Whatever my father had believed about the frail, declining, manageable old woman he could rob and discard, he had been catastrophically wrong.

She was the strongest person in any room she had ever been in.

He had simply never crossed her before, and so had never had to find out.

There is a lesson in that which I have applied, since, well beyond my grandmother and my father, because I think it is one of the most commonly made and most dangerous mistakes people make about one another.

My father had spent his whole life around his mother and had concluded, from all that proximity, that he knew exactly what she was: a mild, agreeable, church-going woman who deferred to the men in her family, who kept a nice house and a nice garden and did not make trouble.