmartin Hall in her curiously rapid and tiptoe manner, the ends of her silvery shawl would stream out behind her, almost as though she had grown fairy wings. Even in winter she went about barefoot. This always astonished any visitors who came to the house, for they found it impossible to understand why she was so unperturbed by the perishing cold.

I asked Tommy Redcliffe how my father used to behave with his eccentric mother. Apparently he always became very white and withdrawn whenever she came into the room but brightened the moment she left it. Whenever my grandmother was present he would pick up a book and become so immersed in the text that he appeared to be trying to get to the other side of its print so that the words could shield him like a barbed-wire fence. He never wanted to discuss my grandmother with his friend, but regarded her condition much as he regarded the state of his father's house, accepting it as a distressing fact which, insofar as was possible, he hoped could be ignored.

My father went over to Northern Ireland only at Christmas and Easter and for one month in the summer. Tommy Redcliffe was convinced that he dreaded his visits and only made them for the sake of my grandfather Dunmartin, for whom he felt both pity and affection.

Aunt Lavinia was apparently much more ruthless. She was adamant in her refusal to visit her parents in their Ulster home. The impecunious and uncomfortable grandeur in which this unhappy and embattled couple lived not only depressed her but struck her as ludicrous. She loved comfort, luxury and amusement. In Ulster there were no night-clubs; there was no theatre; there were very few parties given there that Aunt Lavinia considered entertaining. To her, Northern Ireland was a deadly and provincial No Man's Land, and the secluded and supposedly aristocratic demesne of Dunmartin Hall existed for her as one of its most unappealing features. The beautiful woods of Dunmartin that my grandmother had managed to people with the magical spirits of her hectic imagination were damp monotonous tracts of trees to the pleasure-loving Aunt Lavinia. They were a place where you could take a dull walk in the rain because no one offered you anything better to do. She dreaded being asked to sit up half the night with my anxious grandfather while he showed her all the accounts and the books of his farm and his estate. Aunt Lavinia had no gift for mathematics, and she suspected that his grasp of the figures he liked to show her was almost as weak as her own. All she ever gathered was that the Dunmartin accounts were disastrous. To her, money was an abstraction. If you were gay and well-dressed, it was something that arrived from admiring men. She could see no magical way of making it arrive to salvage my grandfather's rocky and gorse-infested acres. Aunt Lavinia stubbornly kept away from Northern Ireland, because condoling with my grandfather on the horror of his financial accounts and being under the same leaking roof as my unhinged fairy-loving grandmother was not an experience she could see as “fun.”

According to Tommy Redcliffe my father liked to spend a lot of time in the woods when he visited Dunmartin Hall. Taking a gun as a pretext that he was shooting, he would wander round them most of the day. Even when the rain was torrential he liked to keep out of the house. In the evenings he would take his Oxford friend up to a tiny little room in one of the attics, where he had put a couple of armchairs and a bamboo table. In this room, in which his mother was most unlikely to make one of her swooping fairy-magic appearances, he would get out a bottle of brandy and relax, and they would talk about books and politics most of the night.

Sometimes my grandfather would stop reading through the accounts of his estate and creep up to the attic to join the two young men. He too would relax while he drank with them, and the worry lines would look less darkly pencilled on his tense face. Up in that attic Tommy Redcliffe got the feeling he was being drawn into some kind of peculiar conspiracy. He felt that they were all in some tree-house where the children could hide from the adults. Three men were forming a charmed circle to shut out a force that threatened them. At the time the warm and distorting effects of brandy could make these evenings seem agreeable and normal. Only in the mornings would it strike him that there had been something sad and eccentric in the way they had spent so many hours of the night crouched hiding in the dusty little attic of such a palatial house.

Tommy Redcliffe would never have gone to stay at Dunmartin Hall if he had not felt that it was important for him as a friend to go there to give a little support to my father. He always found the atmosphere of the house intensely melancholy. He had also disliked the unpleasant feeling of uncertainty that was created by my grandmother's frequent disappearances. My grandfather would discover that his wife was missing from her room, and having searched the house from roof to cellar he would then set off with a gamekeeper to search the woods and the lake. My father always offered to help try to find his mother, but Grandfather Dunmartin insisted it would be better if he didn't come.

Tommy Redcliffe had found it very distressing to watch this florid-faced man in his tweed jacket and jodhpurs wading through the dung-coloured puddles of his derelict farmyards as he set off to look for his wife, wearing an expression that was as mournful as that of the spaniels that followed at his heels.

