The bird looked dead to me, but my grandfather lined an old box with straw, placed the tiny bird inside and closed the lid.
‘We need to remove him from all the terrors of the world for a while, let his little body recover. You know, it’s a very good thing for an animal to hide if he’s injured or in danger. All the clever animals do it. He crawls into the tiniest space he can find and makes his world very small. It’s a natural thing, when you’re very scared, to make your world very small indeed. The trick is to understand when the danger is gone, to be very brave and let the world be big again, or else there may as well be no world at all.’
The next morning, when I came downstairs, my grandfather was peeking inside the box. He ushered me over.
‘He’s alive, but he’s hungry. Susannah, go outside and dig for worms. We’ll cut them up and feed him.’
I ran outside in a frenzy and dug for earthworms by the rosebushes with my bare hands. I felt like a hero – we had saved something! I found at least three squirming worms and came running back indoors with them wriggling in my hands.
My grandmother screamed on sight. ‘What are you doing with those!’
‘Shhh, woman! We’re feeding the dunnock,’ said my grandfather. ‘Well done, Susannah! We’ll give him the breakfast of a king and let him have his freedom – off to his new world.’
‘Good grief, Andrew! Susannah outside on her hands and knees like a dog, digging through the earth. Whatever will people think!’
‘I doubt very much that people will think anything at all.’
Grandmother had a very different view: she was adamant my world should remain small. Which was strange, considering how preoccupied she was with the notion that everyone was watching us. Who even were these people? My initial closeness to my grandmother didn’t last. I sensed her disappointment in me and responded with sullen insolence. When she brushed my hair, she’d complain that it was too thick and coarse – quite impossible. I guess I had his hair. I swear she would start the brush at my eyebrows on purpose and scrape my forehead with the bristles. The more I complained, the harder she hit me with it. My grandfather turned a blind eye for a peaceful life most of the time.
When I put a foot wrong, which was often – like when I was caught squirrelling bread underneath my bed, an old habit from being hungry, or the time I went missing in the village for hours because I’d found a litter of kittens – she would blame the otherness in me.
‘There’s too much of him in her. I see a lot going on behind those black eyes,’ she’d say.
‘Nonsense! They’re eyes – what colour would you have them be? Pink?’ my grandfather would say.
Or she’d make innumerable comments on how I needed to be something other than what I was. ‘Look how tall she is already! Who will dance with her if she keeps growing like this? Name one boy in the village who looks likely to outgrow her at this pace. Oh, it’s a worry.’
‘I’ll have to dance with her then,’ my grandfather countered. ‘She gets her height from me. We’ll look far and wide to find you a husband – Sweden, Norway, the land of the Vikings. We’ll send for a nobleman, Susannah. Someone tall enough and good enough.’
‘Stop it, Andrew, you’ll give her ideas.’
‘How can that be a bad thing?’
‘A girl should be humble and modest.’
‘This girl should know her worth, at least to me.’
‘You’ll turn her into a boastful creature, and no one will want her then.’
‘Good. Then she’ll have to stay with her old granddad for ever. Won’t you, Susannah?’
One day I committed the great crime of being the only girl among a group of boys playing blind man’s buff, and she had found me falling on top of a boy in my efforts to grab hold of him. We were only playing, but she dragged me home and beat me until the handle of her wooden paddle snapped. Even the old charwoman burst into tears and begged her to stop. When my grandfather came home, he told her she was never to beat me again. She told him that was the day he gave me permission to defy her.
I didn’t hate my grandmother; I found her fussy, particular and a slave to silly rules and regulations that had no purpose. She was obsessed with pretence and impressions, even though no one was watching. My grandfather and I were more alike. I don’t think my grandmother ever recovered from her second heartbreak: that the child she had rescued and brought home was no replacement for the first. I had turned out very different to her fey little Christabel, my mother. I was tall and clumsy, had an opinion on everything, and was half whatever my father had been, which could only be terrible. This badness, she told me, ran through me like black tar, thickening with age.
I thought my grandfather immortal. I never knew him to be sick or complain of being tired or aching. He was six foot four and always wore a topper. He refused to apologise for his height, but he didn’t use it to intimidate. He insisted I go with him on his work for the Salvation Army, so I could bear witness to what happened to women who made bad decisions. On account of being in the Salvation Army, he was opposed to the concept of the workhouse and its method of misery and public shame as a form of social control. He subscribed to the belief that, merely by being unfortunate enough to find themselves poor, people deserved charity and compassion. Several times a month we would stand outside
