My grandmother was thin and brown-leathery and for years I thought she was a witch. Her room was right at the top of her tall, narrow house and she rarely left it, but somehow, she always knew when I’d dropped a cup or if I’d dawdled on the way back from the shops or stopped to buy myself a rare bar of chocolate.

Her voice, with that imperious rasp, would drift down the stairs.

‘Jane, come here at once,’ followed by the tinkle of her bell, demanding my instant presence.

I hated that bell. Nearly as much as I hated the seagull. But not as much as I hated her.

She was only one woman but I might as well have been toiling away in a large hotel, the amount of work she caused. Clean sheets every day. Whole herds of ghastly china animals to wash several times a month. Furniture to be polished – and with the old-style wax polish too, not the permanent spray-shine you can get these days. The windows were to be done every month – because she wouldn’t have stay-clean SmartGlass – and despite most of the rooms being shut up and never used, they still needed cleaning from top to bottom every month. Every now and then I would try missing one but she always knew. I never found out how.

I thought things would be easier after I left school because there would be more time for her insatiable demands, but that turned out not to be the case. There were just more of them. Her insatiable demands expanded to fit the time allocated. She could have had an army of servants and every single one of them would be as overworked and tired as I was.

My grandmother still left the house occasionally. She went to church on Sundays where, presumably, she harangued the Almighty for failing to wipe everyone not white, middle-class or English from the planet. With extreme prejudice. You always felt she was disappointed that God had confined himself to smiting only the firstborn of Egypt when he could, with just a little more effort, have wiped out the entire country. That would have taught them a lesson, wouldn’t it?

On the third Tuesday of every month, she was collected by someone who almost certainly was unable to get out of it and taken to the Social Centre a couple of miles away, where she found fault with everyone and everything, consumed every mouthful of a lunch that was hardly worth eating and was returned home, refreshed, invigorated and complaining every inch of the way.