Aunty Lily Read online

  A loud cheer erupted from the crowded bus. Faced with a united front, the offenders, directing a hostile look in my mother’s direction, reluctantly removed their feet. The old lady sat down and, inspired by my mother’s example, pumped her fist triumphantly into the air. This prompted another roar of approval. When everyone got off the bus in town, two burly men walked behind my mother and the old lady so that the teenagers wouldn’t bother them again.

  My mother, as if channeling the energy of this memory, trembled as she prepared to launch her verbal assault upon the wiry interloper. Fortunately, the woman with the black, spiked hair appeared and gently guided Mother back into her wheelchair. “Barbara, I thought just for today we’d set up a special table for you and your daughter,” she lied, “so you can have a little bit of privacy.”

  Special treatment! My mother brightened visibly, but she turned once more to the impostor. “Just for now!” she shouted in a voice still containing a hint of the scalpel. “Don’t you forget, that’s my seat, and I’ll want it back tonight!”

  Spike—that’s what they called her, and I exchanged conspiratorial looks. She smiled her broken-tooth smile, and I beamed my gratitude.

  After our secluded lunch, John, the bow-legged man with the walking stick, accompanied us out of the dining room and was once more on a quest to find his fictitious car, which he discovered still wasn’t ready. “I’m going for a bloody smoke, then,” he swore. “Do you want a fag, Barbara?”

  My mother looked affronted and, if she had been standing, would have drawn herself up to her full height. “I do not smoke,” she claimed imperiously. I burst out laughing. My mother has smoked more that a pack a day since she started smoking at the age of fourteen. Oh, she had tried many times to give up and one time had taken to sucking on Nuttall’s Mintoes10 instead. She knew she was a lost cause when one day, after she had popped a mint in her mouth, she found herself with a match in her hand trying to light it.

  When she developed asthma in her late forties, the doctors insisted she give up, and to her credit, she pretended that she had. Although we never actually caught her smoking, years later when her gas fire had to be removed, the workmen discovered a mountain of ash and cigarette butts in the exhaust space at the back. They said it was a miracle the whole house hadn’t gone up in flames. When she stayed with us in Chicago for two months and we turned on the air conditioning for the first time, a plume of ash shot out of the vent in the bathroom covering Ben, my twelve-year-old son, who appeared at the top of the stairs the very reincarnation of Marley’s ghost.

  My mother’s caustic comment brought me back to the present. “I don’t know why you’re laughing, our Jen. I gave up smoking years ago.”

  “Right,” I agreed. Why stop pretending now, I thought?

  We spent a quiet afternoon, and just before supper I took her into the dining room a little early so she’d be sure to get her seat, and then I drove the short distance to her bungalow. There was a For Sale in the front garden—I never realized until then just how sad some for sale signs can be; this one signaled the end of an era.

  The next day I packed up the car with small pieces of furniture, a couple of lamps, a few knickknacks, and her photographs. The walls of her little bungalow were covered with them; the last photograph I took down was a picture of my father holding me as a baby. Katherine and Richard sat at his feet and Mother stood beaming at his side. John was still just a twinkle in my dad’s eye. My father had died over forty years ago, but every Saturday when Mother went into town, she bought a bunch of flowers and put them into a vase on the dresser underneath this photograph—she made a sort of shrine of it. He was the love of her life. So, I picked a bunch of flowers from her garden before my final trip to Hadrian House.

  The janitor helped me haul everything up to her room. While I arranged the furniture and cleaned out the commode with lemon-smelling disinfectant, he hung all the pictures. The photograph of my father went above the small dresser at the end of her bed. I arranged the flowers in a vase and placed them beneath the picture—they would be the first things she would see when she woke up. Last of all, I placed a small potpourri on the window ledge—it smelled of forget-me-nots, my father’s favorite flower. Then, I went to fetch my mother.

  “Tadaaa,” I said with a flourish when we entered her room.

  “Jennie, it looks lovely!” She made me push her over to the dresser where she gazed at the photograph.

