Granny Kettlebridge

An early excerpt from a freshly completed novel

“Any gossip, m’dear?” Granny Kettlebridge asks me. What she means by this is “Have you bonked anyone new and interesting lately?” There is a crow at the window and we are in her kitchen, the kitchen that has been her kitchen for 79.8 years and was her own granny’s kitchen before that, and which back then probably smelled of the exact same odour of vinegar and tea and chair dust and potatoes and turned salty earth blowing through the always-open window as it does today. You can’t see the sea out there like Granny Kettlebridge used to be able to because the trees and vines and ferns out there have grown back up since her childhood when the land last lost its grip and devoured itself and because winter’s rot has not quite yet set in, but I know the sea is there, growling behind the drapery. There is never a moment when you don’t know it’s there. Granny Kettlebridge said that when she was a girl there were more people living around here: pig herds, cottagers, dairy farmers. But one night late in 1926 people heard tree roots snapping and saw plaster falling off the walls of their houses and panicked and feared it might be like December 1839 - which a few of them still remembered firsthand -  when as a special Christmas present the undercliff gave most of itself to the sea, so the people panicked and gradually they moved away or died and their empty former homes slowly crumbled and now it is just Granny Kettlebridge and her house, hanging on to the last sheer edge of everything. “They would have burned me at the stake in any other century,” Granny Kettlebridge has told me lots of times, and I have to admit that her house is just the kind that you can imagine a witch living in, with its resident crow, and Granny Kettlebridge has the fingernails you might expect a witch to have - long thin pointy ones, fingernails almost half as long as the fingers they defend, fingernails that play their part in her immense skill at hanging onto the sheer edge of everything - and their length and pointiness used to scare me when I was small, but doesn’t any more, and I don’t think Granny Kettlebridge is a witch, or at least not one of the cartoonishly evil ones that the film industry likes to ferment in the minds of children. Granny Kettlebridge is the one who knows me best, the one person I can tell anything to, and I am the one person Granny Kettlebridge can tell anything to, although I doubt I am the one who knows Granny Kettlebridge best; I come fourth in that regard, after the sea and the wind and the hungry dripping shrubs of the undercliff, and did come fifth, until recently.

Granny Kettlebridge loves hearing about what she calls my “conquests” and I know that there is a vicarious pleasure in that for her. Not that Granny Kettlebridge has been a stranger to casual sex in her life but I know that her existence could not have been more different to mine when she was my age, apart from the fact it took place on the Dorset-Devon border. “Try before you buy,” she tells me. “Give them an inch when you’ve known them a year and not an hour before.” When she says these things I know she is talking not just about me but about her own life with my Granddad Kettlebridge, who I was not born in time to meet, though from what Granny Kettlebridge has told me about Granddad Kettlebridge that absence does not make me as sad as it otherwise might have. When Granddad Kettlebridge died by falling off the cliff above Chippel Bay in 1953 everyone who knew Granny Kettlebridge - which, outside her immediate family, was probably about three people - thought Granny Kettlebridge would be lonely and unhappy but that didn’t happen to Granny Kettlebridge. Granny Kettlebridge filled the cottage with cushions and cats and - even though she wasn’t the biggest lover of dogs - one dog, who wasn’t like other dogs, and filled the cottage’s steep garden with hens and began to write romantic novels for a popular romantic novel publisher. Sometimes, she found forlorn-looking solitary men in the undercliff and took them home and, while the sea made the consciousness-expanding music of a sheet of giant wobbled cardboard, found out aspects of herself that Granddad Kettlebridge had never empowered her to discover. She claims one of the forlorn-looking solitary men might have been the novelist John Fowles, while he was out brooding on the cliffs and imagining the events that would form his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, but having checked the timeline as best I could, I am not convinced it tracks. Whatever the case, when I took Granny Kettlebridge to see the adaptation of the book last year at the Regent cinema in Lyme Regis, we both agreed that the focal character Sarah Woodruff was not without Kettlebridgian qualities and Meryl Streep wore some excellent blouses and cardigans.

In 1969, when I was 12 and her dog Cowper was eight and the nameless crow in her garden was an indeterminate age and my sister Beth was 17 and off living it up with her friends at some hippie commune over in Devon, something upsetting happened to Granny Kettlebridge: the romantic novel publisher told her that they didn’t want her to write novels for them any more. When Granny Kettlebridge asked them to explain why not, they told her that the world she and they were living in was a brave new one, and the romance writing marketing had to do its best to catch up with that world’s braver, racier needs. When Granny Kettlebridge responded that braver and racier was absolutely no problem where she was concerned and she’d in fact been holding back in her books up until now, especially in 1964’s Hasty Engagement and 1967’s The Pirates Of Seaton Bay, the romance novel publisher said that, be that as it may, some midlist trimming needed to be done, and those authors who had never progressed to the higher echelons of sales potential were to unfortunately be a casualty of that trimming, at least for now, although they would be sure to be in touch if that position changed. Granny Kettlebridge, who had written all of her 32 novels under the pen name Violet Axminster, was not left even with a reputation as a published author of fiction to show for her work. She was just an old lady, who a few unkind people suggested might have pushed her husband to his violent craggy death 16 years earlier, living on the damp brink of the known world with seven cats, a weird overattached waxy crow, 15 hens and a startlingly attractive dog. There was an argument that Granny Kettlebridge could have left it at that: she was 65, with no mortgage, and enough savings to see her out to the end of her days, even if those days lasted until the end of the century (which she was doubtful about, considering the history of heart disease on both her mother and father’s sides of the family). She derived plenty of joy from witnessing her two granddaughters, Beth and Jenny, growing up, especially Jenny, who she already saw a lot of herself in. But that winter Granny Kettlebridge proved everyone wrong: she wrote, every day, thousands of words, every week, wrote out on the cliffs, wrote while making tea, wrote with such absorption that even the whistle on the kettle was an intrusion, wrote with a lack of inhibition she’d never previously channelled, wrote in a way that made her feel like a human battery, constantly in use, except in the four hours at night when she was recharging. When, the next March, she finally looked up from her writing and properly remembered the planet she lived on was earth and it was still there beyond the cottage walls, turning, she was pleased to discover that in front of her on her kitchen table were the typewritten pages of two complete, albeit unedited, books: both different to anything she’d written before, both no less different from one another, both the work of fictional women, one familiar, one new.

