“What else is different about them, Grandmamma?”
“The feet,” she said. “Witches never have toes.”
“No toes!” I cried. “Then what do they have?”
“They just have feet,” my grandmother said. “The feet have square ends with no toes on them at all.”
“Does that make it difficult to walk?” I asked.
“Not at all,” my grandmother said. “But it does give them a problem with their shoes. All ladies like to wear small rather pointed shoes, but a witch, whose feet are very wide and square at the ends, has the most awful job squeezing her feet into those neat little pointed shoes.”
“Why doesn’t she wear wide comfy shoes with square ends?” I asked.
“She dare not,” my grandmother said. “Just as she hides her baldness with a wig, she must also hide her ugly witch’s feet by squeezing them into pretty shoes.”
“Isn’t that terribly uncomfortable?” I said.
“Extremely uncomfortable,” my grandmother said. “But she has to put up with it.”
“If she’s wearing ordinary shoes, it won’t help me to recognise her, will it, Grandmamma?”
“I’m afraid it won’t,” my grandmother said. “You might possibly see her limping very slightly, but only if you were watching closely.”
“Are those the only differences then, Grandmamma?”
“There’s one more,” my grandmother said. “Just one more.”
“What is it, Grandmamma?”
“Their spit is blue.”
“Blue!” I cried. “Not blue! Their spit can’t be blue!”
“Blue as a bilberry,” she said.
“You don’t mean it, Grandmamma! Nobody can have blue spit!”
“Witches can,” she said.
“Is it like ink?” I asked.
“Exactly,” she said. “They even use it to write with. They use those old-fashioned pens that have nibs and they simply lick the nib.”
“Can you notice the blue spit, Grandmamma? If a witch was talking to me, would I be able to notice it?”
“Only if you looked carefully,” my grandmother said.
“If you looked very carefully you would probably see a slight blueish tinge on her teeth. But it doesn’t show much.”
“It would if she spat,” I said.
“Witches never spit,” my grandmother said. “They daren’t.”
I couldn’t believe my grandmother would be lying to me. She went to church every morning of the week and she said grace before every meal, and somebody who did that would never tell lies. I was beginning to believe every word she spoke.
“So there you are,” my grandmother said. “That’s about all I can tell you. None of it is very helpful. You can still never be absolutely sure whether a woman is a witch or not just by looking at her. But if she is wearing the gloves, if she has the large nose-holes, the queer eyes and the hair that looks as though it might be a wig, and if she has a blueish tinge on her teeth— if she has all of these things, then you run like mad.”
“Grandmamma,” I said, “when you were a little girl, did you ever meet a witch?”
“Once,” my grandmother said. “Only once.”
“What happened?”
“I’m not going to tell you,” she said. “It would frighten you out of your skin and give you bad dreams.”
“Please tell me,” I begged.
“No,” she said. “Certain things are too horrible to talk about.”
“Does it have something to do with your missing thumb?” I asked.
Suddenly, her old wrinkled lips shut tight as a pair of tongs and the hand that held the cigar (which had no thumb on it.) began to quiver very slightly.
I waited. She didn’t look at me. She didn’t speak. All of a sudden she had shut herself off completely. The conversation was finished.
“Goodnight, Grandmamma,” I said, rising from the floor and kissing her on the cheek.
She didn’t move. I crept out of the room and went to my bedroom.
The Grand High Witch
The next day, a man in a black suit arrived at the house carrying a brief-case, and he held a long conversation with my grandmother in the livingroom. I was not allowed in while he was there, but when at last he went away, my grandmother came in to me, walking very slowly and looking very sad.
“That man was reading me your father’s will,” she said.