Great Granny Webster

by Caroline Blackwood

  The Irish roof has been the perennial arch-enemy of those who have lived under it. The roof has always had an almost mystical importance in Ireland because of the incessant rain. Throughout the ages a quite inordinate amount of unsuccessful Irish time and energy has been spent trying to do something about the roof. More and more roof specialists have been called in to take a look at it. They potter about among the chimneys for many weeks and almost invariably put their foot through its comparatively sound patches before they declare it hopeless.

  Describing Dunmartin Hall in my grandmother’s time, Tommy Redcliffe sounded appalled by the way it seemed to have been so generally and passively accepted that the roof was incurable and could only be kept at bay by pieces of dangling string which helped direct the massive flow of uncountable leaks to the various pots and pans and jam jars in which it suited my family that they should land. Then, just as a ship is bailed out, all these motley receptacles were emptied daily before they started to overflow.

  Tommy Redcliffe was an orderly and practical Englishman, and the discouraging sight of all those soggy strings hanging down from the lofty, peeling ceilings of winding state-rooms had made an indelible impression on him. He said it had always amazed him that my father never appeared in the least disturbed by them, that apparently he saw them as normal. Tommy Redcliffe also remembered with horror that dangling alongside them there had been long sweet sticky brown papers for catching flies and wasps.

  In describing his pre-war visits to Ulster, the terrible state of neglect and the undefeatable damp of Dunmartin Hall had obviously chilled him so much that when he tried to tell me what my grandmother had been like I often thought he felt the house itself might well have been responsible for driving her insane.

  In the period in which he had gone over to stay there, Dunmartin Hall appears to have been going through a moment of exceptional crisis. My grandmother was becoming stranger and stranger. For years and years she had made not a single effort to run the house. As it deteriorated and became increasingly derelict and uncared for, she seemed totally unaware of it. She gave the impression that she no longer inhabited the house except in a technical sense, that she lived elsewhere in some troubled world of her own warring fantasies.

  My grandfather Dunmartin was in total despair. He had no talent as a housekeeper and he found it impossible to give Dunmartin Hall his full attention when he was already overburdened and preoccupied by all the debts and problems of his failing estate. He had hired an English butler and two English footmen and kept selling fields to pay their salaries, but he was too modest and diffident to instruct them. They did very little work, for they were nearly always drunk, since my grandfather was frightened he might insult them if he hid the Dunmartin cellar key.

  Having been professionally trained and having worked hitherto in aristocratic and impeccably run houses in England, these men were horrified by the rudderless and pigsty conditions that prevailed at Dunmartin Hall. They therefore adapted themselves to the point of caricature. All day long they insisted on wearing heavy rubber farm-boots inside the house, and when my grandfather feebly begged them to remove them they refused. If they were expected to wade through the puddles that were always collecting in the corridors of this house they felt it was their right to be sensibly dressed so that they ran no risk of pneumonia.

  Visitors from England were totally scandalised by the sight of these three men in the formal dining-room clumping round the table as they handed out the dishes of food with an unsteady gait that was made more noticeable by the fact that the black trousers of their liveries were tucked inside their mud-splashed wellingtons.

  My grandfather had two of his unmarried great-aunts living with him. He had inherited them with the house as if they were heirlooms, and for years they had continued to live on in one of the remote damp wings of Dunmartin Hall, not out of choice but because no one could think of anywhere else for them to go.

  These two old ladies were in very bad health. One had a cataract and the other grave trouble with her knees. They were much too irritable and decrepit to be of the slightest help to him in managing the house. All they wanted was to be waited on like little children, and they complained incessantly when they had to have their meals in the dining-room, for they would have liked them served in their rooms.

  They were both much too engrossed in their own dissatisfactions to take in that there was anything wrong with my grandmother. My grandfather thought it better not to tell them that his wife had a nervous condition which often made her appear deranged. They realised only one thing. The lady of the house was not very easily available and when they cunningly managed to trap her she was curiously unresponsive to their innumerable complaints. Finding little satisfaction from their hostess, all their bitterness directed itself against my careworn grandfather, and they kept descending on him like two old pecking rooks in their black dresses. Everything was falling apart in their wing ... the frame of their lavatory door was so warped it was impossible to shut it ... they were ladies ... they hadn’t been brought up like that ... it was a disgrace ... it wasn’t decent to use the lavatory in front of the servants ... Three weeks ago one of the gun dogs had made a mess in their sitting-room. They would like to be given a good reason why no one had yet removed it ... The carpet had humped away from the floor in one of their corridors and it was only a question of time before someone broke a leg ... Like the rain that was always pouring down outside the windows, their moans kept splashing down on Grandfather Dunmartin’s worried head.

  As my grandmother’s behaviour became increasingly weird and unbalanced and his great-aunts became increasingly difficult and dissatisfied, my grandfather recklessly staffed the house with more and more cooks, maids and kitchen-maids from the local village. It was as if he were trying to reassure himself that the sheer number of servants could prove that there was still something solid at the centre of his disintegrating home.

