Tucked away in the messy muddle of it all lay a treasure. I stopped cursing, however, when I realised the letters were both sides of an unbroken correspondence, begun when my mother’s school was evacuated during the Blitz and only ending with Granny’s slow descent into dementia. Among the antiques my mother passed on to me was a pretty Georgian chest of drawers and I cursed her on discovering it to be stuffed to bursting with ancient jigsaws, seed catalogues and a mass of old letters. She died when I was a student and it was only decades after that, when my mother elected to put herself into a retirement home, that I thought about Cowboy Grandpa again. My stay often coincided with a protracted visit from one of her many cousins, involving much lunchtime drinking and impenetrable, fascinating gossip on which I could guilelessly listen in from behind the sofa. She was raised by nasty nannies and an army of ambiguously teasing aunts and uncles, some of whom had behaved so badly that she would occasionally break off a story with a maddening “ pas devant les enfants”. She seemed to have no father – at least she never mentioned him – and, like a fairytale princess, had a beautiful mother who died tragically young. I never tired of these stories as they were about her childhood. Gale’s great-great aunt Pattie ‘during her years of glory as a Gaiety Girl’.
