Saturday 26 December 2009

This is an attempt to breathe life into someone long dead - an act of reconciliation and maybe an impossible venture. My memories of her are a loose jumble of events yet there's a static point about which they revolve where I can simply say - this was my aunt. It's no accident that I learnt of her death by chance; we never saw eye to eye and had long since given up on one another. I was a dissapointment ; she wished that I was other than I was and I in turn, hoped for an approval she simply could not give. I courted her to no avail; she was a strong character that hadn't any use for those that she considered simpletons.
My aunt Sophia was muscular and tender; physically strong but rigid in her Calvanist beliefs and therefore deeply bourgeois. Born at the beginning of the 20th century into middle class Edinburgh society this was hardly surprising, yet she had a democratic streak, refusing to teach in any of the city's elite academies and choosing instead a school in one of the poorer districts. She organised the city's Girl Guides, played hockey for Scotland and the piano in retreats for he elderly. You can see now why we didn't exactly hit it off. Yet I loved her.
A small boy needed an aunt like her. She was a sports mistress and therefore rooted in the body and quick to criticise any lapse in posture; she was also tough on observation so that to be with her was to be constantly alert. Little did she know that her lessons would lead to what she considered anathema; Art, in her immovable opinion, was a useless and unmanly indulgance.
She was my father's sister. They were the sole survivors of thirteen children; diptheria and the First World War had wiped out the rest. Their lawyer father had died of a heart attack in middle age and their mother, born in 1859, held on till 1953. My mother was critical of my aunt and laughed at her behind her back while my aunt considered my mother frivolous and vain, yet there must have beeen some warmth on both sides because every year she would come down to London to stay and every August we would lodge in her respectable but gloomy Edinburgh tenement.
I am amazed at how little I got to know about her life; she never talked about my father or their childhood or the two wars; and I never asked because in those days that sort of questioning simply wasn't possible. Even later, after my brother died, we never lapsed into a deeper confidence. She was always the adult and I was always the nephew; an unbridgeable gap, so when I paused to gaze into the window of the antique shop on West Causeway Side and saw the watercolours that I had given her over the years stacked in an untidy heap I felt a frisson of fear as if.......... but it was she who had passed away.

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