Thus Violet Axminster had her sweet and salty revenge: her epic saga The Shagserpent Of Branscombe Mouth became one of the biggest selling titles of 1971 for the erotic imprint Stiff Books, with The Cerne Abbas Giant’s Naughty Weekend and The Loch Ness Bonkster following swiftly and no less successfully in its wake. Meanwhile, as the less libidinous, more experimental Penelope Chalkridge she was able to unleash the other previously locked and chained side of her creativity, publishing a series of Dorset-inspired historical poetry via a small private press based in Swanage. So it could be said that, out of the dry husks of disappointment, Granny Kettlebridge found the seeds of a fulfilling life: two steady income strands, outlets for her dreams, both light and dark, and the blissful bucolic anonymity that many other writers experiencing a similarly steady level of artistic success are not granted access to. And when I speak to her now, as an adult who knows the full story, it is with the awareness that I am not just speaking to a granny but to a stealth icon of 20th Century life. And when that same granny/icon makes me blush by asking such ungranny questions as “Was it hefty in a wide way or in a long way and if we are talking about the latter did it have any bend to it as long ones often do?” and “Before you got it out of his trousers did he walk around like he knew he what he’d got or was he was one of the rarer ones who prefer to lower your expectations then surprise you with it?” I try my best to forgive her immodesty by remembering the laws of relativity and that, to her, who has undoubtedly spent much of the week in front of the typewriter grappling with octodicks and brontococks vis a vis their intentions as regards spreading around their essential liquid, it probably doesn’t seem so immodest.

“Another musician, was it?” she asks now.

“Yeah,” I tell her. “I quite liked this one. He talked a lot but I think he was quite shy. Sticky hands and chin. He wasn’t awkward, though. Northern boy. From Leeds or somewhere. I forget now. After the second time we’d done it, he talked so much he sent me to sleep. He doesn’t live around here, though. They almost never do.”

 “That’s my girl,” she says. “You keep those musician boys on their toes, have your fun. There’s plenty of time left for the rest of it.”

There’s a big empty space in her cottage today. It’s not so much like a sofa has been moved, more like someone took away a source of heat that you’d always deeply valued but come to incipiently take for granted purely due to the progression of the days around it. I can feel the space but I’m sure I can’t feel it to anything like the extent that Granny Kettlebridge can. I am relieved to see that, if she does appear sad, she appears so in a philosophical way that is wholly Granny Kettlebridge. It is only two weeks since Cowper left her and she must miss him an immeasurable amount: his beautiful fur, his natural empathetic awareness of the times she had slid into the doldrums, his needlecraft skills, exemplary grammar, instinct for propagation and infinite erudition in the area of British history, especially its maritime strand. Regretfully I was not there at the end but she tells me it was curiously beautiful and that he is in the waves now, which she knows is the place he wanted to be. He was 21. “A good age” as they say. I can confirm it was one that I found thoroughly enjoyable.

If I say that I believe, in some ways, that Cowper was the remaking of Granny Kettlebridge, that is no denigration of the spirit and drive and iconoclasm of Granny Kettlebridge, merely a statement about the loveliness and genius of Cowper: a loveliness and genius that was staggering in its breadth, always put others before itself, and was never judgemental, even when confronted with subjects that were not to its personal taste, such, for example, as the proofreading of a fictional scene involving the copulation of two mersluts with an aquatic version of King Kong. I will never forget the way when, as a ten year-old, I ran fast, overreached the capability of my small legs with slipped down a bank in the undergrowth east of the Cobb in Lyme Regis, he selflessly carried me the two miles back to the cottage on his delicate back, reciting as he did so a selection of the passages of Wolf Solent that he had learned by heart.

A talking intellectual dog. Who would believe it, in 1982? Not anyone sane, not unless they had, like Granny Kettlebridge and me, witnessed it firsthand, and then realised that what they were looking at was not a dog at all, but something far more precious. And surely any rumour of such a phenomenon would do nothing positive for the reputation of a long-fingernailed, eruptively haired solitary woman, a writer of strange secret books, a friend of few, living in an allegedly haunted cottage, chewed on by ivy, with no near neighbours, where scrawny hens often wandered at will into an outmoded pantry. So Granny Kettlebridge and I mention it to nobody: not my parents, not Beth. These many years it has been our secret, the one that, alongside so many other matters, has bound us ever closer, the one that has become strangely effortless for us to accept, quotidian but never banal. And now his decline and departure have coincided with the last blinkers of youth falling from my eyes and a wider curiosity blossoming in me, I find I want to know more, so much more than the considerable amount I already know and have found it so oddly easy to accept. Agonisingly, it is too late. But also perhaps it’s not, because, although Cowper is no longer here, Granny Kettlebridge is, and I suspect she knows everything there is, or was, to know about Cowper. And as she interrogates me about my healthy commitment-free young sex life, I find that it is not that, but him, that I want to talk about.

I listen to the drapery flap - the outdoor version and the indoor version that he painstakingly hemmed and embroidered - and the storied growl of the sea coming through its gaps and I feel sure that, despite all I have been told, South West England is not yet deprived of him.