Great Granny Webster Read Online Free PDF Page A

would only talk about it, my grandmother might become less unreal and terrifying to me. This melancholy old woman’s deliberate refusal to mention my grandmother’s name only increased the fearful distortion of my image of her. If even her name could not be mentioned in this church-like house, Great Granny Webster must see her daughter’s very existence as some fiendish obscenity.
    When my grandmother Dunmartin came and stood by my bed in Hove she came as an ugly fragmented phantom concocted from whispers and snippets of gossip that I had heard as a child and then deliberately tried to forget because they had frightened me. “The poor creature had to be put away in the end—it was all very tragic ...”
    I had met my grandmother once, but I had been so young I couldn’t remember her. I had never been allowed to meet her after my brother’s christening, an occasion of which I remembered nothing except the taste of the marzipan on the huge, tiered, stork-adorned cake. Living in the dark house of the woman who had given birth to her, I kept remembering the story my elderly cousin Kathleen had told me about my grandmother’s behaviour at the christening. My grandmother Dunmartin had travelled over to Ulster for the ceremony and she had made an attack on the baby. My brother had been lying in an antique cradle dressed up in his bonnet and white lace christening clothes. All of a sudden my grandmother had become very agitated, and without much warning had run up to the cradle and grabbed the baby. Her face looked vicious, twisted and weirdly unpleasant. She had been half-laughing, half-crying when she lifted him high above her head so that the long skirts of his white robes were dangling down pitifully like washing. Apparently she frightened him by the way she was holding him, for he went blue in the face and started bawling so loudly that his nanny, and his nursery maid, and various other visiting nannies and nursery maids who had come over with the guests for the christening, had rushed at my grandmother in a starchy-aproned pack and surrounded her as they struggled and wrestled to get the baby out of her grip.
    â€œHe has bad blood!” my grandmother started screaming. “Can’t you see that I’m doing it for him ? Can’t you see it’s much better for the poor little creature if I smash out his tiny brains against a stone!”
    My grandmother had finally been overpowered by the sheer weight and force of so many resolute and trained nannies. The baby had been saved, for they had managed to wrench him out of my grandmother’s hands, while his close relations and the visiting friends of his relations stood there frozen, taking not the slightest action, they were all so immobilised by the surprise and horror of the whole situation and by their refusal to believe that such an event could not but be a hideous hallucination.
    Later, Cousin Kathleen told me, it seemed almost as if nothing had happened. The infant was safe. The christening was performed as it had always been meant to be performed in the family chapel. My brother was baptised in special water that someone had been paid to bring over in a bottle from the River Jordan. There was nothing in the least odd about the ceremony, except that my grandmother never attended it. While it was going on she stayed shut up in her room with the blinds drawn.
    The next day no one saw her. She got up before anyone in the house party woke. The butler said that Sir Robert and Lady Dunmartin had decided to take the early boat back to England.
    â€œWhat happened to her after that?” I asked. Cousin Kathleen didn’t know. After the disastrous Ulster visit she had never set eyes on my grandmother again. Indeed she had taken care to avoid her. All she had heard were family rumours that the poor woman seemed to be getting worse and worse. She had no idea where my grandmother had been put in the end.
    â€œI never thought your