Great Granny Webster Read Free Page A

differences between us, not merely in age but also in taste, never troubled her. When she planned our days she planned that we should both do whatever she felt like doing, together.
    Soon after I first arrived to stay with her and got to know her sedentary and rigidly unbending ways, I realised that it would be utterly disastrous to try to persuade her to go down to the Brighton beach. I don’t think that she had even driven through the streets of Brighton for years—she saw the town as such a loathsome sink of modernism, vulgarity and vice, the total antithesis of the staid and wealthy gentility of Hove. The idea of trying to coax this grim and fiercely joyless old lady down to the windy Brighton beach, where she might easily have a heart attack just from the horror and the shock of being forced to step over the close-packed, half-naked bodies of “trippers,” was only too obviously inconceivable.
    The Brighton beach was to remain for me like a gay and tempting paradise that was tantalisingly near and yet utterly impossible to reach. I never stopped thinking about it when she forced me to do the thing I found the dullest, the most disagreeable of all, in those unforgettably long and unamusing days I spent in her company—when she made me take drives with her in the afternoons.
    Great Granny Webster knew that I was meant to need sea air, and this suited her very well because apparently she needed it herself. At four o’clock every afternoon a hired Rolls-Royce from a Hove car firm appeared at her door with a uniformed, unctuous chauffeur, who would then drive both of us, as if he was driving two royalties, at a slow creep along the bleak misty sea-front of Hove. To and fro, to and fro, we would drive for exactly an hour while one of the windows of the Rolls-Royce was wound down just enough to let in a very small sniff of salt and seaweed-smelling air.
    There was something memorably awful about those pointless and monotonous afternoon drives in the vast, soft-wheeled, swaying black car with the silver emblem of a dashing sea-horse on its bonnet. In that car I felt that I was much too near to Great Granny Webster. Sealed off behind the glass partition that separated us from the driver, I felt that I could actually smell the acid scent of her old age—smell the sourness of her displeasure with everything, past, present and future.
    I don’t think that I have ever since met a human being who smiled more rarely, who found less in life to amuse her. She took a pride in her own lack of humour, as if she saw it as an upper-class Scottish virtue. If humour can sometimes be used as a defence against the whip-lash cuts of pain, failure, despair and loss, by reducing such things to absurdity, Great Granny Webster scorned to use any such shield, seeing it as a defence only suitable for “trippers.”
    â€œLife is no joke,” she once said to me. “Life can never be much of a joke for the thinking person.”
    When one was with her she could almost persuade one that there was something cowardly and despicable in any emotional dodging, in any refusal to experience every single blow that life could deal one, head-on. She could make one feel that there was an almost superhuman courage in the way she was not frightened to admit that the only thing she now hoped for from life was a continued consciousness, unpleasant as she well knew that it had to be. All she wanted from each new day that broke was the knowledge that she was still defiantly there—that against all odds she had still managed to survive in the lonely, loveless vacuum she had created for herself.
    â€œI have nothing to live for any more,” she would murmur. I was always astonished by the way her tone sounded so smug and boastful. I found it impossible to understand how she could take such defiant pride in the fact that she had managed to keep existing in her disagreeable, large, cold villa in Hove without the slightest