  The act of employing so many people appeared to fatigue Grandfather Dunmartin to a point at which he had no further energy for explaining what he expected their duties to be. Never knowing what they were meant to do, they stayed in a demoralised huddle round the fire in the servants’ hall, where they gossiped and ate soda bread and drank many cups of tea.

  In a remote and sleepy country house like Dunmartin Hall, where neither the residents nor the guests found it easy to think of ways to occupy their time, meals had a special importance. They were events which were greedily looked forward to, and everyone who sat down at Dunmartin’s gleaming mahogany inlaid table always yearned to be served some long and delicious meal, for they needed to find pleasant and self-indulgent ways of breaking up the tedium of the dragging hours of the day. Unfortunately, the food served at Dunmartin Hall in my grandfather’s time was always cruelly disappointing, and his aunts would do their best to make him suffer for it by grumbling relentlessly in their high-pitched querulous tones as they bemoaned the fact that the disgusting food that kept appearing in the dining-room was ruining their delicate elderly digestions.

  When these irascible old figures started to make their habitual peevish fuss about the disgraceful quality of the food, Tommy Redcliffe often felt a secret sympathy with them, for he too grew to dread both the sight and the taste of the frizzled unappetising pheasants that were served day after day for both lunch and dinner. No knife ever seemed sharp enough to cut them. Invariably they had been so grossly overcooked that their dehydrated flesh had the texture of plywood.

  The Dunmartin pheasants were all cooked together in a big batch every Monday. They were left roasting in red-hot ovens most of the day and then taken out and hung in the larder so that they could be warmed up in frying pans during the days that followed in the numbers in which they were required. All the vegetables were also boiled together in giant iron pots every Monday, and when they were reheated later in the week they had much the same anaemic and wizened inedibility as the game birds.

  When the shooting season was over, the Dunmartin fo
od sank to even deeper depths of dullness. Day after day, there would be cold ham with beetroot salad, and only occasionally would there be the variation of hot ham fried in some coarse and glutinous batter accompanied by tinned peaches.

  Tommy Redcliffe remembered the meals that were served on his first visit to Dunmartin Hall as much the worst that he was ever to have to eat in that house. This was in large part the fault of an unnerving situation created by Grandfather Dunmartin, who still refused to abandon the idea that it was important for his wife’s self-esteem and her emotional well-being that she be allowed to choose the food that was to be served that day in her household.

  Every morning, following out one of the rare instructions of my grandfather, the youngest of the English footmen, walking with his cumbersome rubber-booted tread and wearing the grimly apprehensive expression of someone carrying out an unpleasant military mission under enemy fire, would leave Dunmartin’s dark and dirty kitchen and after winding through various semi-basement passages would eventually start to climb the great steps of the majestic stone front staircase with its resplendent and dizzying spiral of wrought-iron bannisters. On reaching the top landing, he turned left and headed down the long, musk-smelling corridor which led to my grandmother’s bedroom. In his hand would be a wine list and a variety of menu cards, on which alternative suggestions for the day’s meals had been written out in inaccurate and wobbly French by the Dunmartin cooks. My grandmother was expected to read through all these menus, to place a tick next to any of the suggested items that she approved of and to cross out the ones that did not appeal to her. She was then meant to go through the list from the Dunmartin cellar to choose wines which were appropriate to go with the different courses she had selected.

  When my grandmother heard the footman knocking on her bedroom door, she reacted in different ways, depending on the mood she happened to be in when he arrived. Some mornings she asked him to come in. She would take the menus from him and, while he waited uneasily, glance down them with the unseeing eyes of someone in a dream, and finally place a few impatient random ticks next to some of the names of the French dishes which had been suggested to her. On other mornings, the sound of his knuckles knocking with politely trained yet remorseless insistence on her door had the effect of inflaming her most paranoid and irrational terrors. Giving a piercing little scream, she would dive for cover under her bed, where she would lie quaking, with her arms clutching the cold surface of the white chamber pot which was placed there nightly because her room was so inconveniently far from the nearest bathroom. There she would remain until Grandfather Dunmartin, looking stupefied and haggard, came in to visit her and by various reassurances, like someone oozing a pinned winkle from its shell, managed to persuade her that it was safe to come out.

  There were also worse occasions when her reaction to the footman’s knock would be much more frenetic and sinister. Making a rush to her door, she would fling it wide open and stand there with her golden hair in a dishevelled mop and her breasts poking out of her slinky silver-threaded nightgown. Glaring at the young man with the suspicious and provocatively rolling eye of a woman confronted by a strange potential rapist, she asked him what the hell he wanted and then, screaming obscenities, started to curse him for having dared to come to disturb her.

  Stuttering because he was both embarrassed and enraged by the foolish situation in which he was continually being placed by Grandfather Dunmartin, the English footman tried to explain that all he wanted was to show her the wine list and the menus. On hearing this explanation, my grandmother would start to laugh and her uncombed curls would bob up and down while her frail body shook as she let forth hyena peals of derisive amusement. Her mocking laughter could always make the footman blush, for he realised perfectly well that she saw his whole mission with the menus as totally insane.

