My maternal grandmother seemed, when I was small, to be a typical ‘granny’ of the 1960s, tiny, rosy-cheeked and full of ‘wise’ sayings. However, as an adult, I discovered she was malicious and spiteful. She entertained herself by setting up disputes between her daughters, telling each of them something entirely fictional that a sister had ‘said’. She bullied her children by constant criticism. She had married ‘beneath her station’ to an illiterate farmhand during the first world war when she was 4 months’ pregnant, but that didn’t stop her being po-faced and moralising with her children and grandchildren. She lied about her age and her past, and swept uncomfortable family events under the carpet.
My paternal grandmother was a colourful character, the daughter of a well-to-do middle class businessman, who eloped with the milkman, built up a very successful property business when he left her with four small children, and remarried an exotic European refugee after the war. She was a Cordon-Bleu trained cook, wore designer clothes and taught me about cocktails, smoking and men while I was still at school, much to the horror of my Mum. After she was widowed, she had a string of charming gentleman callers right up to her death in her 80s.
Guess which one is my role model for old age?