Aunt Joan

One of the inspirations for this blog was the book "Lost Worlds" by Michael Bywater, an eccentric and beautifully written compendium of lost things, feelings, places, attitudes and people. So I'm going to be lazy and let him do all the heavy lifting for this post. Besides, he's a much better writer than me.

"Anyone born before 1960 will have known Aunt Joan, or a variant of her. Neat, effective, cheerful. Aunt Joan's response to the slenderest of pleasures was: 'How lovely!' She lived alone in a little house on a fixed income and did wonders for charity. All her Christmas presents for the nieces and nephews and great-nieces and great-nephews were bought carefully, with thought and love, throughout the year. Aunt Joan never had to make the panic dash on Christmas Eve, nor did she ever forget a birthday. She was tiny, courteous, well groomed, well loved and lived an orderly life, never causing pain or even upset; and at the heart of this little life was an incalculable loneliness.
Aunt Joan had a secret. It was always the same secret, for all the Aunt Joans: a young man, an understanding, plans, hopes — and a war from which the young man never returned. The end. You kept going, you did your best, you looked on the bright side and remembered that there were lots and lots of people much worse off than you were. How much of what Aunt Joan was, was because of what she had lost — or had taken from her."
Michael Bywater,
Lost Worlds (2004)

I was born in 1962 so the "Aunt Joan" in this sounds more like my Grandmother who was also tiny and cheerful (though my sailor Grandfather did come back from the war.) My aunts were more the type to just give us a 50p record token at Christmas, but it was Gran who actually took the trouble to ask us what records we wanted, which for a few years meant the poor old dear was going into her local Woolworth's and buying Clash and Stranglers albums.

Download: If I Knew You Were Coming I'd Have Baked A Cake - Gracie Fields (mp3)