Great Granny Webster (New York Review Books Classics) by Caroline Blackwood

Author:Caroline Blackwood [Blackwood, Caroline]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781590175392
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-04-17T16:00:00+00:00

3

SOON AFTER Aunt Lavinia’s attempted suicide I had lunch with a man who had been a close friend of my father and known him since he was a child. Tommy Redcliffe was a semi-successful biographer. He was a gentle pleasant man, at that time in his middle-thirties. His hair was turning grey and his eyes looked wise and disappointed. He had an artificial limb, for he had lost a leg in the war. He had the manner, both retiring and restlessly enervated, of the cured alcoholic.

Tommy Redcliffe talked about my father with amused affectionate nostalgia, remembering the insanely drunken parties they had both so adored at Oxford. I was always puzzled by the way so many of my father’s old friends seemed to have remained unmoving, as if they had been frozen in some dream memory of those pre-war university parties. They appeared to feel that nothing in their subsequent lives had ever equalled whatever excitement it was they had got from them. They still never managed to recreate the Oxford they had loved so much, in any sense that could convey its glamour. When they tried to describe the tipsy rowdiness of nights in smoky college rooms when the debutantes came down from London, their attempts to make it sound exhilarating only left me with an impression of a way of life which was destructive and brutal. Sons of aristocratic parents, they had formed a fashionable little clique which was selective in its membership and comprised of leaders and followers, like a gang. They seemed to have acquired a sense of strength and superiority from the pooling of energies, which is the appeal of gang-life. But their laughing nostalgia when they remembered how someone in their set had been sick on the floor, or passed out, or insulted a stranger, or crashed his girl-friend’s car, never could counteract my feeling that what they now remembered as precious moments must also have been in many ways unpleasant. It was the mood of that pre-war Oxford which remained lost for me—the high spirits, hope and recklessness, the sense of comradeship made closer through shared jokes and rebellion. This mood was too fragile to be resurrected many years after it had suffered a smoke-like dispersal.

When I had listened to Tommy Redcliffe reminiscing about the wild and drunken moments he had shared with my father at Oxford, I asked him to explain why a man who apparently enjoyed such times had bothered to make frequent train trips down to Hove in order to eat a wine-free dinner with someone as uncaptivating as Great Granny Webster.

Tommy Redcliffe had only met my great-grandmother once or twice, but she had remained forever imprinted on his memory. He disagreed with Aunt Lavinia’s theory that my father’s motives for visiting her had been mercenary. He felt Aunt Lavinia had always seen everything in life as a lottery and therefore assumed that everybody must see it as she did. In his opinion my father would have had to have

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