Great Granny Webster by Caroline Blackwood

hopeless.
    Describing Dunmartin Hall in my grandmother’s time, Tommy Redcliffe sounded appalled by the way it seemed to have been so generally and passively accepted that the roof was incurable and could only be kept at bay by pieces of dangling string which helped direct the massive flow of uncountable leaks to the various pots and pans and jam jars in which it suited my family that they should land. Then, just as a ship is bailed out, all these motley receptacles were emptied daily before they started to overflow.
    Tommy Redcliffe was an orderly and practical Englishman, and the discouraging sight of all those soggy strings hanging down from the lofty, peeling ceilings of winding state-rooms had made an indelible impression on him. He said it had always amazed him that my father never appeared in the least disturbed by them, that apparently he saw them as normal. Tommy Redcliffe also remembered with horror that dangling alongside them there had been long sweet sticky brown papers for catching flies and wasps.
    In describing his pre-war visits to Ulster, the terrible state of neglect and the undefeatable damp of Dunmartin Hall had obviously chilled him so much that when he tried to tell me what my grandmother had been like I often thought he felt the house itself might well have been responsible for driving her insane.
    In the period in which he had gone over to stay there, Dunmartin Hall appears to have been going through a moment of exceptional crisis. My grandmother was becoming stranger and stranger. For years and years she had made not a single effort to run the house. As it deteriorated and became increasingly derelict and uncared for, she seemed totally unaware of it. She gave the impression that she no longer inhabited the house except in a technical sense, that she lived elsewhere in some troubled world of her own warring fantasies.
    My grandfather Dunmartin was in total despair. He had no talent as a housekeeper and he found it impossible to give Dunmartin Hall his full attention when he was already overburdened and preoccupied by all the debts and problems of his failing estate. He had hired an English butler and two English footmen and kept selling fields to pay their salaries, but he was too modest and diffident to instruct them. They did very little work, for they were nearly always drunk, since my grandfather was frightened he might insult them if he hid the Dunmartin cellar key.
    Having been professionally trained and having worked hitherto in aristocratic and impeccably run houses in England, these men were horrified by the rudderless and pigsty conditions that prevailed at Dunmartin Hall. They therefore adapted themselves to the point of caricature. All day long they insisted on wearing heavy rubber farm-boots inside the house, and when my grandfather feebly begged them to remove them they refused. If they were expected to wade through the puddles that were always collecting in the corridors of this house they felt it was their right to be sensibly dressed so that they ran no risk of pneumonia.
    Visitors from England were totally scandalised by the sight of these three men in the formal dining-room clumping round the table as they handed out the dishes of food with an unsteady gait that was made more noticeable by the fact that the black trousers of their liveries were tucked inside their mud-splashed wellingtons.
    My grandfather had two of his unmarried great-aunts living with him. He had inherited them with the house as if they were heirlooms, and for years they had continued to live on in one of the remote damp wings of Dunmartin Hall, not out of choice but because no one could think of anywhere else for them to go.
    These two old ladies were in very bad health. One had a cataract and the other grave trouble with her knees. They were much too irritable and decrepit to be of the slightest help to him in managing the house. All they wanted was to be waited on like little children, and they complained