During our first years at Roses, while I was still capable of town-bred speculation and analysis, I used to wonder if her detachment sprang from a contained and despairing diffidence— if, having failed so pitiably to rear her own children, she had made some violent vow not to meddle with mine. Later, seeing her detachment persisting, quite unchanged, under her grandchildren’s affection, I came to suppose her dislike of her son’s marriage perpetuated in a stoical disapproval of the fruits of it—for she was completely a Stoic; in all the years I lived under her roof, I never heard her utter a regret or an aspiration. And at other times I had the simple and sentimental thought: She has lost all her children; she dares not love again. In spite of this detachment—or perhaps because of it—her relationship with her grandchildren was as easy as the relationship of sea and seaweed. We think of children as being our dependants; at best this is only a half-truth. The child is a social tyrant, imposing on its elders an obligation to conform, and as a rule the elderly, being on the outermost and most provincial rim of the child’s society, transform themselves the most slavishly, and climb downward, so to speak, in a headlong flurry to be accepted. The children’s grandmother was as equalitarian among my children as though she were another child. She spoke to them, even to the youngest, without a change of voice or manner, and bargained with them in such matters as winding her wool or stripping the gooseberry bushes as sternly as though 28they were horse-dealers. They, in turn, bargained with her and, by measuring their wits against hers, came to know her as confidently as Job understood the Daimler and the tides. In spite of her threescore years and ten, she was as active as a hound. It was an extraordinary sight to see them playing hide-and-seek in the orchard—the tall old woman running with her grey head stooped under the lichened boughs, or folded away in some narrow hiding-place, her eyes blazing with excitement. After a while, with a fickleness that matched the fickleness of a child, she would say curtly, ‘That’s all,’ and walk out of the game without a trace of fatigue, for she played to please herself, not them. Even in that most grandmotherly role of storyteller, she retained an egoism of artistry. It was she who chose the stories; it was to her own ear they were addressed, or perhaps to the ghost of her unsurmisable childish self seated among my children, who listened with critical ease to her narratives, as a cultured audience listens to a first-rate performer. ‘Nothing too much.’ It is, I believe, a Stoic maxim; at any rate, it is a canon of classical performance, and she unfailingly observed it. I never heard her carried away into overdramatization or false emphasis. Her ghosts appeared without those preliminary warnings, lowered tones that say ‘Here comes the ghost,’ as stentorianly as the major-domo announces ‘His Grace the Duke of So-and-So’; the squeals of the little pigs were related, not mimicked; her bears growled as a matter of course. Listening one evening to the dignified inflections of the Wolf Grandmother replying to the inquiries of Little Red Riding Hood, I realized that this was, in fact, the lot 29of my children: they had a Wolf Grandmother, a being who treated them with detached benignity, who played with them and dismissed them and enjoyed them without scruple, and would, at a pinch, defend them with uncontaminated fury. Her eyes were large the better to watch them with, her ears long the better to hear them, her claws sharp the better to tear—by an accident of kinship—not them but the village of St Keul, the malevolence of the sea, the Jesuitry of the bedtime chocolate.