I was thinking about my scariest great-aunt, Aunt W. She was my mother's aunt and I only ever knew her as a frail looking, little old lady who survived on sweets, cigarettes and sherry into her nineties. She never married, but was in touch with her brothers and sisters and their families and was a terror. She had that knack of looking someone up and down and saying exactly what would reduce them to a puddle of embarrassed humiliation. She terrified me, and the rest of the family tiptoed around her. She wasn't a church goer, but otherwise was one of those 'old ladies in hats' that I wrote of. She had a mind like surgical steel and a capacious memory and didn't mind watching people squirm.
According to the family, she started work when she was sixteen, keeping the books for a family firm. She never left. She kept working there well into her seventies and I believe she very quickly became the 'office dragon' which no-one dared cross, intimidating three generations of the family. The trouble with employing someone like Aunt W was that after a few years, she knew all the secrets. She knew where things had been stashed ten years ago and could remember the supplier and the costings. She was an extremely useful office dragon. After she retired, she helped her sister run a wool shop and took on all the reps who had had an easier ride with Aunt C.
Aunt W was a knitter. She loved intricate Aran patterns, the ones with instructions that look like algebra with lots of cables and panels - the ones that I don't even consider trying! The sort that look like Chris Evans' sweater in 'Knives Out'. Except she didn't just follow a complicated pattern. Instead she would take a panel with a favourite cable from one pattern, a particularly interesting cable from another pattern, and then take the sizing from a third, adapting the stitch counts and repeats as she went. She was very good with numbers, the sort that runs their eyes over a column of numbers and just jots the correct total at the bottom without effort. She was quicker than the salesman demonstrating adding machines when they first came out.
When I thought about her, I realised why there were fewer of these formidable ladies around. If she had been born in my generation, she would have gone to university and ended up running departments, starting a business or researching something complicated in labs. They have a place in society that is more than directing their formidable energy into the church tea rota.
Today has been quiet, with all that nonsense continuing. It's hard to do anything as there is a lot of pain. On the bright side, I've been able to hang out with bear between his lessons, and he's been great company.
Hugs and good health to all.
Very much enjoying your family reminiscences. There did seem to be a time when old ladies existed on sweet drinks, fags and mints, with maybe the odd small tin of salmon or a pack of Mr Kipling french fancies thrown in for Sunday tea. When I stayed with my paternal grandparents as a small child (my grandmother was the dragon of the family but she did it with passive aggressiveness) we used to visit their neighbour, the charmingly-named Mrs Merry, who was considerably older, for tea. I was always dispatched, almost at once, to the local corner shop for a small sponge cake, cigarettes and a quarter of everton mints. I don't think Mrs Merry was capable of getting down the steep hill to the shop, or back up it for that matter, so goodness knows where the rest of her sustenance came from. She was a very sweet soul, going blind; you could track the progression of her disease by how much of the rooms in her house were clean. As she got worse the tide of dust and mess closed in on her.
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