She vanished just as the year ended.

In fact, to be quite clear about it, my mother-in-law had died a couple of years earlier during the Great Covid-19 Pandemic. I expect she was relieved at the time to join her late husband, George – a middle-management executive in the beverage business – who had predeceased her by some thirty years. I had never met George myself.

All those stories about unbearable mothers-in-law were well wide of the mark in our case. Granny Gertie and I got on like a house on fire. She affectionately labelled me her ‘drinking companion’. She would often uncork a bottle of rosé wine when we drove down with the boys from London and went to her place in Brighton for lunch. As Michael and Thomas only drank juice and my wife, Helena, only drank mineral water, Gertie and I shared the vino. Helena was always the driver, in any case.

Gertie also shared my love of literature. After I showed her some of my poems and short stories in the early days of my marriage to Helena, Gertie encouraged me to write a novel. ‘Then, who knows, darling! You might be able to give up the day job, Dickie!’ she would say with a wink.

Of course, when those two senior teaching posts came up at Saint Lawrence’s International school in Alicante, Helena and I jumped at the chance, left our State School teaching jobs in London, and took the boys to Spain. Those were in the days before Brexit, of course, when you could move from the UK to the Iberian peninsula pretty hassle-free.

So, Helena became Saint Lawrence’s new Head of Science, and I became the school’s new Head of English. We settled in the land of sunshine and sangria and didn’t look back. Our salaries were fairly generous, and we could, with staff fee reductions, afford to send both boys to the school as students, though they did do a year at the village primary school first.

Granny Gertie followed us to Spain shortly after we took up residence there. She adored having grandchildren. So she sold her stylish top floor flat in Marine Parade, and purchased a neat, two-bedroom villa, three doors up from us in the urbanization of Capa de Oro, near the village of Benihogar, north of Alicante city. Gertie bought herself a cute, gold VW beetle – to ‘run around in’, and taught herself Spanish.

As the years went by, Granny Gertie made numerous friends in the village at the senior citizens club, practised her Spanish, and babysat Mikey and Tommo in the evenings whenever Helena and I wanted to go out to the theatre, the cinema, or to dinner with friends. Mikey and Tommo loved having their grandmother so close. It was, in miniature, just like their some of their Spanish friends in the village and their extended families.

Since my parents had both died close together shortly before our boys were born, they never knew them.

But Granny Gertie was a force to be reckoned with. Her boundless energy and sunny, larger-than-life character more than compensated for the fact that she was Mikey and Tommo’s only surviving grandparent. When they were young, she watched BBC Children’s programmes on Satellite TV with them, played Mrs McGregor vs Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny with them, and gave them videocasettes of the latest animated films in English for their birthdays and at Christmas. As the boys got older, the Disney movies and Children’s TV were swapped out for the latest sci-fi movies on DVD, and football matches on Sky.

At last, the boys went off to university, Mikey to study modern languages in Madrid and Tommo computer science in Barcelona.

Saint Lawrence’s was quite adversely affected by Brexit, I’m sad to say, as many of the English expat families who sent their kids to the school decided to return home to Britain after the fateful referedum result was announced. The school owners decided fo target a new clientele – the children of European diplomats and of Russian oligarchs – and the curriculum changed from British to International, but it was still an English-medium establishment from KG through to University Prep.

Eventually I was let go and replaced by a younger firebrand in the English Department. ‘We need to move with the times!’ said Ms Beckett and Ms Wilde, the school’s Irish-born principals. My pension wasn’t princely but it was comfortable. Helena had meanwhile been headhunted by a Spanish Publisher of School Textbooks, to write a series of Science Books for English-medium schools.

Some years earlier, Granny Gertie had gifted me her golden Volkswagen. ‘I can’t see as well as I could,’ she had told me at the time. ‘My reaction times are slower, and my hearing’s duller. I don’t feel safe driving. I’m a liability to others. Please take care of The Gold Bug for me! and ferry me to the market and the shops as needed.’ I promised to do so. It was our private in-joke that her car’s nickname was the title of an early detective story about pirate treasure by Edgar Allan Poe.

As I mentioned before, Granny Gertie died during the Pandemic. It wasn’t actually Covid-19 that finished her off, but a congenital heart defect. Under the palliative care of a local Spanish cardiologst, this progressed from a faint heart murmur to full-blown arryhthmia until this became so extreme that one night, as she slept, she slipped away peacefully, sheltering in the familiar terrain of her own bed. I was convinced that, since she had, through unrelible health, been reduced to a pale and tentative husk of her former confident, go-getting self, she simply didn’t choose to live any longer.

‘The world has become a terrible place! Dictators a-go-go everywhere!’ she would say in the last few months of her life. And I couldn’t help but agree.

Our boys – now working young men – returned home from Madrid and Barcelona to be present when Granny Gertie passed away. Her funeral was a small affair. She wanted to be cremated and have her ashes scattered off the end of Brighton pier.

We invited all her friends from Benihogar to a funeral tea party at her villa to commemorate her passing. Her ashes sat in a decorative gold ceramic urn on the mantlepiece throughout. And now, after we’ve sold her villa, they sit in their gold urn on our mantlepiece, awaiting their final scattering.

As for myself, I try now to go walking once a day to keep in reasonable shape. I’ve always been a bit of a foodie. And a tea-lover. Gertie coincided in the latter passion, and often – until her last ilness – used to pop down for a cuppa and a natter while Helena was busy on the computer in her home office.