Purple Prose (4 page)

The house itself is somewhat austere, the decor in dull or dark colours; it is excessively neat, well organised, well polished,
spotlessly clean, kept as though in readiness for an unexpected but important visitor. But Vi's room is Aladdin's cave; fringed lamps cast a soft light on the purple brocade chairs, the embroidered cushions, on the purple satin bedspread, and purple velvet curtains, trimmed with gold fringe. There are piles of books with tattered covers, clothes scattered across the bed and on the floor, as though their owner had just tried on and discarded a complete wardrobe, and there is a shelf of foreign dolls in national costumes. I already own two like these, one bought for me during a holiday in France last year, another in Spanish national dress, sent by a friend of Mum's who lives in Barcelona. I make for that corner of the room and stand on tiptoe to look at them, reach up to touch them. Will my present be a doll like these?

‘Look,' Vi says, drawing me over to the window. ‘It's starting to snow.' And we stand there in silence, Vi still smoking, watching the first few flakes dancing on the wind against the background of the darkening sky. There is a call from below; Mum and Dad are by the front door waiting to leave.

‘I want you to have this,' Vi says, turning away from the window to give me a bundle wrapped in calico. ‘He was very special to me, so make sure you look after him. Don't unwrap him until your daddy drives in to the tunnel.' She kisses me on both cheeks. ‘Run along then,' she says. ‘Have a lovely Christmas and I'll see you next year when you will be six.'

‘So what did Aunty Vi give you?' Mum asks when we get to the end of the street.

I hug the bundle to my chest. ‘I'm not allowed to open it until we get into the Blackwall Tunnel,' I say, rocking back and forth with impatience. I loathe the great dark entrance to the tunnel, but now I can't wait to get there. As we pass through the gatehouse, Mum turns in her seat to watch as I unroll the calico wrapping.

‘Oh my God, Len, it's a dead bird! Vi's given her a dead bird.'

It is indeed a dead bird, a very large, evil-looking, stuffed parrot, dusty but intact. A parrot with amazingly realistic glass eyes and
real claws, mounted on a wooden plinth, with a small metal plaque engraved with ‘Hamish 1937–1943'. Hamish smells of the same violet scent as Aunty Vi. I adore him. Mum hates him with a passion, especially when he is given pride of place in my bedroom alongside the foreign dolls.

I long for our next visit, dream of being allowed back into Vi's purple room of treasures, about the possibilities of another special present: a doll perhaps, the tambourine hanging on the wall, maybe even the zebra-skin rug? The visit comes, months – almost a year – later, and I am immune to the kindness and generosity of the other aunts, waiting only for Vi's second coming. But this time Vi is ‘resting', just as she is on the next visit, and the next. There is talk about her rarely appearing these days, about how she wants all her meals upstairs, about what horrors may be hidden in that room now that Aunt Olive is no longer allowed to clean it.

Vi's non-appearance was a huge disappointment on these visits. I grew angry and resentful. She appeared only once more, about three years later. The same stagey entrance, the purple nightwear, the cigarette in the same holder and this time a bunch of purple artificial violets pinned into her hair. I was enthralled but determined to punish her for her absence and pretended to ignore her, but she barely noticed me, and when she did she couldn't remember my name. I was not invited to her room, there was no special present, only the perfectly nice and appropriate ones from Olive, Gladys and Lily.

Years passed and I began to rail at the prospect of the long drive to London and back, the dull conversation, and having to be on my best behaviour. Even the possibility of an appearance by Vi failed to attract me. She had singled me out, made me believe I was special, then cast me aside. I usually enjoyed the company of elderly people; I was an only child living a distance away from school friends, so spent long periods with my parents and
grandparents and their friends. They were all lively people who liked a party; many had travelled widely or lived and worked abroad, there were dinner parties and dances, and they were frequently heading off to London for formal dinners or the theatre. They danced and drank, and sang songs from the latest musicals, the men smoked cigars and wore dinner jackets, the women were frequently dressed to the nines in long evening dresses with matching elbow-length gloves with tiny buttons at the wrist. A lot of gin and champagne was consumed. I wanted to be like those old people, but I was scornful of the stuffy old maiden aunts, their anachronistic decor – the aspidistra, the minah bird, the piano that was never played. In my teens I rolled my eyes at the memory of Vi and the eccentricity of that chaotic, overcrowded purple room. We were a somewhat fractured family, my parents rarely mixing with other relatives, and they did not press me when I said I didn't want to trek up to London to see the aunts.

Some years later, long after I had moved out of home and was married with my first child, Mum asked me to go through the things I had left in my old room. Dad was going to paint it and turn it into a study. There were clothes, and old exercise books, some framed photographs, ancient toys and ornaments, various craft projects that I had started and abandoned, and Hamish, still wrapped in his original calico. I unwrapped him for a last look, and handed him over to Mum for the church jumble sale.

