SCANDINAVIAN CHILDREN CALL their maternal grandparents Mormor and Morfar and their paternal grandparents Farmor and Farfar. It is a neat and simple system and avoids confusion when you are referring to your forebears. My mother was a Dane brought up in Sweden and with a Swedish passport, so doubly Scandivanian, and to me her parents were Mormor and Morfar.
They lived in Stockholm, then in Copenhagen and came to London in 1905. Morfar who was a painter, carpenter and inventor and mad about cars, made a lot of money selling cars, lost it again and then made a bit more. By the time he was my grandfather, he was an elegant old man with white hair and beard who possessed two cars of his own, an ancient box-shaped Fiat and an even larger Opel, in one of which he used to visit us on Sunday afternoons to talk to my father about all the people who were swindling him out of what little money he had left. One of these, by chance, lived in a house visible from our windows. Morfar would shake his fist in the direction of this house, uttering imprecations in his execrable English: ‘He schwinded me!’ He boasted of being trilingual in Danish, German and English and he may have been but I suspect he was coherent only in Danish.
Slender, beautiful and humourless, Mormor expected deference from all, especially her children and grandchildren. She used to say that Morfar had only married her for her dowry, pitifully small though it was, something I doubted as fifty years later she was still extremely good-looking. She ruled him with a rod of iron, literally with a rod with which she poked him when she wanted him to fetch something for her. I remember her mainly from her smothering yet somehow unfeeling hugs and her refusal ever to let me play her piano, while my other grandmother would have let me play hers all day long.
Ruth Rendell is a crime novelist who also writes as Barbara Vine. Many of her books have been adapted for film and television. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded the CBE in 1996 and has been a Life Peer for twelve years.