Aunty Mabel is dead. The night before, I had been reading
Alice In
Wonderland to my young son, and that mentions a Mabel in passing;
I thought
then of my old aunt, and how her life stretched back to a time
filled with
Mabels, Gladyses, Harolds. Then I remembered hearing someone on
the radio
point out that there were a hundred slang words for the penis,
and none to
speak of for the clitoris. He proposed Mabel and played a record,
by
friends of his, called Mabel Rock. Nothing came of it, as far as
I know;
the word remains as untouched as my maiden aunt.
Aunty Mabel, born in the East End, died in Romford, once of the
Salvation
Army, last of a sizeable clutch of aunties and uncles. I remember
her only
slightly, when I was young she gave us sweets and small change on
our
annual visit; of late, she sat in her old people's home and got
our names
and the year wrong, a picture of the Queen above the crucifix by
her bed.
Ninety-eight fading years, fading in a small room; I can't ask
her how she
spent her life. I tried last time, but she didn't understand the
questions
and my parents were uncomfortable. My son ate the proffered
orange, and
thought it funny to be called Rupert.
A friend of mine lives in Coldharbour Lane, inland, on a hill;
the nearest
river is five miles away and the nearest coast ten times that. At
least
it's cold. He's got something of mine, something I inherited and
gave away,
something that sits in a bed of cotton wool in an old Jacob's
Cream Cracker
box. The crackerbox is covered with flaking green paint and a
little rust;
the relic within is a whistle from the Great War, engraved with
the
officer's name and rank, and a small cross.
I wonder what happened to my family, once so big and now just my
parents,
growing old, drifting, losing momentum, hundreds of miles away.
One day,
I'll have to bury them, there's no-one else to do it. My father
always
loved Eleanor Rigby; there's more strange irony in that than
makes any kind
of sense. Then I'll have to remember them; to my son they'll be
no more
than my grandparents are to me, like the oldest veterans at the
Cenotaph,
dead soon enough, too soon to matter. All those years, faded to
illegibility like ancient books forgotten in the sun-warmed dust
of a shop
window.
How much was lost, who can tell; the details of misery and pain
are so far
away, so blurred, that all I can do is feel the edges of the void
that's
left. After the fires of war, so long ago, my world is green
again, new
shoots thick on the ground. But there are no big trees above,
nothing to
break the force of the winter storms, just a gap of years where
no people
grew.
Aunty Mabel is dead, God rest her soul, and the fossil of her
long-cold love
lies in state, in cottonwool, in the crackerbox at Coldharbour
Lane.
(c) rg