  “He was lovely, was your dad, our Jen,” she sighed sadly.

  “I know, Mum.”

  “You know after Dad died, Val was always trying to set me up with someone—you remember Val, right? Taught me everything I needed to know when I started work at Winterton’s hosiery factory. I had no experience and Mr. Winterton was taking a chance on me. If it hadn’t have been for Val, I would have lost the job. She saved my life and she made me laugh. Every day, Val waited for me to get off the bus and we’d walk to work together. Well, we got to work one day, and there was a big hole in the pavement11 just outside the factory—it was wide and deep and probably should have had some yellow tape around it. Val took one look and said, ‘Eh up, Barbara, I think you’ve got yourself a man trap!’ Well, we both laughed and thought no more about it, but at the end of the day when we left work, there was a man from the waterworks bent over and fixing a pipe. ‘Eh up, Barbara,’ laughed Val, ‘you’ve bloomin’ well caught one!’ Looking at the man’s huge bum sticking up in the air, I added, ‘And he’s a big ‘un, too!’ Val and I roared with laughter. The poor man had no idea what was going on.”

  Then, my mother turned from the dresser. “Course I only ever joked about finding someone else—I was never serious. I loved your dad too much.”

  “I know, Mum.”

  “It was a blind date,” she reminisced, and love almost at first sight—did you know that our Jen?”

  “No,” I lied. “Tell me what happened.” And then my mother, who could barely remember what had happened yesterday, told her story with astounding clarity.

  She settled down in her chair.

  Well, Peggy Shepherd, George Palmer, and Albert [that was my dad] knocked on the door at Aunty Lily and Uncle Harry’s, which was where I was living at the time. I opened the door and took one look at Albert and decided I didn’t like him. In his deep blue overcoat with its tie belt and padded shoulders, he looked like a wide-boy, as we used to say—too sharp for his own good and definitely not my type. But before this thought had time to fully register, Sabu—you remember Uncle Harry had a pet monkey, right? Well, Sabu shot through the air, over my head, and landed on Al’s shoulder.

  I suppose I should have warned them about the monkey. Peggy squealed, George Palmer squeaked, but not your dad. He started to laugh, which delighted Sabu so much he jumped up and down wildly on Dad’s shoulder all the time pulling Dad’s hair, which was unfashionably long—another point against him. Sabu didn’t agree with my opinion. He wrapped his tail around Dad’s head and started to groom him. I had never seen him do that with anyone else but your Uncle Harry! It was then I noticed your dad’s eyes were the same deep blue as his overcoat. And that’s when I fell in love with him. Just like that. We went for a walk along the river, and we didn’t even hold hands, Jen. That’s how it was back then. We went for lots of walks along the river.

  She smiled at the memory and then continued her tale.

  Our first date alone, we went to the pictures, but I had left it a bit late getting ready. At the time, Aunty Lily lived on Filbert Street, the home of the Leicester City Football Club. The game had just finished and the busses were so crowded, I couldn’t get on. I was over an hour late and when I got to the cinema, there was no sign of your dad. I was wondering what to do when a bus pulled up and Al jumped off—he’d had to work late. He was surprised that I had waited so long. He said, “Now I know you must really love me.” I didn’t tell him the truth until we were engaged, and he said I’d got him under false pretenses!

  Well, we had to wait a while
for the next show to begin and before we took our seats, your dad took off his overcoat. It was the first time I’d seen him without it—and I discovered that I had been wrong about the padded shoulders. I fell in love with him all over again. It was a good job because just as the film started, a couple took a seat in front of us. The man, who sported an ill-fitting toupee, was much older than the woman; she was wearing a fur coat and clutched a large box of chocolates. “They’re not married,” whispered Albert. “He’s her fancy man.”

  I was sure they would hear your dad, but before I could tell him to be quiet, the man sat down, and the arm of his seat broke off. He fell out into the aisle, rolled down the sloping floor, and disappeared into the darkness. Dad let out a roar of laughter and couldn’t stop—even when the poor man groped his way back to his seat and glared angrily at him. Eventually, Dad was laughing so hard, the couple had to move.

