Guest post by Peter
Aunts
Does one need an excuse to blog about one’s aunts? Can I assume that enough of you had aunts who one way or another loomed large in your childhoods for you to be interested in mine? Let’s hope.
Perhaps a woman needs to have been an elder sister to become a classic, bloggable aunt, accustomed from an early age to having younger siblings to admonish and direct. Twenty odd years ago I was a having lunch at a major family gathering. Facing me across the table were three young women of the next generation, all of them elder sisters. With something of a shock I realised that I was looking at the next great wave of Dickinson aunts about to break on the peaceful shores of family life, sweeping all before them.
It doesn’t take a lot of aunts to constitute a wave. Two in my case. I’ll call them A and G, my father’s sisters. A foretaste of what was to come may be found in A’s first diary entry when she and her sister, teenagers then, returned from staying with a family in the south of France: “I have lost my hold over Gigi.*”
Aunts accumulate anecdotes, which then develop into family myths. They’re a bit like saints in that way, performing minor miracles of auntliness. My mother told me this one. When my father died suddenly in his late thirties she was left with four sons aged 10, 8, 6 and a few months and only a minuscule pension from the Colonial Office to live on, in an almost foreign country (she was a South African farmer’s daughter.) Naturally the family took her under their wing. Equally naturally she found the close embrace of that wing a bit stifling, and at one point escaped with us to a cottage in the Forest of Dean.
This is one of those strange old areas of England which feel extremely remote from anywhere else, indeed its long-settled population is genetically different from the rest of England.** When Aunt A came to check it out she told my mother she ought to have a dog.
“I don’t think I want a dog,” said my mother.
“It isn’t good for those boys to grow up without a dog in the house.”
“But they’re away at school most of the year,” said my mother. “I don’t think I can cope with a dog.”
That seemed to be that, but a few weeks later Aunt A turned up on her doorstep.
“I’ve brought you your dog,” she said.
“Oh, but . . .”
“Nonsense, May. I told you those boys oughtn’t to grow up without a dog in the house.”
He was a neurotic Corgi called Timmy. We thought he was great, of course, but he must have been a pain in the neck for my mother. She was forced to leave him alone in the house at times, and I think he may have suffered from what is now called separation anxiety. Anyway he took to racing round and round the house in a frenzy of barking until he collapsed, exhausted. Eventually she found someone to take him off her hands. Poor animal, I hope he did better with them.
Some twenty years later my next-younger brother, by then an ordained priest*, was asked to give the address at a family wedding. This he did with considerable aplomb, holding forth to a congregation including many of his formidable elders on the true nature of marriage, a subject on which they had a good deal of experience themselves. At the reception afterwards some of them congratulated him on his talk, and when Aunt A sought him out he thought she’d be saying the same sort of thing.
Instead, it was “My dear boy, where did you get those terrible shoes?”
“These? Oh, I think I’ve always had them.”
“Well, they really won’t do. What size are your feet?”
It’s strange how important shoes used to be. You could tell a gentleman by the quality of his shoes. The ones Aunt A sent my brother actually fitted and lasted him for years. She did get some things right. We may have laughed at her, but we were fond of her.
That’ll have to do for to-night. I’m falling asleep. I’ll tell you about Aunt G some other time.
* * *
*They had family nicknames, of course, necessary because of their mother’s talent for choosing names likely to cause maximum embarrassment in childhood, influencing several generations. A was Agatha Patience. Somebody must have reined Granny in over G, who was plain Georgina, but she broke out again with my father, whose schooldays were made miserable when it became known that his middle names were Sebastian Willoughby. When my grandparents decided they would be coming out to Africa for my christening my father got his blow in first by registering me as Peter Malcolm, which should have done the trick as Granny’s mother had been a Miss Malcolm, but she had decided the time had come to lay claim to a faint and perhaps bogus family connection with the great French nobility and that my middle name should be de Brissac. Arguments ensued on her arrival, according to my mother, who for peace and quiet persuaded my father to give in. But then, mysteriously, Granny had a change of heart in the middle of the service, which took place in the living room of my maternal grandfather’s farm^ in the north of the Cape Province. Just as the archdeacon was about to dip his finger into his portable canvas font she stood up and banged her parasol on the floor and cried “No! No!” But the archdeacon wasn’t moved, and carried on with the prepared script, with the result that I am now de Brissac in the eyes of God and Malcolm in the eyes of man. I expect to spend eternity hanging around outside the pearly gates while the bureaucratic buck-passing goes on.
^An ostrich farm, if you want to know. Well. There were several thousand sheep too.
**Heart-warming story. There was an ordinary chiropodist in Yorkshire who expected to spend the rest of her working life dealing with pensioners’ corns, etc. When she moved to the Forest of Dean and set up practice, she was astonished to find how different people’s feet were. York was a Viking city in the Dark Ages, and there’s still a lot of that blood in most old Yorkshire families, whereas the Forest of Dean, in Gloucestershire near the Welsh borders, isn’t on the way from anywhere to anywhere and hasn’t seen much by way of invasions. Even marauding Welshmen left it alone.^^ So it has a very stable, long-settled population. Our chiropodist put two and two together and wrote a paper on the subject for a technical foot-magazine. An archaeologist working on a burial site somewhere else in England saw it and asked her to come and have a look at the feet of his skeletons, and a whole new career opened for her. So she’s is now a world authority on the subject– there must be a word for it – palaeopodanalysis? – travelling to interesting places to pass judgement on ancient metatarsi.
(Well, I find it heart-warming.)
^^ Killing a Welshman wasn’t legally murder in the border city of Chester.+
+ I thought only if you used a longbow. –ed/hellgoddess
* Anglican priest. He’s married and has a family.
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