Читать книгу It’s a Man’s Life, Ladies: A Short Story from the collection, Reader, I Married Him - Jane Gardam - Страница 7
ОглавлениеMY MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER, Gertrude, was born in the lonely seaside village on the northeast coast of England where most of her family had been born, worked, idled and died since the days when, so it was said, bad girls stole away at night from low parts of the town around Fisherman’s Square to lie with the seals under the darkness of Hunt Cliff after sunset.
Back then there was still talk of babies born with webbed feet and whiskers, though nobody had ever seen one. My grandmother, Gertrude, did once strike us all dumb by saying that her toes tended to stick together and were long as flippers if she did not curl them up. Looks were exchanged. When I knew Granny she was old but she did have some whiskers which she used to remove one by one with silver sugar-tongs. I have inherited the sugar-tongs, though not the toes and whiskers.
Once, I told my best friend at school about the seals. It was when we were paddling around in the pools in the cliff’s shadow. The shadows were sometimes dappled rather in the shape of seals at rest and I said, “My granny got a baby down here, but it died,” and Mary said, “Where d’you get that sort of fancy from?” and I said, “They go honk-honk together and fling about and later there’s a baby. With flippers. Someone said.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Ask our maid,” I said. “And there’s a bit of shawl at home made of seal-cloth. They made them up to cover the faces of the babies if they died. Most of them did. There was one baby died in our family, called Bertie.”
“Did he have flippers?”
“They never said.”
I used to imagine my solemn and ever-bewildered grandmother (she could be bewildered by a boiled egg) going honk-honk at the sea’s edge, the white lacy water running, and then just sitting for long, long hours at home. Just sitting. She and her two busy sisters.