  We’ll be thrown out! I hissed, but he still couldn’t stop laughing. Even on the bus home, he kept roaring with laughter until at length the whole bus—even though they didn’t know what he was laughing at—joined in. And I never stopped laughing, our Jen, all the years we were married.

  “Not, that is,” she added sadly, “until he died.”

  She paused.

  “I still miss him every day.”

  I looked down at her—she was smiling sadly and gazing into the distance at pictures only she was privileged to see. Once again I looked at her thin arms, which stuck out from the short sleeves of her blouse like chicken legs, but in them I was now able to see the ghost of the robust arms that had once been the arms of the lover, the mother, and the friend. And I knew that it wouldn’t be long before she would slip forever into the pictures and stories of her past. I put my arm around her and held her close. Oh, not to keep her in this world, for that would have been cruel, but because I knew what a great honor it had been to have had her in my life.

  Strangely, as I held her, I began to think of the bow-legged old man, the lady with the Cheshire-cat-teeth, the wiry interloper, the woman with the forget-me-not blue eyes, and even the surly woman behind the newspaper. I now understood that they, too, had lived lives every bit as vibrant as my mother’s. Their physical and mental weaknesses, like my mother’s, were a testament to the gauntlet they had long ago thrown to the world. If we are lucky, we are able to pick up the gauntlet, and the only way we can do that is by listening to their stories and sharing their memories. In the end, it is the only way we can pay homage to their courage, their endurance, and their humanity.

  * * *

  9 Wringer

  10 Once a world-famous sweet made in Doncaster.

  11. Sidewalk

  Earnest

  EARNEST: SERIOUS, ZEALOUS, NOT TRIFLING, ARDENT. According to this dictionary definition, I was a very earnest young woman. Being earnest, everything I did, I took very seriously, especially being pregnant. Obsessed with doing everything right, I was determined to produce the perfect baby, I was determined to raise the perfect child, and I was determined to return to my . . . OK, maybe not so perfect, but not so bad, pre-pregnant shape. I read every book the library possessed on pregnancy and child rearing practices, and it wasn’t long before I became somewhat of an expert. In the checkout lines in supermarkets, I would look with a certain disdain at toddlers throwing temper tantrums. Having studied, I knew that with just the right kind of handling, such scenes could easily be avoided.

  But right now, my focus was on being pregnant. Two things kept cropping up that caused me concern: stretch marks and varicose veins. I made up my mind not to have either. In an effort to avoid stretch marks, I lathered copious amounts of cocoa butter into my stomach every morning and evening in the naive belief that my stomach would return to its perfectly flat, smooth, pre-pregnant condition. The fact that my efforts were doomed to failure did not for one moment occur to me. Perhaps, I should point out that my husband is six foot three, and I a mere five foot three. Eventually, the baby had nowhere to grow but out—further out, as it transpired, than my skin was capable of stretching.

  I was somewhat more successful with varicose veins. Varicose veins, I found out, are caused by blood getting trapped behind the valves that help propel the blood through the veins. The trapped blood forms into large clotted lumps which bulge out distorting the vein so that the leg looks as if it has twisted coils of blue rope buried just beneath the skin. My mission was obvious. I had to stop the blood from getting trapped. This, I read, could be done by bathing the legs in cool water both night and morning, massaging them regularly, and elevating the feet above the head at frequent intervals during the day.

  I was a very earnest young woman. I kept to this regimen every day for the duration of my pregnancy. At the time, I taught in a junior high school where elevating my feet above my head proved to be difficult but not impossible. During my planning period and lunch break, I disappeared into the small staff bathroom. It was so small that I could sit comfortably on the toilet seat and rest my feet in an elevated position against the opposite wall. As I gradually grew bigger, however, this position slowly became snugger. Eventually, it became so snug that one day I was wedged in tight and couldn’t free my legs without the danger of falling sideways onto the floor. I was stuck!

