My mother calls this week with unwelcome family news. My poor aunt has had a stroke, although, alas, there is not much we can do to help. Our relative lives many thousands of miles away in Texas.
She has been there for nigh on seventy years and it is a romantic tale. Auntie Pat crossed the pond as a GI bride, one of a hundred thousand British women who married American soldiers and airmen after the second world war.
These girls must have set off with such high hopes of adventure. They dreamed of living the American dream – and my aunt later returned home to visit everyone. My grannie used to tell the tale of how she was wearing a large fur coat and had another in a bag for her.
It gave a touch of post-war glamour to a country more used to queues and restrictions. Food, clothes, petrol – all these things continued to be controlled here for several years after the war. Indeed, rationing only ended completely in 1954. That’s just two years before I was born.
And now the cat is out of the bag. Yes, a very big birthday looms and there will, no doubt, be more on that next week. It is a fair milestone and I was going to go into mourning. But now I say better to be 60 and the proud possessor of a bus pass, than to be 59 and have nothing. Far nicer to get concession rates at cinemas, than pay full whack…
Oscar Wilde may have famously declared that one should never trust a woman who tells you her real age: “a woman who would tell you that would tell you anything!” Frankly, there is no point in hiding things.
Happily, my aunt is now recovering across the Atlantic. What’s more, the serious shaking she has suffered from for the past ten years seems to have abated. Perhaps one medical condition has miraculously sorted out another.
I call my daughter to keep her up to date with that and other gossip. It is seven in the evening and I chatter away. The chief has been on a photographic course. Yet another log burner has been installed at Clan Gregor house. The frosts have killed off the last flowering pansies. Importantly, the MacNaughties have, for once, managed to stay out of trouble…
I ramble on for a good half hour, as mothers do. Finally, she timidly butts in. “Mum, I don’t want to interrupt, but is it alright if I call you back tomorrow? I’m supposed to be going out in ten minutes.”
I forget. It is Saturday night. She is London and, unlike the older ones among us, she has a night life. The chief and I once had one of those. Now the height of excitement is a tray supper and a curl up on the sofa, doggies squashed between us. Old age?! Bring it on…
