A year on...

It was a year today that I got the message that my uncle Len had died. I can’t remember where I was, probably at home, it was my mum who let me know. It wasn’t unexpected, I deal with these things in a matter-of-fact way, but it stopped me for a few moments in my tracks, remembering.

I’ve written about Len here before and his wife my aunty Kate, an old fashioned couple who saw so much of real life in the way that couples did back then, far more than I will ever see or even want to ever see - war and hardship and loss and separation. Through it all though I think that they kept their spirit with a whistle and a smile and a kind word or a harsh and a gossip and endless cups of tea.

Ah, yes tea... the wine of the time.

Susan, Alison, Judith and Lindsey. They had four children, my four cousins, all girls; and their girls were the apples of their eyes, their faces lighting up when they spoke of them, eyes all a twinkle when they talked about their latest success. I remember visiting them in their house in Towersey when I was young. I’m sure that we walked there, passing the fields so full of corn, the hedgerows heavy with fruit. I remember apples from a tree, the Wicked Queen from Sleeping Beauty, jam sandwiches, best china, doilies, cake and a doll’s house with electric light.

Later at their house on Windmill Road I remember hearing Susan's copy of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart Club Band for the first time - milk rounds, old coins, watches, morris dancing, cards, berets, gammy legs, the long grass in field by the side of the house (and is that aubretia and an old battered shed?) - all back then, so long ago and remembered in a moment on that day.

A year - such an instant and such an age simultaneously. How can that be?

Anyway, a year on I remember that time again. My Uncle Len and his lovely bride Kate, his four girls who grew up to make them both so proud. I have no time for sentimentality, I am far too the cynic for that... but memory? Well, memory is what I'm made of and although I miss them both they are still both here in there with me.