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MY GRANDFATHER

You didn’t see the old man did you? My Grandfather I mean. He was with us when we moved to this isolated farm half way up a Dorset Hill. We don’t get many visitors here and not many people knew that he was with us. He’d always been with my Mother, ever since her Mother died and the old home split up. That’s why he came here with us I suppose, a sort of habit and anyhow, no one else wanted the old chap.

He’d been gone some time now and I’d almost forgotten all about him until the other day. I was talking to a friend about the Victorians and how they dressed. My grandfather was one and always dressed in their style. You know, a wing collar and a dark cravat with a pearl pin, and a dark heavy suit. At least, that’s how I remember him. Close cropped hair, bushy, glowering eyebrows and a heavy moustache, always neatly trimmed but taking up the whole of his top lip and turning down a little at the ends in two blunt points.

As a young man he had been a policeman in the Glamorgan Constabulary at Merthyr Tydfil. Not finding the life to his liking he resigned and became a gamekeeper for the Marquis of Bute. Leckwith Woods and Common became his life and a rough, tough, hard life it was. He lived in that cottage at the bottom of the hill by the bridge. Right opposite Cosletts’ Farm. The old bridge was narrow and had little alcoves built in the sides so that pedestrians could get out of the way of the horses and waggons as they crossed the bridge.

My Mother and her playmates, she was a child then of course, used to spit on the wall at these alcoves in the hope that the courting couples who stood in them on the summer evenings would get the spittle on their clothes. I don’t suppose that they ever noticed anyhow but it was fun! Grandfather had a four acre field as part of his wages and he also saw to the letting of the saltmarsh on the river bank. All the traders in Canton in those days had two horses or more and those that were not working were put on the marsh for a rest. It did their feet good I believe.

But back to Grandfather and his job of gamekeeping. There was a constant battle in those days against poaching. I have somewhere a cutting from the ‘Echo’ of about eighteen eighty something reporting a court case in which Grandfather and the police had a pitched battle in Leckwith Woods with a gang of Gypsies who were poaching. This was in the days before newspaper photographs but there is a sketch, was it a woodcut? of Grandfather with his head swathed in bandages after the fight.

He was a hard man. It must have been the life he led. He cut down more than one man who had hung himself in an old shed on the Common. He once brought in a young woman whom he found just after she had drunk a bottle of vitriol. Not a pretty sight and it may have been these experiences kept him in a stern and dour frame of mind. Then there was the dog. He’d bought this dog especially to be a guard dog. It was lonely out there on the Common in those days for Grandmother and her little daughter when he was out on his rounds at night. The morning after he’d bought the dog he came downstairs to find that the house had been broken into and a lot of stuff stolen. The first thing that he did was to take the dog outside and shoot it.

I’ve said before that he was with us when we came here. Not long after that I got married and a year or so later my Mother died and we were left with Grandfather. He never used to say anything to my wife but after Mother died she used to complain about him. I shrugged it off for a long time. Then she said one day that the old man would have to go. Said she couldn’t put up with it any longer. His eyes followed her everywhere she said and it was getting her down. We tried keeping him in the sitting room but it got so that she wouldn’t go in there and I had to go in and move him.

When you are young and haven’t been married too long there isn’t much you won’t do for your wife is there? If it came up today I should think twice about it. Perhaps I’ve become more tolerant or have learned to handle my wife better. Whichever it is, that day she said he’ll have to go or she’d end up in

It was all over. I made a bonfire and burnt the remains. Looking back I wish I hadn’t but it is too late now.

What d’you mean about the police? You don’t think I murdered my Grandfather do you? He died before I was born. It was his portrait I was talking about!