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grandmamma
     

 
     
     
    I fancy you think little of who makes the food you eat. Thrice a day it appears. Do you truly know whose fingers touched it? Do you give a moment’s attention to the mind that devised your dish, its method and ingredients? Of course you do not. That would drag you out of your comfortable chair, along the corridor, down narrow rickety stairs, along a greasy stone floor to the under-regions of your home. There work a pair of quick but red-scabbed hands, a pair of eyes that judge and shape your food upon its platter. A mind entirely unknown to you directs these preparations – yet you allow it to choose each morsel that will enter your mouth. You are not a menial, a scullion. Your thoughts are occupied with higher matters.
    It is a notion of mine that we distract ourselves with false fears, turning our eyes from the true horrors stalking this world. When I was young I had many foolish terrors: a dread of speaking in large company, or having to dance or sing or exhibit some other accomplishment. My name is Grace, but I was never as graceful as my name promised. I envied those girls who were bright and glib, for I was left much alone, and developed a habit of watchful silence.
    When I was a child we were as good as anyone else who lived in Greaves. Mother’s dowry had bought Palatine House, the largest house on Wood Street. My father decreed I must not be indulged by learning of any kind, it being sure to spoil a female. He especially forbade any education in the Fine Arts, though my mother had been a painter of some talent when they first met.
    My mother rebelled, cautiously and craftily, as thwarted women will. She gave me lessons in the stolen time while Father was away at business. I remember her standing before me in a bluebell-striped dress, her tired face suddenly shining as she opened A Ladies Instructor For Painting Diverse Delights , so we might copy its hand-coloured plates. ‘Grace, you have a fine eye,’ Mother said. I wanted to dissect the heart of my subjects, to catch the shadow of the wilting rose in cadmium red, and conjure the snow tumbling like thistledown outside the window in washes of cerulean blue. One day, when painting the gleaming sphere of an apple, a black wriggling creature punctured the skin from the inside. Mother was bemused that I carried on painting, recording the creature’s ugly pointed head and shiny segments. ‘That is the truth,’ I insisted, proud of my picture.
    In turn, my mother portrayed me in delicate shadowy pencil: a serious, thin-featured child; long limbed and shy. Even when alone with brushes in hand we spoke softly, alert to heavy footsteps on the drive. My mother’s high-strung nerves had trained my own. ‘He is here,’ I would whisper, my heart stirring as if an ogre crossed the threshold, and not my own father. Our work was rapidly hidden away in the seat of an oak settle. There must have been other lessons too, for I wrote with an elegant looped hand, and borrowed every new novel from the town’s paltry Circulating Library. Genteel crumbs of knowledge I think them now, remnants of a gentler age, like the biscuits Mother once twisted in Elizabethan knots.
    I have Mother’s paints still, in a chipped ebony box fitted out with palette, brushes, and jewel-like watercolour blocks. I still paint every day, just as fiercely, but now my spirit ranges further, and also – I have learned this lesson well – I look about myself with greater vigilance. A daydreamer, my father called me, but I wonder now if I have been a sleepwalker. I have not attended to my own affairs as I should. I have dozed with the bedstraw smoking, as Peg Blissett might have said.
     
    In those days, Father was a towering bear of a man, a master printer with a workshop of ten men. It was a high-ceilinged, racketing building, filled with trestles and mysterious machines, with printed papers strung across the ceiling. On a rare visit he showed me his work, lifting a new