Grandad Gets It Wrong

Grandad’s mother kept in contact with one of her husband’s brothers, which is how Grandad knew Bella, his first cousin. Bella was every inch a Lord, – self-confident, self-opinionated – and not very tall. She was also good-looking and very smartly dressed, which is why no-one could understand her daughter Mildred Annie being so plain and dowdy.

Bella’s married name was Halstead, and she and her husband lived at Colne – ‘bonny Colne upon the hill’, as it was known. It was, and is, very much a border town, just in Lancashire, but its inhabitants speak with Yorkshire accents. After Bella was widowed, she and her daughter Mildred, known by the family as Millie, moved to Morecambe on the North Lancashire coast, where they ran a boarding house. Bella had two other daughters, Cissie, who was married to Tom Fogg Warburton and lived in Bolton, and Gladys, married to Mr. Donachie (I don’t remember his first name) who lived in Scotland with their two sons, Tom and George. (When I was eight, and went with Grandma and Grandad to see them when they visited Bolton, I thought I was in love with fifteen-year old George; but before I could grow up enough, he, his brother, and his parents emigrated to Australia).

I only ever saw Auntie Bella once, when I was four. My parents and I stayed at the boarding house in Morecambe so as to see Bella for the last time, as she was dying of cancer. I was taken into her bedroom to see her. She died not long after we’d gone home.

Millie kept the boarding house going, but we didn’t go again. We went for holidays over to Ireland, to stay with family from Grandma’s Watson side of the family.

It is Grandma’s side of the family I turn to next. In an earlier story, I wrote a bit about the Watsons. Grandma had a younger first cousin, James Watson, of whom she’d always been extremely fond. As a very young man he’d enlisted in the Seaforth Highlanders at the start of the First World War. After the battle of the Somme, the Highlanders were retreating, on a forced march. They had been walking for forty-eight hours, when the incident happened which changed James’s life. He was an experienced hill walker, and when some of his comrades collapsed with exhaustion, he kept going. Eventually, though, he knew he’d have to have a rest, so he dropped out of the column, which was clumping down a raised causeway at the time.

He went a few yards from the road, but then found his feet sinking into mud. When he tried to lift them, he found he couldn’t; he just sank further. He started to panic, and called out for help, but he couldn’t be heard above the sound of heavy boots on the tarmacked road, just a few yards away. Nor could he be seen, in the increasing dusk.

He sank in deeper and deeper. Soon the bog came up to his chest, and he was finding it difficult to breathe. The last thing he remembered, before passing out, was calling for his mother.

The next thing he knew was waking in a hospital in Dublin, with no recollection of the intervening time. He never discovered how he’d been extricated from the mire, or by whom, nor how he’d been transported from France to Ireland.

Well, he was alive; but he’d had one leg amputated, and the toes and heel of the other foot. For the rest of his life he clomped around with an artificial leg, and on the other side a built-up boot. He needed two sticks to get about. When I knew him, in the late forties and fifties, he lived in Rochdale in a house next-door to Grandma’s brother Jim, whose funeral in the future has already figured in these tales. Grandma kept an eye on him. She was a first-rate cook, and made her own bread, pies, puddings, cakes, and biscuits. Wednesday was her baking day, when she made enough for the week ahead. She kept Cousin James well-supplied. Either she or Grandad would visit him twice a week, taking him home-made food, and Grandad or Uncle Jim shopped for anything else he might need.

{similar{The time came when Grandma decided she was past catering for two households, and looking after two men, neither of whom was domestically competent. She needed a rest. There were magazines to be read (‘True Story’ was her favourite), and crochet to be done. Something would have to give. Normally she was very easy-going, but when she said, “Here I draw the line,” that was it; and she was drawing it now.

So Grandad took control. His Cousin Bella’s daughter, Mildred Annie, had retired from running the boarding house, and was living with her sister Cissie. She realised that if she stayed there indefinitely there’d be nowhere for Gladys and her family to stay when they visited, so Millie was looking for a live-in job somewhere: something less demanding than running a boarding house, now she was older. Grandad decided she would do nicely as a housekeeper for Cousin James. He wrote to tell her to come over to Rochdale, where he informed her he’d found her a job. Then he walked to Cousin James’s house to tell him there’d be a housekeeper moving in on Monday. Neither Millie nor James had any say in the matter.

Grandad had not anticipated what happened next…….

Millie moved in with James, and took over the tasks Grandma had performed. Grandad still went round twice a week, taking a proprietorial interest in how everything was running. He got a shock four months later when he found that James and Millie were sharing a bed; and what’s more, they were ‘at it like rabbits’, he said. Grandma and Grandad were astounded. James had been a teenager when he’d lost his leg, and had had no experiences of women. Millie was a dowdy-looking spinster. As well as being shocked, Grandad said he was ‘tickled pink.’

By the end of the year, James and Millie were married. Although amused, and glad to have someone take care of James, Grandma and Grandad couldn’t help but wonder if all Grandma’s well-cooked food had been wasted on James. He seemed to be quite content with Millie’s idea of a good meal – a tin of corned beef, with plain boiled potatoes, followed by tinned peaches and evaporated milk. Maybe James hadn’t even been aware of all the time, and effort, which Grandma had expended on him over the last forty years – not to mention the costs she’d borne.

It was a shock to everyone when James died suddenly, five months after getting married. It was a bigger shock still to find he had left everything, every last penny, to Millie in his will. There was no mention of Grandma, no acknowledgement of all she’d done for him for over forty years. It wasn’t that she’d been hoping for a financial reward; rather that she’d have liked some recognition of all her years of hard work, and care.

It was a shock, also, to learn just how much James had left. He had always been known as a ‘warm’ man, if not downright tight-fisted; and he had become very wealthy indeed.

“It’s as if our Millie’s won the football pools,” Grandad said.
Millie smartened herself up, and developed a condescending manner. Grandad said, “She’ll be looking for another rich old man, now she’s got a taste for it. Mark my words.” We assumed he meant money…..

Then he said to Grandma, “I should never have interfered, running people’s lives for them.”

Grandma just patted his hand, and gave him a kiss on his forehead. “We’re no worse off, love,” she said. “You thought you were helping them. You weren’t to know. And there’s things more important than money.”
Grandad just shook his head.

“I’m sorry, love. I got it wrong, didn’t I?”