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Good Morning

I’ve been recording some of the stories of my aunt’s life.  She’s 90 now and I want to keep, not just the stories, but the sound of her voice telling them.  It’s the voice: the rhythm, the intonation, the crackle of age, the way it changes colour and intensity as a memory fades away - or bursts into life suddenly, from a long-forgotten place. 

My aunt contracted scarlet fever in 1932, when she was seven, and she spent six weeks in an isolation ward.  It changed her.  She was frightened in hospital, and she desperately missed her mother, who wasn’t allowed near her. She would watch the nurses in their starched white uniforms bustling round the ward, keeping everything spotless and in rigid order.  When my aunt came home, she was so institutionalized, she couldn’t bear anything to be out of place. She used to wake up my mother, her twin, in the middle of the night, and make her get out of the bed they shared so that she could re-make it neatly, just as she’d seen the nurses do.

My aunt was the quieter twin.  The one, she says, who followed my mother’s lead.  She left school during the War, worked in a shop, and became a manageress very quickly.  ‘I wasn’t as clever as your mother’, she told me, ‘but everything I did, I did to the best of my ability’.  And then she smiled and sang me, word perfect, an old song from her childhood, called ‘Me and Jane in a Plane’.

By keeping her stories, I honour my aunt, and cherish her.