  When she grew tired of ridiculing him, she would reach out with her thin bony arm and snatch the wine list and the menu cards from his hand. Ordering him to wait in the corridor, she would slam the door in his face with a childish vindictiveness. Sometimes she kept him waiting for over an hour before she opened it in order to hurl the menu cards into the passage hissing: “All we do is live to eat in this house!” or some such inappropriate remark. It would then be discovered that she had taken various coloured crayons and with careful vicious strokes scratched out the name of every single item of food that had been suggested to her.

  At the time that Tommy Redcliffe first visited Dunmartin Hall, three red-headed local girls, called the McDougal sisters, were taking turns ineptly to do the cooking. They were young and scared and highly strung, and they had never grasped the most rudimentary principles of what they were required to do down in the ramshackle unmodernised kitchen of such a palatial house. The only definite instruction they had received since their arrival was that Grandfather Dunmartin wanted several alternative menus shown to his wife every morning. My grandfather liked the feeling that he was keeping up the traditional domestic routines which his dead mother had once insisted on. He therefore wanted the menus to be written out in French.

  The McDougal sisters had no experience and were hardly capable of cooking anything much more complicated than bacon and eggs. They couldn’t understand a word of French and therefore the task of writing out a series of differing menus in a foreign language was a daily torment to them. They got up at six-thirty and wasted a lot of time slowly copying out the names of various rich and refined dishes which they took from a French cookery book, often confusing the hors d’oeuvres with the entrées, for they had no idea what they were suggesting to my grandmother.

  Although every day they obediently wrote out lists of pretentious courses on the stiff menu cards which were engraved with the Dunmartin coat of arms, it made not the slightest difference to them whether these cards were sent back to them covered with approving ticks or whether all their suggestions had been scratched out by the malign crayon strokes of their employer. They had very soon noticed that no one ever complained if the food they cooked had no relation to anything they had suggested to my grandmother. They found many of the procedures in this alien and sinister Anglo-Irish house baffling. They saw their job of writing out these menus as a difficult, silly, hollow formality which they would never understand the point of. When the cards were returned to them, they never bothered to look at them. They would be too preoccupied, like flustered sailors without a compass, floundering in indecision as they tried to make up their minds what they should cook for the Dunmartin dining-room. After much over-excited debate, just before lunch when the urgency of the situation forced them into action, they would nearly always agree on their favourite standbys—ham or pheasant. They preferred the latter, seeing it as an expensive and exotic food which was therefore the most suitable. They would go and get a few of these pre-cooked birds from the larder, throw them into a frying pan and then have them pompously carried by the butler to the dining-room—mahogany-coloured, rock-like objects swimming in a sauce of bacon fat.

  Once when Tommy Redcliffe had caught a very bad cold, which he blamed entirely on the polar conditions prevailing in his bedroom at Dunmartin Hall, he had gone down to the kitchen to ask the McDougal sisters if they would make him a drink of hot lemon and honey. He had happened to arrive just at the moment when the footman was bringing them back their menus, and he had been startled and intrigued by the hostility and contempt with which the footman treated the three young cooks.

  The youngest girl greeted the footman, but he refused to answer her. He stood there in the doorway of the kitchen glaring at all the sisters, and the lid of one of his pale fastidious eyes gave an irritable nervous twitch, as if rejecting the very sight of their chapped and flaking arms, their greasy aprons, their freckled noses and frizzy ginger curls. He was immensely eager to show them that he regarded them with disgust, that he found their accent unintelligible, and saw them as no more worthy of human respect than the ill-fed scruffy fowls that pecked and squawked in the Dunmartin chicken-runs. It was
obvious that he considered the sluttish way the McDougal sisters kept their kitchen as not only repugnant but dangerous. He seemed unwilling even to cross its threshold and stood there in the doorway with the nostrils of his arrogant aquiline nose flaring as if they detected some poisonous smell.

  Tommy Redcliffe still vividly remembered the expression of pure revulsion with which the footman’s cold pale eye had looked at all the filthy pots and pans and other cooking utensils, at the bluebottles which were settling on the butter, the wasps which were struggling in various open pots of jam. Tommy Redcliffe too was alarmed at the sight of the fuzzy grey mould that had formed on an old pudding that was lying in a china bowl on the sticky and unscrubbed kitchen table. He was shaken by the state of the unswept stone-flagged floor, on which the corpse of a mouse was rotting quietly in the corner in a mousetrap, where everywhere there seemed to be the crunched carcases of pheasants which had been thrown, despite their sharp and choking bones, to the gun dogs and lay there littered with odd bits of withered cabbage and the peelings of potatoes and carrots.

  Tommy Redcliffe doubted that the supercilious young footman would have dreamt of eating a mouthful of food which had been touched by the McDougal sisters. He suspected that the butler and the two footmen cooked their own private meals on a stove in their pantry, and that as my grandfather never bothered to check the household bills they most probably ordered themselves excellent meat from the local butcher, so that—not to mention the superb vintage wine they were always taking from the cellar—the three Englishmen fared very well.

  “Take these,” the footman had suddenly snarled, throwing the menu cards on to the floor with a gesture of furious hostility and contempt. He might have been feeding some chickens with corn. He turned and strode away in his wellingtons, as if escaping from an inner region of hell.