Long residence in Richmond had stripped Aunty Kathleen’s voice of any Yorkshire twang, and she spoke like a duchess slightly perplexed at the way the butler had laid the table. She was one of that great tribe of solitary women, stalwarts of clubs and voluntary organisations, whose representatives you could find in every corner of Britain in those days. I discovered from one of the nurses at the home in which she spent her last couple of years that there had once been a young man called Albert, but he been killed during the war. There were legions of women like her, forced to make their lonely way in the world, acquiring the necessary no-nonsense bustle that made it possible, but somehow always carrying a slight whiff of sadness about them. Several years ago, when I was giving a talk in Cheltenham about the English identity crisis, a middle-aged woman in the audience asked, ‘Have you thought about how much the problem of English identity is bound up in the disappearance of the maiden aunt?’ I hadn’t. But she was definitely on to something. Though they were often sniggered at, these women bereaved in youth carried forward an idea of nationality that is very hard to locate in any other group of individuals. With my mother’s unmarried sister Muriel, and Dad’s two unmarried sisters Margaret and Kate, I had a total of three maiden aunts.
Aunt Kate was accident-prone. At some point she had broken her right leg, and her injuries never healed properly, so that every time she went outside the shin shone through her hosiery in a lurid shade of purple and black. Once she somehow managed to track down a distant relative in training for the Catholic priesthood and arranged to meet him at the entrance to the coffee shop in Brown Muff, the great department store in the centre of Bradford, the nearest city to his seminary. As the young man shook her hand she felt the elastic in the waistband of her knickers break, and they began to slide down her thighs. She strode towards the table she had her eye on for tea, and with ‘Just a minute’ to the putative priest at her side, reached up under her skirt, grabbed her pants and stepped out of them. That sort of thing was always happening to her, like the seven attempts she made to pass her driving test at the age of fifty-something, at least one of which included her reversing her primrose-yellow Triumph Herald into a six-foot-deep hole in the road, watched by half a dozen astonished labourers. She was wonderful.
When we were children she often came to stay, taking us all on walks which somehow always ended at an ice-cream parlour. Once a year she would meet us off the train at Paddington and take us to the Boat Show at Earl’s Court, where we ogled floating gin palaces and she considered various labour-saving devices she might install on Kirsty, her horribly unstable little cabin cruiser moored on the Thames. She usually decided that she really didn’t need them, and our excursions on the boat retained their fish-paste-sandwich flavour to the end of our teens. Mercifully, none of us had been on board when her previous boat, Lorac, caught fire and sank – an event indelibly linked in my mind to Sir Francis Drake’s ‘singeing of the King of Spain’s beard’ at Cádiz in 1587, which we must have just tackled in a history lesson. Kirsty met her end one day when Aunt Kate asked me to row across the Thames to the mooring and bale her out after several days of heavy rain – Kate had broken her arm, and couldn’t do it herself. On board the boat I lifted the decking and was baling away when a vast pleasure steamer passed by, sending out a great wash. I lost my balance, stuck my foot through the bottom of the hull and unleashed a Buster Keaton-style fountain in the cockpit, after a few minutes of which Kirsty settled on the bottom of the river.
None of us quite knew what Aunty Kathleen had done before the war, during which she served as a nurse. Apart from the Richmond and Twickenham Times, which she read from cover to cover, mainly for the items of staggering unimportance reported as if they were the invasion of the Sudetenland, the only other publication in the house was the Draper’s Record. In the 1960s she acquired an old barber’s shop which she turned into the ‘Kate Paxman Boutique’, appealing, she explained, to ‘the sort of women who’d like to shop at Harrods, but can’t afford to’. (Harrods at the time was still considered a smart shop.) The business seemed to do all right – there must have been some shopkeeping gene on that side of the family, because Aunt Kate’s stepsister Margaret kept a haberdashery shop in Selby.
In her last few years poor Aunt Kate developed a brain tumour, which triggered what she tried to laugh off as ‘the shakes’. She endured the pointless interventions of brain surgeons with a stoicism which humbles me even now.
In early 1957 – the year that the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan declared that ‘most of our people have never had it so good’, my father took a job with a steel company and uprooted the family from Hampshire to the Midlands. With help from Mother’s parents we moved into a tall, gloomy house in the Lickey Hills near Bromsgrove in Worcestershire, alongside what had once been a main road to Birmingham. High Lea was an austere brick Victorian building, which must once have dominated the hillside on which it stood – it had the stamp of a man who’d done well in Black Country metal-bashing and would rather like people to know. It still had tumbledown stables, haylofts and garages, a kennel block and a paved yard. There were acres of garden, paddock and orchard, a vile-smelling septic tank at the bottom of the adjoining fields, and an enormous lime tree on the central lawn. Another lawn surrounded a circular ornamental pond which was drained after my infant sister had been discovered one day lying almost drowned among the water lilies. There was also a tennis court, the surface of which had been wrecked by grazing horses.
Suburbia was creeping in upon the metal-basher’s mansion, and the land around the big house was increasingly occupied by infill housing. It was a time when living standards were rising, which showed itself in the new religion of do-it-yourself. The Messiah was Barry Bucknell, a dull man in striped tie and cardigan who seemed never to be off television, instructing his disciples how to tear down Victorian cornices or ruin the interesting features of doors by nailing hardboard all over them. Every man aspired to a bench and a vice, and Dad was soon sending away for kits to make glass-fronted bookcases and a not-very-attractive workbox in which Mum could keep her wool, thread, buttons and stuff. Dad was not a very effective devotee – he seemed to hammer his thumb a lot, and he didn’t look after his tools particularly well. A corner of our vegetable garden had been sold off to another DIY enthusiast who built an entire new house which, although he moved his family in, never seemed to be finished – the man lost interest, and settled for living among piles of bricks and timber with a big black dog called Bimbo which didn’t do much except fart.
Like most houses of the time, High Lea had no central heating, and the place rang to constant cries of ‘Close the door!’ Once we had stopped toddling, all the children were given domestic chores, the worst of which was bringing coal up from the basement. Every few months the coalman would empty jute sacks of coal down a chute which ran from the front garden into the cellar. The task of shovelling it into a scuttle for delivery to the sitting room was unpleasant, not only because the place was cold and damp and lit by a single lightbulb, but because it was infested with frogs. When you struck the shovel into the heap at the bottom of the chute something black and sparkling with coal dust was liable to leap up at you.
That aside, High Lea was a terrific place. There were endless war games among the ruined outbuildings, and den-building and camp-outs in the garden with my closest friends, Paul Davies, who lived with the smelly black dog in the permanently unfinished house in the sold-off corner of the garden, and Gerald Mullen, the son of an Irish assembly-line worker at the Longbridge car plant a few miles away. When, a year or so after our arrival, we recorded a message on the new-fangled reel-to-reel tape recorder Grandpa had bought, my brothers and I sounded as if we had been born and bred in the Black Country.
My mother’s mother, who had been born in a Glasgow slum and escaped by joining the Salvation Army, once told me of Mum’s insistence that ‘Only the best was good enough for you children.’ In that belief my brothers and I were sent to different schools from my friends Paul and Gerald. For a couple of years we attended The Mount, a local pre-preparatory school of which I remember little, which probably means it was a happy place. The only clear memories I have