Gregisdead121 ’s Reviews > Great Granny Webster > Status Update

'' Even missing
him was futile, for it was like missing a foreign country which one had
never visited and never would. No anecdotes or reminiscences from his
contemporaries could ever give him a face. ''

I missed my
father. Missing him, I realised that for me he would always be lost in a
much more serious and final way than Aunt Lavinia and Great Granny
Webster could ever be. Like someone born before the invention of the
camera, he had disappeared too early for my memory to have been able to
form any device that could retain him as a distinct outline.

Despite the
humiliations of extreme old age, her sense of the worth of her own identity
was solid because it had become inseparable from the hallowed stability of
her own unvarying routines. Even if one happened to dislike both her ways and her values, because she saw herself as too highly placed and well-armoured to need to care about vulgar criticism she remained in a sense the winner.

But their laughing nostalgia when they remembered how someone in their set had been sick on the floor, or passed out, or insulted a stranger, or crashed his girl-friend’s car, never could counteract my feeling that what they now remembered as precious moments must also have been in many ways unpleasant. This mood was too fragile to be resurrected many years after it had suffered a smoke-like dispersal.

Sons of aristocratic parents, they had formed a fashionable little clique which was selective in its membership and comprised of leaders and followers, like a gang. They seemed to have acquired a sense of strength and superiority from the pooling of energies, which is the appeal of gang-life.

“The sun looks very odd to me today,” she said. “It’s like meeting some
old friend one went to school with and never quite expected—or in some
way never hoped—to meet again.”

She believed in having “fun” as if it was a state of
grace. Taking nothing seriously except amusement, she caused very little
rancour, and although she was considered untrustworthy and wild and was
reputed once to have gate-crashed a fashionable London party totally naked
except for a sanitary towel, she managed to slip in and out of her many
relationships, she invariably described as “divine,” like an expensive eel.

"When Great Granny Webster used the word “nowadays,” she always
stressed and separated each syllable and managed to make it sound like
some lethal poison which was responsible for destroying everything in the
universe that she had once found a little good."

I like to think that if you start to suddenly see a book appear in your life, randomly , you should read it. This has been that book.