Just off the A24, in the London borough of Sutton, where sprawling suburbia just begins to give way to the Surrey stockbroker belt, sits an innocuous red-brick bungalow. Fronted by a small car park, shrink-wrapped with well-kept hedgerows and flowerbeds, that bungalow is St Raphael's Hospice. And this morning, in that hospice, my grandmother died.
In her prime Anna Frenkiel was a mulier fortis in the old tradition, a force to be reckoned with, but the blade of even the sharpest old battleaxe loses its glint eventually, and today her body gave up on her.
Babcia will be mourned by the handful of friends who survive her, and by her family. A link has been cut, a tie to the past severed. I imagine her funeral will be in the same Wimbledon church where we said goodbye to her husband, my grandfather, and we will certainly be burying her next to him. I will be missing her.
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