Grandmother’s footsteps

Astonishing as it seems, I am now a grandmother ( or ‘Oma’ as they say in Germany). A little Berlin baby boy born on Halloween, thus ensuring years of brilliant spooky birthday parties and pumpkin shaped cakes. It’s hard to describe how much I already love him, this squidgy wriggly munchkin whose arrival has made everything seem alright with the world. But more of that another time.

As I write this, I am listening to a piece on Radio 4 about stepmothers ( or ‘blended families’ as they keep calling them, a phrase that I find deeply annoying and irrelevant to my own particular experience). Indeed, if you had attempted to blend me, my brother, our stepmother and father in the Nutribullet (not that we had them in 1976) it would have splintered and broken, a little like the time I tried to trim Lucas’s sheep like hair and the whole pair of clippers fell to bits and got stuck in his tight curls

I guess in my case, step parent hood was never going be easy as it didn’t get off to a great start.

My stepmother H was the spinster in the Embassy who got invited to ours for Christmas because as my mum said ” she is on her own and people should never be on their own at Christmas”. Two years later my mother left twenty years of Foreign office life and came home to live in Wiltshire, armed with letters for my brother and me from our father announcing that our parents were divorcing. We didn’t see our father for a year after that as we continued our boarding school lives of exams, Snoopy and teenage crushes. For some strange reason I was convinced that I was somehow responsible for their divorce. I do wish that somebody could have assured me it wasn’t , as I carried this as a tiny seed well into adulthood. Stupid isn’t it?

And then my father came back to visit. My mum ( we found out many years later) moved out to a hotel so that he could stay at her cottage. I can’t remember much about that excruciatingly awkward week, apart from that I threw a mug of hot chocolate over him, and that the whole experience should have featured in a ” How to deal with your children when you are getting divorced in the worst possible way” article. After a few days we moved up to his club in London, a large ornate building off Berkeley Square with copies of ‘Horse and Hound’ and newspapers laid out on the tables with military precision, a place where ties were compulsory at dinner and where Colonels and Lords lounged on the squishy sofas with glasses of sherry or tea served in impossibly thin bone china cups with silver strainers and tiny bite sized sandwiches. The best bit about the club was the swimming pool in the basement, with the poolside cafe where you could order club sandwiches and stick thin chips ( with a bottle of Canada dry ginger ale, a fact I thought was absolutely the height of 70’s cool). It was at the club that my brother overheard my father talking on the phone and realised that he was getting married again ( a fact that he had neglected to mention to us) and not only that, he was getting married to H, someone we already knew. The next bit is a bit blurred. I think we must have confronted him about it but I can’t really remember. I do know that he left for Japan fairly soon after that and that they got married in the garden at the British Embassy there ( not again because we were told this but because years later we found the wedding album).

This is probably coming across as a whinge, well I suppose it is really. It’s just astonishing how badly my father dealt with all of this, though as time passed and the dust settled, my mother happily re married, we grew up, had our own families and we all sort of got on with it. Inheriting two angry teenage stepchildren who were fiercely loyal to their mother cannot have been easy for H and looking back I think she did her best with very little support, so we muddled along through the years. To be honest my relationship with her was in some ways more straightforward at times than with my father.

Visits to their house in Wiltshire were nail bitingly tense as she welcomed a car load of fighting grubby grandchildren into the immaculately white sitting room with a large plate of home made chocolate cake but at least she always made an effort in a rather formal don’t touch anything kind of way.

They are all dead now, my mother 30 years ago, my father two years ago and H more recently. My father did not take to old age ( to put it mildly) and as H valiantly attended the coffee mornings and film clubs that were laid on in the sheltered accommodation they had moved to, he shut himself away in his study and sulked.

While my father died of old age ( and bad temper) and lived to the ripe old age of 93, poor H was not so fortunate. She became increasingly confused, her behaviour erratic and out of control. Some mornings she would put her clothes on back to front or empty packets of rice into each of the kitchen drawers. Once she called me to ask why I had been in during the night and stolen all the carpets. It was apparent that something was very wrong, though in the next breath she would pull back and ask about the children, or point out how lovey the roses were looking and you could guarantee that if anyone from the hospital or GP surgery turned up she would turn into the most perfect hostess, so that people would think it was us losing the plot and that we were making the whole thing up. This went on for some time until she was finally diagnosed with vascular Dementia and Alzheimers. Her last two years were desperate as she raged and fought, battling with me, my father and the carers, throwing things, hitting and shouting. An attempt at a nursing home ended in disaster so we brought her home with 24 hour care and a hospital bed in the sitting room. After my father had died ( in the next room) I tried to explain to her that he was no longer here. ” Don’t be ridiculous” she said, “I’m getting married to Fabrice this afternoon” and threw her cup of tea against the wall. I have no idea who Fabrice was but I hope she enjoyed the thought of him.

Six months later she also died, calmly and peacefully in her sleep. We found out afterwards that she had been working as a spy. But that is another story.