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Authors: Caroline Blackwood

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Standing in the oppressive suburban graveyard of Hove and feeling a sudden sadness at the loss of his flighty and humorous sister, I missed my father. Missing him, I realised that for me he would always be lost in a much more serious and final way than Aunt Lavinia and Great Granny Webster could ever be. Like someone born before the invention of the camera, he had disappeared too early for my memory to have been able to form any device that could retain him as a distinct outline. Even missing him was futile, for it was like missing a foreign country which one had never visited and never would. No anecdotes or reminiscences from his contemporaries could ever give him a face. He would remain like a wobbly circle drawn by a child that says “Look at my man,” not having the skill to put in the eyes, the nose and the mouth.

Waiting for Great Granny Webster's burial I found it strange and distressing to realise that the old lady could never be lost for ever like my father. Whether I wished to keep her or not, she would always remain with me because I could remember her as a living concrete entity, whereas he was merely an absence, an abstraction without voice or flesh.

I had met Great Granny Webster only a few years after my father's death, but that small time-lag had been crucial. Her image would live on while his would vanish, because unlike him she had appeared with the beginning of my memory's photography. Great Granny Webster would enter this hole in front of which Richards and I were embarrassedly praying, but she would never stay there. In my imagination she would have an after-life in which she existed for ever in her dark Hove drawing-room, living and breathing in her upright chair. My father could never have any such resurrection. He could never emerge from his jungle grave in Burma to live again and breathe.

And thinking about those who were buried I thought about my grandmother Dunmartin, who was still living, just as lost as the dead, in the mental hospital where she had been placed long ago by her mother. I wondered whether Richards had informed her that Great Granny Webster had finally relinquished her tenacious life-grip, whether the unfortunate woman was in any state in which this fact could have either interest or meaning for her.

I suddenly saw Great Granny Webster as awesome. She had outlived so many. She had managed to be both the start of a line and the end of a line. In my family she seemed to be Alpha and Omega.

As Richards and I kept on waiting by the hole, it occurred to me that I didn't know what we were waiting for.

“What are the arrangements?” I whispered to Richards.

“She ought to be appearing soon,” she said.

And then I saw her coming. The way she was arriving was so completely correct that I could hardly believe it. I had expected her to come in a coffin on top of a hearse. But instead she was very slowly crunching up the gravel towards the church in a huge black Rolls-Royce, which was being driven at exactly the same dignified creep with which she had once liked to cruise along the sea-front of Hove.

Inside the Rolls-Royce was an undertaker from the local crematorium. He made an impressive inky silhouette against the windows of the car as he sat on the seats at the back, holding Great Granny Webster in an urn on his knee.

The undertaker took her inside the church, and after a few minutes she came out again and was carried across the graveyard by a clergyman.

The clergyman was very bald, like Richards, and he had the sort of chubby child's face that should have been pink. But the poor man was so cold, as he was wearing only his surplice and his stole, that his cheeks and all the skin of his hairless head had turned a bright violet blue. He held her urn high above his head and blessed it.

Her urn looked very sedate and tall and upright and narrow. It held itself with exactly the same impeccable posture with which she had held herself in life. Everything about her burial was so correct at the beginning. Everything was so right, so very much what she would have wished.

And then everything seemed to go wrong.

All at once the clergyman started gabbling through the burial service. In all fairness, the man looked really deathly cold and the wind was lifting up his clerical skirts and swelling them round his ankles like sails. One could understand why he seemed to be trying to get the service over as soon as possible so that he could get back inside his church.

“Earth to earth. Dust to dust ...” He held the urn like someone who was pouring a gallon of petrol out of a can and Great Granny Webster started gushing out into the hole in the grass.

“Earth to earth. Dust to dust ...” But as she came streaming out of the urn she didn't look at all like dust. That was the thing that was so very shocking. I kept expecting her ashes to be a greyish brown, but instead they were dazzlingly white. There was something profoundly unsuitable and disturbing about their brilliant whiteness. There was an incongruity in the way this extreme whiteness made her appear gay and bright and festive, the very opposite of anything she had ever liked in life. In no way did it seem at all correct, that Great Granny Webster should look frivolously snowy and sweet, almost exactly like castor sugar that was being poured into a bowl as an ingredient for a wedding cake. There was something very jarring and ironic in the fact that this woman who had always insisted on eating only saccharine for reasons of economy should be making her last earthly appearance in the guise of first-grade expensive sugar.

And then there seemed to be much too much of Great Granny Webster to be emptied into the ground. There was something almost obscene in the sheer quantities in which she was emerging. I had expected that the clergyman would just take one handful of her ashes and throw them into the grave as a symbol. But instead he kept impatiently tipping the urn and his frozen face looked exasperated at the way that her white powdery substance would not stop flowing out.

“I'm very glad that she can't see any of this,” I found myself thinking. Surely she would have been horrified by the recklessness by which her remains gave the impression of being airily squandered. She, who had always liked to hoard and count and ration, could surely only be appalled by the lavish and devil-may-care generosity with which she was now being poured into the earth as if the contents of her urn could never come to an end.

I glanced sideways at Richards, guessing that she too must be feeling that there was something shockingly unsuitable in the ruthless way that death had taken from her old employer everything that was sombre and careful.

At the very moment I looked at her, a particularly fierce blast of wind from the sea came hurtling through the graveyard. It caught the jet of ashes which were still gushing out of the urn. It lifted up the remains and sent them dancing around in the air.

I looked down at my black funeral clothes and I saw with a feeling of chill and terror that they were coated with white flecks as if I had just been in a snow storm. I found the sight of them utterly sickening, but I made no attempt to brush them off in case Richards might see me doing it and take it as a sign of disrespect.

I glanced once again at my great-grandmother's aged maid, for I was still curious as to her reaction to the ceremony. I saw that her eye which was free from the black patch was squeezed tightly shut. I was never to know whether Richards was deliberately trying to blot out the horrifying sight of the sugary and wind-blown incorrectness with which Great Granny Webster was now dancing drunkenly over the earth, or whether she was only flinching because by a final misfortune some last feathery fleck of the woman for whom she had worked so hard and so long had got lodged in her one good eye.

This is a New York Review Book

Published by The New York Review of Books

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1977 by Caroline Lowell

Introduction copyright © 2002 by Honor Moore

All rights reserved.

Cover image: Cover photograph: Arthur Batut, Fifty Inhabitants of Labruguiere, France, and Their Composite Portrait Type (detail); Espace Photographique Arthur Batut, 81290 Labruguiere, France

Cover design: Katy Homans

The Library of Congress has cataloged the earlier printing as follows:

Blackwood, Caroline.

  Great Granny Webster / Caroline Blackwood ; introduction by Honor Moore.

    p. cm. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 1-59017-007-5 (alk. paper)

  1. Aristocracy (Social class)—Fiction. 2. Grandparent and child—Fiction. 3. Hove (England)—Fiction. 4. Teenage girls—Fiction. 5. Grandmothers—Fiction. 6. Aged women—Fiction. I. Title. II.Series.

  PR6052.L3423 G74 2002

  823'.914—dc21

2002002880

eISBN 978-1-59017-539-2
v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to:
Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

BOOK: Great Granny Webster
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