GL Reading Comprehension Practice Sheet – Y9

The Two Grannies by Laurie Lee

Text Extract
The Two Grannies is written by Laurie Lee and tells of his childhood in a remote Cotswold village in England.

Our house was seventeenth-century Cotswold, and was handsome as they go. It was built of stone, had hand-
carved windows, golden surfaces, moss-flaked tiles, and walls so thick they kept a damp chill inside them
whatever the season or the weather. Its attics and passages were full of walled-up doors which our fingers
longed to open – doors that led to certain echoing chambers now sealed off from us forever. The place had once
been a small country manor, and later a public house; but it had decayed even further by the time we got to it,
and it was now three poor cottages in one. The house was shaped like a T, and we lived in the down-stroke. The
top-stroke was divided separately among two old ladies, one’s portion lying above the other’s.

Granny Trill and Granny Wallon were rival ancients and lived on each other’s nerves, and their perpetual
enmity was like mice in the walls and absorbed much of my early days. With their sickle-bent bodies, pale pink
eyes, and wild wisps of hedgerow hair, they were also much alike. In all their time as such close neighbours they
never exchanged a word. They communicated instead by means of boots and brooms – jumping on floors and
knocking on ceilings. They referred to each other as '’Er-Down-Under’ and '“Er-Up-Atop, the Varmint”; for each
to the other was an airy nothing, a local habitation not fit to be named.
’Er-Down-Under, who lived on our level, was perhaps the smaller of the two, a tiny white shrew who came
nibbling through her garden, who clawed squeaking with gossip at our kitchen window, or sat sucking bread in
the sun; always mysterious and self-contained and feather-soft in her movements. She had two names, which
she changed at will according to the mood of her day. Granny Wallon was her best, and stemmed, we were told,
from some distinguished alliance of the past. Behind this crisp and trotting body were certainly rumours of
noble blood. But she never spoke of them herself. She was known to have raised a score of children. And she
was known to be very poor. She lived on cabbage, bread, and potatoes.

Whatever the small indulgences with which Granny Wallon warmed up her old life, her neighbour, Granny Trill,
had none of them. For '’Er-Up-Atop was as frugal as a sparrow and as simple in her ways as a grub. She could sit
in her chair for hours without moving, a veil of blackness over her eyes, a suspension like frost on her brittle
limbs, with little to show that she lived at all save the gentle motion of her jaws. One of the first things I noticed
about old Granny Trill was that she always seemed to be chewing, sliding her folded gums together in a daylong
ruminative cud. I took this to be one of the tricks of age, a kind of slowed-up but protracted feasting. I imagined
her being delivered a quarter loaf – say, on a Friday night – then packing the lot into her rubbery cheeks and
chewing them slowly through the week. In fact, she never ate bread at all – or butter, or meat, or vegetables –
she lived entirely on tea and biscuits, and on porridge sent up by the Squire.

Granny Trill had an original sense of time which seemed to obey some vestigial pattern. She breakfasted, for
instance, at four in the morning, had dinner at ten, took tea at two-thirty and was back in her bed at five. This
regime never varied either winter or summer, and belonged very likely to her childhood days when she lived in
the woods with her father. To me it seemed a monstrous arrangement, upsetting the roots of order. But Granny
Trill’s time was for the birds, and although she had a clock she kept it simply for the tick, its hands having
dropped off years ago.

In contrast to the subterranean, almost cavernous life which Granny Wallon lived down under, Granny Trill’s
cottage door was always open and her living-room welcomed us daily. Not that she could have avoided us
anyway, for she lay at our nimble mercy. Her cottage was just outside our gate and there were geraniums in
pots round the door. Her tiny room opened straight on to the bank and was as visible as a last year’s bird’s-nest.
Smells of dry linen and tea-caddies filled it, together with the sweeter tang of old flesh.

‘You at home, Granny Trill? You in there, Gran?’

Of course - where else would she be? We heard her creaking sigh from within.

‘Well, I'll be bound. That you varmints again?’

‘We come on a visit, Gran.’

‘Just mind them pots then, or I’ll cut you to pieces.’

The three of us clumped indoors. Granny Trill was perched in the windowsill, combing her thin white hair.

‘What you doing, Gran?’

‘Just biding still. Just biding and combing me bits.’

The room was blue and hazy with woodsmoke. We prowled slowly around its treasures, opening boxes, filling
teapots with cotton-reels, skimming plates along the floor. The old lady sat and watched us mildly, taking very
little notice, while her dry yellow arm swept up and down, and the black-toothed comb, as it slid through her
hair, seemed to be raking the last ash of a fire.

‘You going bald, Gran?’

‘I still got me bits.’

‘It’s coming out.’

‘No, it ain’t.’

‘Look at that dead stuff dropping out of yer comb.’

‘That’s healthy. It makes room for more.’

We didn’t think it mattered; it was merely conversation, any subject at all would do. But suddenly the old lady
skipped out of her seat and began to leap up and down on the floor.

‘’Er down there! I got more than ’er! ’Er’s bald as a tater root! Wicked old lump, I’ll see ’er gone. ’Er’s failing, you
mark my words.’

When the spasm was over, she was back in the window, winding her hair into a fragile bun. Beautiful were the
motions of her shrunken hands, their movements so long rehearsed; her fingers flew and coiled and pinned,
worked blind without aid of a mirror. The result was a structure of tight perfection, a small shining ball of snow.