My Animal Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

father suspected them of patronising him. Churches had charm in bucketfuls, Gees had pride in spades.
    When my mother was dying in hospital (because, as happens so often, death suddenly bore down before we could get her out) and the morphine was carrying her a little away from herself, she slipped back into the past, and talked about the churchyard opposite the house where she was born: ‘There are women in long white dresses walking about between the graves,’ she told me as I sat by her bedside. One sentence she repeated, holding my hand: ‘There’s someone waiting for me at home who is good as gold, good as gold.’ This was her mother May, née May Davis, source of my mother’s occasional feyness, genetic wellspring, I imagine, of my own writing, lover of rhymes, daughter of the nearest thing in my own family to a writer.
    I only remember my mother’s mother as a very old lady. Grandma Church was in her eighties when she died, in what must have been 1952, because I was only four and recall for some reason the gaiters andbrown checked coat I wore on the day of her death, alas the same day as the death of one of the two spinster Gardiner sisters who lived next door, Miss Lou and Miss Grace. So that I, hopping in from the garden into the kitchen where my mother was crying, still chanting my repeated refrain of the day, ‘Poor Grandma, poor Miss Gardiner,’ was rounded on with natural asperity by my mother, who said, ‘Never mind Miss Gardiner, how about Grandma?’ — and my father made everything worse by telling her off for being unfair. The guilt of having caused my mother double pain still gives me a little stab of unhappiness.
    Grandma Church, to me, was an old lady, tall and big for an old lady, who made puzzling jokes and had long ashen and brindled hair wound around her head in a thin coiled sausage, and dark brown tortoise-shell spectacles. She had a fur coat with shiny worn edges that probably came from her employer Mrs Coe, but she still had a smiley mouth, not like the thin lips that most old people had, a feature I always admired in my mother, whose mouth never grew mean or old. Grandma Church would bend over and talk to me, so I liked her even if I never quite understood her, but then children never quite understand grownups, so this seemed nothing remarkable. I remember, one time when Grandma and Grandpa were staying with us at Bromsgrove, a conversation one day on the sunny landing about a hair, which Grandma showed me, and stroked across the palm of my hand (was it growing on her face? Perhaps.) When I reported this to my parents I recall my father looking serious, and saying something to my mother, who said, ‘Oh she’s all right, Vic, never mind.’ This was explained much later when Mum told me that her mother had been ‘senile’ in her last fewyears but that Grandpa hadn’t helped by ‘taking over everything at home so she felt that she couldn’t do anything at all’.
    But what little my Mum also told me made it clear that her mother could have done anything if she had not been born poor. For a start, in the wedding photograph for her marriage to Bill Church, May Davis is strikingly beautiful, by far the best-looking of all the sisters and aunts in attendance, with big dreamy heavy-lidded eyes, full lips, only half-smiling, a small tip-tilted nose and pale blonde hair. Beside her Bill looks swarthy and sensual and Italianate or Jewish, and a little small. The secret of their marriage may have been that she was five years older than him, and thus almost on the shelf. Well, he gave her seven children, and to look at him, sex and laughs. It was May who read to my mother, and made her love books. And this is the puzzle about the Davis side of the family: where did the education come from? Was there money, once, that was lost? Did it trickle away between all those sevenths of sevenths?
    Because May’s mother Martha Davis