On that visit it was obvious that Gran was finding it hard looking after Snowy so when I offered to keep him with me she agreed. I’d cried behind my sunglasses as I watched Gran get on the train without her beloved dog, pulling her wheelie suitcase, and I didn’t stop worrying until she rang later to say she was home safely.

But just three days afterwards Gran called me in a panic to say she’d lost the dog and I had to remind her gently that Snowy was living with me and Tom now.

The final thing that really did it, that made me ring Mum and tell her everything, was when one of Gran’s neighbours, Esme, contacted me.

‘It’s your gran, lovely,’ she’d said. ‘She left a pan on to boil dry. It was lucky I’d popped over – she could have burnt the house down.’

When I confessed my concerns to Mum, she flew back from Spain and whisked Gran off to the doctor. After that things happened quickly – but Mum always got things done, she was just that kind of decisive person – and a private nursing facility was found for Gran, not far from where she’d lived in the Bristol house with the garden that I will always think of as home.

I pull into the spacious car park outside the front of the huge grey Gothic-looking building called Elms Brook, which makes it sound more like a retreat than a care home. Although Mum said it used to be an asylum with bars at the window. But it was nice, Elms Brook. It was mid-range price wise, although Gran still had to sell the house to pay for it. I swallow a lump in my throat when I remember how I’d felt packing up her things and clearing out her home.

It was in one of my grandmother’s more lucid moments, last November, when she told me and Mum about the cottage. This was the first time we even knew of its existence.

‘It’s in your name, Lorna,’ Gran had whispered, leaning forwards in her high-backed chair and holding on to Mum’s hand. ‘I transferred the deeds ten years ago.’ And I had marvelled at Gran’s astuteness. By putting the cottage in my mum’s name it wouldn’t have to be sold to pay for Gran’s care.

Afterwards, as Mum and I stood outside the care home saying goodbye, Mum, shivering in her bright orange coat, had turned to me and said, ‘I always knew my mother was a wily thing, squirreling her money away. She would have bought that cottage as an investment.’ She blew on her hands. ‘Anyway, I don’t want it. It’s yours, if you’d like it. I know you hate living in a city.’ And it had shocked me because, for once, I felt my mother really understood me.