‘Poor old Vi,' she said, packing him into a box with my other cast-offs. ‘Oh well, they're all gone now, the maiden aunts.'

‘All of them? I thought Vi was still alive.'

She shook her head. ‘Good Lord, no. Vi's been dead for years. Don't you remember, when you were in Paris, we wrote and told you.'

What happened to that letter? Was it lost in the post, or was I so caught up in the excitement of living and working in Paris, of falling in love in a café on the Boulevard Haussmann, and walking
hand in hand along the banks of the Seine that I simply didn't read it?

‘We did think it was odd that you didn't mention it when you wrote. Vi was in a nursing home for several years, didn't know people, didn't know herself. Very sad. They're all gone now.'

I had thought of them only rarely, attended Lily's funeral, missed Olive's and Gladys's, and now they were all gone. I was appalled by my casual disrespect, my neglect of those ageing relatives who had only ever shown me kindness. I remembered the second and last time I had seen Vi, when she had actually come to the front door with the other aunts, to see us off. I knew Dad had taken a photograph of them and I asked if I could have it. When, a week or so later, he gave it to me, I propped it on a shelf and stared at it. Captured in a fraction of a second the aunts stared awkwardly back: Olive, in her floral overall, hands clasped at her waist, Gladys, her slightly crooked smile emphasised by the camera, Lily straight-faced and upright, hands behind her back and Vi, standing a little further back than the others, looking beyond the camera, the artificial violets in her hair, her cigarette dangerously close to Lil's hair. They belonged to another time, a little piece of history that I had allowed to drift away until they were gone. Olive, Violet, Gladys and Lily, spoken of always in birth order. Loathed by Alice, my paternal grandmother who had married their second brother, Len. Who were they – these maiden aunts? And what was it with the ‘maiden'? Why not just aunts or great aunts?

The older I get the more frequently I am disappointed by the way I have let so many interesting and precious people and things, slip past me when my attention was elsewhere; fascinating snippets of history, tasty bits of family gossip, telling examples of individual eccentricity, certain people who just faded out of my life. I did not pursue those questions about the aunts when they came to
me then, in my twenties, but I finally did so some years later, after reading a social history of the interwar years.

A ‘maiden aunt' is defined in several dictionaries as ‘an aunt who is single and no longer young', but widowed aunts are not referred to in this way. The term suggests a particular sort of redundant virginity, conjures unflattering stereotypes of lonely ‘dried-up' spinsters, nosey old neighbours, harpies and harridans, all loaded with a fear and dislike of women who have lived their lives without men. In early Victorian times the maiden aunt was a favourite elderly relative who would look after the children at the drop of a hat and could be relied on for her patience, her loveable nature, endless stories, secret treats and her sense of fun. But for many women born between 1885 and 1905, the term had a different meaning and would become a fate for which they were criticised and reviled. They had grown up believing that marriage was their birthright, but the Great War changed all that. The results of the 1921 census revealed that there were almost two million unmarried women for whom the prospect of a husband and children had been destroyed. They were unflatteringly referred to as ‘the surplus two million'. Many of these women made a virtue of necessity by successfully pursuing jobs and careers they might otherwise not have considered. Some started their own businesses, a significant number became writers, artists or political activists. Many simply became beloved maiden aunts, but all these women were seen as a problem, and discussions in parliament and in the newspapers of the day revealed a widespread disgust and fear of the impact of a surplus of women who would never marry. The
Daily Mail
even said ‘these superfluous women are a disaster to the human race.'
¹
As individuals, many of these women were loved and admired, but collectively their existence seemed to threaten the status quo.

What can it have been like in those years for women, many of whom lacked the education or the background needed to earn their own living, whose families couldn't or wouldn't support
them? Many were mourning the loss of lovers or fiancés, while others mourned the loss of those they would never meet, the families they would never have. How did it feel to read those caustic denouncements that blamed them for their own misfortune? For many, the life of a single woman between the wars was a desperate and frequently fruitless search for a husband, or for acceptable, ladylike, paid work, to avoid the daily struggle to overcome the hardships of poverty and exclusion. Maiden aunts and other single women in abundance found ways to live, scrimping, saving, often going without food to maintain appearances. One maiden aunt who was in her thirties at the end of the war, turned her status into a business when her adoring nieces and nephews outgrew her care. Gertrude McLean, the seventh of nine children, established Universal Aunts, an agency to match respectable, capable women with families who lacked the services and pleasures of maiden aunts. By the early 30s, McLean, assisted by Emily Faulder, who had been her first applicant, had found suitable, pleasant and dignified employment for thousands of women who lacked professional or other qualifications. The aunts collected children from schools and stations, shopped, organised parties, picked up garments from dressmakers, acted as partners for a hand of bridge and much more. They brought joy to their charges, companionship and support to their employers, and had the satisfaction and the income to live their single lives with dignity and pride.