Observations upon one's grandparents. For Kate

Flora's paternal grandmother lived in a wonderful late Georgian house on the edge of the Mendips. She was Elizabeth, a proud and private lady, who kept chickens and made copious preserves and pickles and Flora remembered the dark larder in which the eggs glowed in the malt vinegar in Grandma's huge preserving jars. There were jams and pickled red cabbage and the damsons and plums from the old trees around the house.

It was thought that Elizabeth didn't particularly care for folks outside the family; there was respect, then, though  perhaps not liking between Flora's mother and grandma. Conversation was always confined to cooking and cottage garden plants and then silence. Flora had no memory of her mother ever visiting grandma beyond her early childhood. And certainly no memory of Grandma ever visiting Flora in her own house. This made her sad. A sort of lingering, quiet sadness which there was no point at all in sharing. It was just the way things were.

Flora's grandfather, Reg, was a tall, handsome man. Big working hands, broad shoulders like Flora's father. A man, again, of few words, but with lots of jobs for  Flora. Pick the fruit, some dahlias - in his garden, all the plants stood to attention when he walked among them - check the chickens, go into the huge walled vegetable garden and pick peas and broad beans, climb the tree and get some prize plums. Don't want to waste them. 50p pressed into your hand wordlessly as you got into the car to go home.

She loved to visit this part of her family but, as an introspective child, knew there was little to say and that they liked to see her, but would never, ever dandle her on their knee. Just the way things were. There was silence around what Flora knew to be sad things in the family: of death and separation and cancer and blindness and things involving tempers and people not being able to get out of bed. This unsettled Flora as a child and teenager, but as an adult she respected its dignity. When, over an eight year period of losing both grandparents, her father, her godmothers (one, her father's beloved and gregarious sister - the unusual girl in the family) and her mother, her remaining aunts and uncles (there were six in all) gently told her that they would most likely not see her again, it didn't come as a shock. Just sad. Sad. She never saw any of them again.

And then, there was the other side of the family. The lively, bright clan from South Wales. As a child, Flora was never quite sure how many of them there were, but thought that her mother had more or less ten or eleven siblings, with some attrition and a grandmother's tale of a baby dying at the breast - the story of which always made Flora cry. Flora's grandmother was theatrical, really rather a good self-taught pianist, would have been at home in the music hall where - and she liked to remind her little granddaughter of this - she would have drawn crowds. Instead, she managed the tribe of children as they shifted through various farms across South Wales and into Pembrokeshire as tenant farmers and grandfather -whom Flora never met- came along, too. At least, that was the impression Flora had growing up. That grandfather was there, along with grandma and her mother, Nanny - who died in her own bed accompanied by a vision of the virgin Mary in the corner of the room.

Flora keeps even now a picture of  her maternal grandfather on a dresser. He -Roland - looks like a movie star and has an intense and steady gaze.She always wishes she had met him; Flora's father once told her that grandpa was an intensely clever man, a fine mathemetician. She knew from her aunts that there had been flashes of dangerous temper - but never at the children. She wanted so much to understand and know more. When the last child grew up, grandfather left and went to live alone in Tenby, Pembrokeshire. If he found someone to love, we'll never know.

So, what have we left? Flora had thought it odd, when she married into a family from Georgia, in the Southern United States, that such interest was taken in family history, in genealogy and who was kin to whom. But of course, it makes sense. Kin is what you are. Not the whole of what you are, though. Experience, bitter and otherwise, teaches us that blood is not always thicker than water; that family is, frankly, a flexible construct. But, as Flora raises her own children, meets and is partially assimilated into other families -which is how it should be, she might say- she does think back two generations and has come to the conclusion that brooding of this nature is born of someone thrust into adulthood early by loss.

The painting is 'Grandmother's cheese dish'. 2010 in oils by Anna Vaught.