  A group of noisy students walked past the door. I banged loudly on the wall and shouted for help. One brave soul approached.

  “Is there anyone in there?”

  I decided to ignore the inanity of the question.

  “Bob?” I knew it was Bob Westlake. With only two hundred and twenty-five students in the entire school, it wasn’t difficult to pick out Bob’s voice.

  “It’s Mrs. Munro. I need your help.”

  “Oh, God!”

  I knew what he was thinking. “It’s all right. I’m not in labor. Just go and get Luther.” Luther was the janitor.

  “Oh, well, in that case, I’ll need a pass.”

  “Perhaps you would like me to write it on toilet paper and slip it under the door?” I was uncomfortable and beginning to lose my patience.

  “Do you need a pen?”

  “Just go and get Luther!” I exploded.

  Luther arrived. “Mrs. Munro?”

  “Yes”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m stuck!”

  There was a long pause while Luther considered the various positions in which I might be stuck.

  “You will have to remove the lock,” I explained patiently, “and help me out.”

  There was another long silence while Luther searched for the appropriate words.

  “Will I need a blanket?”

  There was now a long silence while I considered the various uses to which a blanket might be put. Sensing my dilemma, Luther asked, “Er—Mrs. Munro, are you decent?”

  I quickly put Luther’s mind to rest, and he set to work. Luther unscrewed the lock and the door swung inward. I was now trapped behind the door. The only way for Luther to get me out was to take the door off its hinges, which he did in no time. Then, like a valiant knight rescuing a rather rotund princess, Luther picked me up and carried me to freedom.

  Now, this was in the days when individual classroom walls were considered anti-educational. It was as close to a one-room schoolhouse as you could get in the modern era. As soon as we stepped into the main teaching area, two hundred and twenty-five students leaped to their feet and gave us a standing ovation. The principal, not to be out done, insisted that I go home and rest for the remainder of the afternoon.

  As the pregnancy advanced, my husband, Eric, and I had certain decisions to make about the birth itself. We certainly wanted to take Lamaze classes and “enjoy” all the advantages of a natural birth. Then we were asked if we would like a Leboyer birth where immediately upon arrival the baby is placed upon the mother’s stretch-mark free stomach while Dad cuts the umbilical cord before plunging the baby into warm water to give him his first bath.

  “Lamaze begins with an “L,” and so does Leboyer,” Er
ic pointed out to no one in particular. “We may as well do it.” The workings of the engineer mind never fail to amaze me! And then, of course, there was La Leche League. Three “L’s”—how could I resist?

  At the first meeting, while mothers discussed nursing bras and the wisdom of wearing patterned blouses when breast feeding, I watched a two-year-old clamber onto his mother’s lap, turn his baseball cap around so that the peak was at the back before hoisting his mother’s sweater and tucking in. Across the room, a large, impressive woman was effortlessly nursing three-year-old twins. There was no false modesty here. Bare breasts were the order of the day. I could recognize zealots when I saw them, and I felt immediately at home.

  I read the La Leche League manual from cover to cover, concentrating for the moment on “nipple” preparation. Apparently, my first task was to toughen them up so that they could withstand the vigorous sucking of a newborn and beyond. First, I had to twiddle them regularly, which I did. I felt as if I were tuning myself into some sort of cosmic maternal radio station. However, the very best thing according to the manual was to expose the nipples daily to the benefits of the fresh, open air. I paused, allowing the image of myself bare-breasted and pregnant to skip across my suburban back lawn. I squelched it immediately, not wishing to offend the Lutheran family who lived across the way.

  But I was a very earnest young woman and if fresh air was what my nipples needed, then fresh air was what they would get. It didn’t take long for me to discern a workable solution. I discovered that if I knelt by my bedroom window, I would be just the right height for my breasts to rest on the window ledge. I could push the window up just enough to allow the fresh air to bathe my exposed nipples.