My mother thought it was the wrong road, anyway, this railroad rushing us off in the wrong direction. And I knew, in the way only a child can know these things, that it was all my father’s fault.
I was about four and we were leaving our comfortable home in a quiet village in the genteel gently rolling south of England for the untamed and unsophisticated rugged sheep farming hill country of the Welsh border, where my dad grew up. His parents were no longer capable of living alone, he was an only child with no one else to share the responsibility so he was doing the only thing he could do, as they categorically refused to move south to live with us. We had to go to live with them.
So Dad quit his job, something that became quite a hobby with him over the years, and we moved to another world.
My mother was not happy.
I was perfectly happy. Too young to have formed attachments to any place, I was simply reveling in this new train ride experience.
Travel having been severely restricted during World War Two, which had recently ended, I had never met any of my grandparents. I don’t think I quite grasped the concept. I certainly had no storybook image in my head of the classic rosy-cheeked plump and cuddly grandmother beaming over her flowered apron and offering fresh-baked cookies. Just as well. I would have been sorely disappointed. My grandmother was as eaten up with resentment towards my grandfather for years, as my mother was towards my dad on that train ride.
My mother’s ground to a halt not long after we arrived at the end of our wrong road, she adjusted as people do, but my grandmother kept her anger well fed and it flourished.
My grandfather was what we would call these days a recovering alcoholic. In those days he was just one of several local drunks. The fact that he no longer touched the booze seemed to be ignored and he was still thought of as a drunk by neighbors and family alike. Certainly my grandmother never gave him any credit, nor even acknowledgement, for having quit.
He had drunk his way out of a good job, lost the lovely old house that they had owned when my dad was a little boy, and had to settle for moving to the cold dark damp dreary dwelling I now found myself living in.
My grandfather rarely spoke, or moved for that matter. He sat in his armchair beside the fireplace, which rarely had a fire in it, hour after hour, doing nothing. For all the attention he paid us, we all might as well not have been there. At least he was harmless, unlike my grandmother. Far from showing even a spark of gratitude for my parents’ sacrifice, she acted as if she hated us all. She never spoke a civil word to anyone, but droned on with an endless litany of complaints. She walked with the aid of a cane, and any time I was foolish enough to get anywhere near her she took a vicious swipe at me with the thing. I learned very fast to stay a good cane-length away!
You might possibly think that she and my mother, both resenting having been forced down that long wrong road by their husbands, might have bonded a little but this was most certainly not to be. That house was not a place of bonding.
Looking back after I had come to know my maternal grandparents I can certainly appreciate how hard all this was on my mother. Her parents were very different. Her mother actually did approach the storybook image, and my Irish maternal grandpa was one of the delights of my later youth. He was a stonemason, creating gravestones from the local marble. I loved to sit and watch him, and occasionally I was even allowed to help. He sang while he worked, or regaled my fascinated ears with endless fantastical tales in which I doubt there was an ounce of truth.
They lived in a gorgeous rambling old house, built in 1742. It was light and warm with welcome, and different in every way from that of my other grandparents, the one in which I was to grow up. But I was just a kid, and I was oblivious to all the negatives of our new life. With the exception of that flailing walking stick, I loved it all. We had dogs and cats and chickens and pigs and a goat. Surrounded by farms, I was free to wander wherever I chose as long as I carefully closed all farm gates. I made friends with staring-eyed sheep and slobbering cows and hairy-hoofed horses. What did I care if the house was dark and cold, had no running water, no electricity, no indoor toilet? Having to shiver my way to the far end of the yard, stumbling in the waving flashlight beam, to the rickety old outhouse, was all fuel to the fire of my new life adventure.
My grandfather died not long after our arrival and my mother commented that she rather expected my grandmother to dance on his grave. I couldn’t imagine this at all and quite looked forward to it but in the event she did not even go to his funeral.
My grandmother, I never called her grandma either out loud or in my head, died about two years later. I could well imagine my mother dancing on her grave, and she did attend the funeral but simply looked suitably somber.
Now we were free to return to the civilized south. I lived in terror of this announcement for some time, life was much more fun on the wild Welsh border as far as I was concerned, but eventually I realized I need not worry. By that time, my mother had returned to teaching in the nearby elementary school where she taught before marrying my dad. My dad had a good job not too far away, we made improvements to the house, and we stayed. But somehow it felt as if my grandmother’s misery had invaded the very walls. She would not go away.
Years later, home for Xmas from college, I was helping my parents clear out the old cellar and what should surface but that gnarled old walking cane. I held it up and we all started to laugh. My dad took it from me and calmly sawed it into four short pieces, which he handed solemnly to me. Without a word, we went back upstairs into the living room where these days a hearty fire roared, and I equally solemnly placed the lengths of wood on the fire. Silently we watched until they were completely consumed. My grandmother was gone.
© October 2011
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