Uncles and aunts

Uncles and aunts are yet another source of confusion.  There were no real ones (apart from Ruth and Douglas, whom I’ve already mentioned) but in the forties it was customary for any relative or close friend to be identified as aunty this and uncle that.

To get the relatives out of the way, there countless connections on my mother’s side.  Just a few – the Yeovil people, the Beverly people, and Aunty Phyllis (who used to come and spend some weeks with us most summers: presumably not at the same time as Grandma, I can’t imagine them getting on too well.)  When I went to Leeds for my University interview in 1959, I was lodged with the Wakefield people, who were very kind to this lad they probably didn’t know from Adam.  I know I went out to the local cinema and saw a lovely Norman Wisdom film.  Who were they?  I have no idea.

The close friends were Uncle Jack and Auntie Babs, Uncle Norman and Auntie Marjorie, and Uncle John and Auntie Gracie. 

Jack was probably my father’s only real friend.  They were thrown together by wartime work and the friendship endured for at least twenty-five years.  I loved him.  He told me the first dirty joke I ever heard, when I was about six.  (Here it is: little girl and little boy are peeing in the bushes..  Little girl to little boy: “Ooh, that’s a useful gadget, where can I get one of them?”)  He was a dedicated photographer, and I still have some of his landscape work in Pembrokeshire.  They went on holidays together into the sixties, and he died suddenly at the end of one of those, on the way back from Italy.  Babs was just there in the background, being kind.

Norman and Marjorie were just neighbours in Watcombe Road.  I remember virtually nothing about them, so I mention them purely because I had my first sexual experience with their daughter, Christine, in the sandpit in their back garden.  We showed each other our bits.  Her older brother Derek persisted in riding his bike round the lawn, which precluded any further progress.  We were six years old.

John and Gracie were probably acquired through my parents’ flirtation, in the twenties, with ballroom dancing.  They were rich, by our standards.  I remember Uncle John as a kind, unassuming man with a black toothbrush moustache.  They had three children, of about the same age as us, and we were obliged to be friends with them, but that didn’t work for me: I didn’t start to do friendship until well into my teens, and I’ve still not quite got the hang of it.  But we all rubbed along well enough, I think.  Certainly we went on holidays together, renting and staying in the two adjoining houses at Wisemans Bridge.