My grandmother was considered to have “good” days and “bad” days. And she always disappeared on so-called bad days. It was often many hours before my grandfather found her. He would go through agonies of indecision as he tried to make up his mind whether or not to call in the local police. He was very unanxious to create any scandal that would give his house a bad reputation in the surrounding countryside. He had a horror that my grandmother's name, which he saw as something sacred, might appear in the Belfast papers. He made arbitrary decisions that he would get in the police and their search-dogs if his wife was not found by ten, by eleven, by midnight ... Somehow he always managed to find her in very unlikely places. There was a little bramble-covered island in the middle of the lake; and there she would be, having rowed herself out in the fishing-boat. She would be sitting on a rock on its shore, dangling her bleeding bare feet in the icy slate-grey water. At other times she would be hiding in the thicket of a yew-tree or crouching inside the trunk of a hollow oak. She was usually in a very over-agitated state of mind when she was discovered. She was either elated, jabbering exalted nonsense and saying the fairies had chosen her as their queen, or petrified, rolling her eyes in a pitiful fashion and moaning that she was in the grip of some evil spell. It was often very difficult to persuade her to come back to the house. My grandfather was unfailingly patient. Once he found his wife, he would send the gamekeeper away. Standing with a torch in the woods, he would plead with her gently; he would coax and cajole. In winter the rain was often so heavy that they were soaked to the skin in minutes; but grandfather would ignore it, totally concentrated on trying to say the right thing to calm her. Finally he would succeed—maybe because she knew that in his fussy, anxious fashion he was now the only person who still loved her.

Tommy Redcliffe and my father, semi-tipsy on brandy and pink-eyed from cigar smoke, would stay up in their attic, occasionally taking nervous peeps from its tiny window, hoping for the sight of the flash-light, which would mean that my grandmother, soaked and usually weeping, was at last being brought safely home.

Cousin Kathleen had always claimed that my grandmother was a woman who had never wanted to have children, that she had had them only because the conventions of the time demanded that she produce heirs for her husband. It was after the birth of Aunt Lavinia that she first showed signs of severe mental illness and started behaving as if she were bewitched. She developed a crazy obsession that both my aunt and my father were changelings. She kept screaming that her real children had been stolen by evil fairies and replaced by demon substitutes. She wept and moaned for the ones she had lost. When she saw my father and Aunt Lavinia, she glared at them with a spitting malevolence and terror.

My grandfather called in a specialist from Belfast, who gave her many pills, which had no effect on her behaviour. The doctor advised that her children should immediately be got out of the house. If she could forget their very existence, he hoped that her nervous illness might subside. Not having any idea where he could send them, Grandfather Dunmartin had quickly moved my father and Aunt Lavinia, who were then very small, to a wing which was the furthest removed from my grandmother's bedroom. There, for a while, they were looked after by two Northern Irish girls who were told not to allow them to make any noise. For whenever my grandmother heard them laughing or crying, it set her off into a fit of convulsive weeping as she mourned the children who had been taken from her.

In desperation my grandfather wrote to Great Granny Webster, who was living peacefully in Hove. He told her about her daughter's distressing mental condition, and that he had been advised to get his children out of Dunmartin Hall. He asked her what she thought he ought to do.

Apparently Great Granny Webster wrote back a very curt, cross letter. From its tone it was clear that she felt it was extremely incorrect that my grandfather should have bothered her. She said that he must do whatever he thought fit. Her letter ended with the motto “Life is a struggle and one cannot expect to rely on the strengths of others ...”

Finally the two children were sent to Canada, where they lived with my grandfather's sister until it was considered time for them to come back to England, so that my father could go to Eton and Aunt Lavinia to a fashionable girls' school.

Tommy Redcliffe had found it very disagreeable to be present on the rare occasions that my father was in the same room as my grandmother. My father had been separated from his mother for so many years that he appeared to regard her as a total stranger, yet one for whom in some uncomfortable way he still felt responsible.

Sometimes my grandmother seemed to know that he was her son and sometimes she didn't. On one occasion Tommy Redcliffe had seen her come wafting into a room with her bare feet and her silver shawl, and she had rushed up to my father who was sitting in a chair reading and had started to embrace him, calling him affectionate names, telling him how much she had always loved him.

Tommy Redcliffe thought that my grandmother's sudden displays of affection were rather unpleasant, for they were more like an aggressive assault than something that one could feel very grateful for. As he watched her trying to kiss my father she gave the impression that she was only acting out a charade of effusive friendliness because she felt she was being directed to behave in this way by the benevolent supernatural forces that teemed for that instant in her demented imagination. She behaved as if she were under constant and contradictory instructions from her own inner spectres. When she embarrassed my grandfather by picking up the butter from the dining-room table and rubbing it into her hair, she would explain that voices had warned her to do this in order to ward off some impending evil spell.

Most of the time my father could remove himself from her capricious antics, and he acted as if they bored rather than disturbed him. Only her sudden rushes of affection enraged him. He hated her to touch him. His whole face would darken and he would recoil with savagery when she tried to throw her arms around him. When my grandmother behaved lovingly towards my father, Tommy Redcliffe often felt frightened that he was going to knock the poor woman down.

My grandfather used to say that he felt it was very fortunate that my grandmother had become ill at Dunmartin Hall, because the size of the place made it possible to keep her at home. Also he was grateful that the house was so isolated that only her family and close friends were aware of the seriousness of her condition.