We loved going to see our Great-Aunt Phoebe.
She was a remarkable person.
At 86 she would sit bolt upright in her armchair, leaning forward slightly, knees apart, revealing, if you peeked down a little, just the edge of her sagging stockings and pink satin suspenders, her large flat bosom unrestricted by a bra, or pinned down perhaps by a loose garment as ancient as herself.
Her eyes, behind the inevitable horn-rimmed, would twinkle with immense intelligence and kindness, and strands of white hair fell out of her bun and hung round her lively face. A glass of port sat on a rickety table by her side any time after 6pm, and she loved sipping noisily, emitting a smacking sound and shouting out for more. We, as children, would delightedly run to pour her another glass when nobody was looking, knowing it was forbidden by our parents. We adored her.
There were two things she relished. First, a good dirty story, preferably told in hushed conspiratorial tones by a man. The dirtier the better. It had to sound défendu.
Strange, for a woman brought up in the height of Victorian prudishness: early schooling down in the village with a prissy schoolmistress (‘she looked as if she had sucked all the lemons in the bowl, that one’), sent home as early as possible to be married, which she did, to kindly Old Fred with whom she promptly had five children. But if a story took her fancy she would throw her head back and shout with laughter, like a man, then gulp down her port, smack her lips and declare: ‘Oh, that was GOOD. Yes.’
Second, she loved watching football on TV. She knew her players, the names of the coaches and all the season’s team scores. Arsenal was her favourite. If you asked why, she would draw you towards her gently and whisper ‘Begins with arse…’, so we often did ask, of course. Great-Aunt Phoebe loved a match: ‘Go on, you absolute bugger,’ she would shout in her plummy tones, waving her arms and causing her little table to wobble, then would drain her port in one ebullient gulp and shout for more.
She always smelled faintly of roses. Recently I found an old handkerchief of hers in a bag, and held it my nose: its faint fragrance transported me straight back to her comfortable shabby sitting-room with its two long windows giving onto a scrubby lawn, its coal fire, faded rugs, flowery curtains and a large TV screen with a dent in the corner, where she had thrown a book at it in a fit of fury. It took me back to that feeling of early childhood, when for a blessed time you are unencumbered by responsibility: just a privileged bystander and giggler faced with the enormity of adult behaviour.
We were proud of her. To my father’s amazement, having been a die-hard Conservative all her life, her husband a ‘gentleman farmer’ in rural Kent, poised uncomfortably in the delicate shadowland between the upper-middle and the middle-middle classes, she suddenly voted Labour in her eighties. Delighted, my father gave her a subscription to The New Statesman to celebrate. Great-Aunt Phoebe followed politics closely. She had a canny instinct and seemed to know in any situation what unseen forces were at play. ‘Wrong. Bloody wrong! Full of wind!’ she would shout if a neighbour were to utter a received rightwing sentiment. And her sharp political analysis would often convince, the startled neighbour rattling her china cup back onto its saucer and going home to share her light-bulb moment with the spouse next door.
Thatcher was her arch-nemesis, of course. The book was thrown at her, during one of Thatcher’s tight-lipped schoolmarm TV appearances, and if some new financial cut to public finance was announced, to the disabled, school dinners or the NHS, she would shout ‘You bastards! Bastards ALL!’ and another gulp of port would go down.
To us children the crowning glory, however, was Aunt Phoebe’s kitchen.
Much to our delight, any regard for cleanliness had been abandoned.
It was the dirtiest room in the house. A layer of grey film covered the cups and plates, the oven-top was caked in something sticky and undistinguishable and there were suspect marks on the walls. Any conventional cooking had been abandoned: it was unbelievable. Great Aunt Phoebe had recently discovered take-away. Boxes and boxes of delivery cartons were piled onto the floor, the shelves, the table, the chairs. You could not sit down, nor would you want to. As children, the spectacle filled us with joy. My cousins and I often crept into the kitchen and dissolve into uncontrolled laughter. We would look about and giggle helplessly at the sheer mess of it, so different and wonderful was it from our own homes, where space and standards were tightly controlled by our mothers, with oft-repeated injunctions to put away, pick up and tidy-up, clear our rooms and take off our shoes. Here was a kind of freedom, and in it we recognized Great-Aunt Phoebe’s resistance to conformity and her ability, at 86, to choose to be herself, unequivocally.
Then from next door we would hear her shout ‘Get in here you little buggers, I need a drink’, and we would race into the sitting room, eager to be the first to grab the empty glass and pour her another port.

PhR May 2023