Antonia

It was a hot Summer’s afternoon when I arrived. The nursing home was in a beautiful looking place – a graceful Regency house built from pale gold Cotswold stone. The grounds were immaculate, and the tea was laid on a table draped with a snow-white cloth. There were proper china teacups to drink from, and silver teapots, and a low babble of voices drifted across the lawns from the small tables set at a discreet distance from each other.

My grandmother was already sitting in the garden when I arrived. She looked all hunched up; her head practically touching her chest. It shocked me. I’d been abroad and hadn’t seen her for a year or two, and although I’d been told she was very, very ill, I still wasn’t prepared to see her like that.

The cheerful nurse brought me a chair and said brightly “here’s your granddaughter to see you Antonia”. I could see my grandmother wince at the woman’s familiarity in using her first name. In her world it simply wasn’t done, unless you gave someone permission – and certainly not by anyone who worked for you. Even though she’d stopped having staff of her own many years before, she still retained the imperious attitude of someone who expected the social conventions to be observed.

My grandmother answered her in Italian. I learned afterwards that it was her chief revenge. She would firstly make sure which languages the nurses understood, and then deliberately choose one they couldn’t. It was funny. She spoke at least six languages fluently and so she had a lot of choice. It was nice to see she was still getting some enjoyment out of life, even if it was at the cost of the goodwill of the staff there. I bet they were relieved when she died.

She took my hand and pulled me close so she could see which of her granddaughters I was. There were three of us and I was the oldest and most troublesome. Apart from one of my male cousins, she was the only relative I’d ever had any time for.

She was forgetful by then, running through the list of all her granddaughters’ names, knowing mine would be in there somewhere, but she knew who I was apart from the name, and her eyes still sparkled with mischief and pleasure at seeing me. We had always been close ever since I was little, and I think she was the only one who didn’t completely think of me as a waste of time.

We had a similar attitude to life, both preferring excitement to serious things. She must have been one of the first women to be offered a scholarship to Oxford – it would have been just before the First World War, and she had turned it down because she had wanted to travel instead.

When I was five, my grandfather died and she moved from Geneva to live with us for a few years. After that she lived mostly with my aunt in Oxford, but I often went there to stay for weeks at a time – it was much nicer than being at home.

My earliest memories of her, are watching her wreathed in smoke, playing patience. I loved to stand quietly next to where she was sitting, concentrating on her fingers as she snapped the cards down, looking at the stones sparkle on the big gold rings she wore.

She always spoke a mixture of languages to me too, but not in the way she did to the nurses. She would simply make sentences using a variety of different languages and at the time, because I was so used to it, it didn’t feel strange at all. Mainly it was a mixture of French and English and Italian, with the odd bit of Maltese, German and Russian thrown in. It seemed perfectly normal to me as a child.

I used to visit her in the mornings as she powdered her face, and applied lipstick. When she was satisfied with how she looked, she would fasten my grandfather’s old Rolex around her wrist. I loved that watch – it wasn’t a show-off gold kind – just a very simple steel one with a white face. Sometimes she would let me wear it if I promised to be extremely careful.

The biggest treat of all was when she would let me rummage in the trunks she'd brought with her. They were stored in the garage and I would spend the whole day there. They were huge tin trunks, all covered in labels. She had been everywhere in the world.

Inside each, it was a true treasure trove. You never knew what you might find. I have no idea how she had managed to keep it all still intact. You could put your hand all the way down into the deep metal darkness and it might meet something cold and round – an ARP hat that had belonged to my grandfather. Then would come the story of how he fire-watched during the blitz from the roof of the BBC.

Next, something soft and twisty, like a snake – a feather boa, glamorous beyond anything to my six-year-old eyes – and as I draped it around my neck, she would be off on a tale of the parties she’d been to in Rome before the war.

A small silk square – my grandfather’s travelling dressing gown – it folded up into a tiny silk envelope – and she would explain how he had used it when he was in Libya In the late forties as a UN diplomat redrawing the map of the Middle East. I pinched so much of their stuff – the lovely, lovely clothes – I still have most of them now.

In her bedroom she kept the books she’d saved – wonderful first editions of PG Wodehouse – lovely big volumes with thick paper, tiny wartime standard thin books of poetry written by the French in exile in London – each with its little wistful preface full of hope for a time when they could all finally go home. Heavy bound collections of Punch and The New Yorker. I would go through these as a child asking constantly “what does this cartoon mean?” “ Why is he saying that?” I learned so much from all those old magazines

The photograph albums were kept in her room too, and I remember leafing through the pages demanding an explanation for each picture. “Why are you dressed like that?” “It was a fancy dress party so we are pirates” “ Who is that man next to you with the eye patch – that’s not Grandpa is it?” “ No carissima, that’s Mussolini” – and then of course I would ask for the story even though I'd heard it before. All about how they’d been friends, but how he’d become a bad man, and my grandfather had carried on telling people this in the newspapers, even though he had been warned to stop, until finally, they had all been given thirty-six hours to leave the country.

She would describe how they had travelled up through France, stopping at Longchamp, “for the races of course; We went every year”, finally ending up in London where they’d spent the war. Even as quite a young child I admired the fact that she had insisted on stopping in France – not letting an arrest warrant get in the way of pleasure.

I think they had to leave most of what they’d had, except what was in the trunks. It must have been hard for her, losing her glamorous life – parties, servants. Once when I was older, I walked into a roomful of more sedate family members and they noticed me just too late to stop gossiping about all the cocaine she took then. I was very amused at the thought of my grandmother doing that.

They were much luckier than most refugees at the time. Their passports came from a country that was a part of the Empire and so even though they’d lived in Italy most of their lives, they had no problems with internment, and my grandfather was able to work at the BBC and write for the Times. She used to tell me how she had to learn how to make her own hats then, but I don’t think she ever learned to cook or clean. That was always for other people.

After the war they were off again – my grandmother refused to go back to Italy – my grandfather was knighted and they begged him to go back but she didn’t want to – instead they went with the UN to Libya, then New York, and finally settled in Geneva until my grandfather died.

When I was older and staying with her in Oxford she would take me out with her to buy clothes, and she would use her walking stick to make the tourists get out of the way. She never stopped thinking she had automatic right of passage before anyone else.

I don’t think it was intentional arrogance – it was just the way she was – slightly outrageous. My uncle was a don in a college and constantly entertained politicians, philosophers – all sorts of people. I bet she gave them a hard time at the dinner table.

And now, here she was, sitting hunched up in a chair on a lawn in the Cotswolds being rude to nurses and telling me that if she had known it would be so horrible she wouldn’t have bothered giving up smoking at seventy-five. She said it hadn’t been worth it.

I felt so sad, but also completely helpless. I wanted to whisk her away with me but I knew I couldn’t. I was only twenty-five and I had nowhere to take her, and no means of looking after her. I was so grateful for all her stories and encouragement, and I felt terrible when it was time for me to leave.

That was the last time I saw her. I went abroad again soon after, and she died weeks after my first son was born. I remember looking back as I left her in those beautiful gardens, and seeing her waving at one of the nurses, for all the world as if she were in a restaurant, asking for another drink.