20 Elsie and the others

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” said Alice.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the cat. “We’re all mad here.”
Lewis Carroll

Some people’s families come up to scratch. Some don’t. And some lurk in those shadowy areas in between the bad and the good. Like mine.

On Dada’s side it’s hard to keep track of who’s who. Some of them I only meet at their funerals. Others are part of the standard entertainment I am offered when parked out at their various domiciles during the interminable summer holidays.

Not that I’m complaining. Anything is better than a week with Mama’s elder sister and her finicky ways and pathological hatred of children (especially me).

Dada’s relatives, many and various as they are, are for the most part good sports, with the exception of the witch-dragon. But that doesn’t mean I would choose them all as relatives.

This summer, I am being farmed out to Dada’s younger brother Evan, his wife Nancy and their three children, who are all younger than me. I don’t really want to go, but I pretend to be excited because I realize gong away has its good points, such as not being subjected to Mama constantly telling me to do something useful like weeding the garden. Dada is no longer able to work and he is often too weak to do much else than sit or lie around. It behoves me to be a model daughter, I am told.

So I put on a show of obedience and before you can say Jack Robinson, I am being shown where my bed and empty drawer are in the three up three down house somewhere in the Welsh hills, which Mama is scathing about because it is a mere council property.

The eldest of my three cousins is a little boy, very clever and snooty, and not interested in girls. In fact, he hates them, and makes no secret of the fact. The middle child is a girl. She has just about started school, and she doesn’t go in for small talk, so an icy silence pervades our relationship. The youngest child is a baby boy, who communicates in gurgles and burps but fortunately spends most of his time sleeping. Faced with this choice of companionship, I settle for hanging around my aunt in the kitchen, even though it often means doing boring things like drying the dishes or stirring the custard.

Uncle Evan gets up and goes out to the bank every morning. I understand he counts the money there. He doesn’t seem to bring much of it home, though. Life is very Spartan, and if I want something to eat or drink, I have to ask for it. I take consolation in the fact that my cousins do, too.

Auntie Nancy is a fanatically busy person. She’s one of those people who actually look for things to do. I think she does that to stop herself thinking about what she really would like to be doing. I don’t think she ever sits down, except at mealtimes. She’s the guardian of the pantry, the laundry, the furniture, the garden, the neighbours, my cousins and not least, my uncle.

On Sundays they always sleep late, which is even more boring than getting up early to clean the house. I never sleep late. I wander around after getting up. Because of his illness, Dada has been segregated from Mama for years, and I have quite got used to going from Mama’s bedroom to Dada’s bedroom on Sunday mornings, because that way I can wangle double pocket-money, most of which now goes on chocolate-coated biscuits called wagon-wheels, which come wrapped up separately in shiny paper and are sold at the newsagent’s I pass twice every school day.

An obvious reason for Dada having his own room is that he spends most of his life in bed and is catching. I am told it’s what the doctor ordered. So whatever people say, it’s not because they are not friends and at least that’s not my fault. Surely they would have told me if that was the case?

When on this particular Sunday in August I wander into my aunt and uncle’s bedroom, I am astonished to see them in the same bed. I have not the slightest notion of what goes on between the sheets of grownup beds, but I have a strong sense of foreboding, and try to back out of the room unseen. To no avail. They not only see me, but actually invite me to join them. I am acutely embarrassed.

"Come, on. don’t be shy!” they call in friendly voices, and I clamber reluctantly down the middle of the bed and squeeze in between them, taking up as little space as possible, with my arms pressed closely along the sides of my body and my feet turned inwards. So great is my discomfort that I also take up very little of the air around me, and I speak not a word. After ages and ages of them snoozing peacefully on either side of me, with me stretched out like a corpse down the middle, I declare that I need to go to the toilet, and make my escape. After that I keep to my room until I hear people pottering about.

One of the consolations of visits to these relations is having the chance to visit other more congenial relatives just up the road who are a tiny bit weird but always give me a good welcome. The little Welsh hill town is full of my relations, and two of them live in much grander houses than the one I am staying at. One of them is Dada’s eldest sister Elsie, a very strange but kindly person, who shared the family out with Jane and brought the younger ones up on shoestrings when they all, that is all fourteen children, became orphans, The other relations I like are Dada’s eldest brother Rodney and his wife Millie, but I should not forget to mention Henry, though his slobbering kisses (that Mama hates and says are unhealthy) are to be avoided if possible. I can’t remember where he lives and I think that’s because I am not allowed there on my own, as if I would want to go.

I like Elsie the best. She has the makings of a fine beard that she fortunately keeps shaved. Elsie spends a large proportion of her summers knitting vast woolly combinations for the winter. I can’t imagine anyone wearing such a garment, but I am assured that she does. Elsie’s best character trait is that she can always be relied on to provide a hungry niece with a square meal because she firmly believes in the therapeutic value of food. Elsie has a massive Welsh accent and a speech defect that may or may not be caused by faulty dentures. Her ‘ell’s are always preceded by ‘ech’s, which makes it quite hard to decipher what she in saying, and the squelching sound accompanies all the vowels like in “I’m Echlsie.Wech’ll cook chliver today. Chlovechly chlavour. Have some chlemon juicechwile we’re cooking it, chlove.”

No, Elsie isn’t the best; she’s the second best, though her hospitality is brilliant. If I had to choose, I really would prefer Millie, who is literally out of this world. I often find excuses to visit her.

Millie is someone after my own heart. She is an ageless source of inspiration, a living muse, a throwback to Greek theatricals. When you go into her house, you usually have to go round the back through a wilderness of a garden and up to the French doors, because nobody ever hears the doorbell. Millie is rather deaf and avoids leaving her chair for any but the most pressing reasons. Uncle Rodney still does something very scientific and isn’t home during the day. Because Millie hates leaving the house, she never goes anywhere much, not even to do the shopping. Most of it is ordered on the telephone in stentorian tones that can probably be heard by the grocer without the headset. The produce is delivered personally by him, and he usually finds her having her all-day breakfast in the sunny dining-room looking out over the chaotic back yard.

The most curious part about the dining-room, and indeed the whole of the house, is the unfinished state of its furnishings. It’s as if they had just moved in. There is a large rolled-up carpet straggled diagonally across the dining-room floor, and lots and lots of boxes stacked up in the corners of the room. Articles of clothing, some of them even on coat-hangers, are festooned over the armchairs. Piles of newspapers cover every other available surface. Bookcases are stuffed higgledy-piggledy with academic books. It’s intellect gone mad, Mama says.

Millie doesn’t seem to notice the chaos. She perches on her carving chair in the middle of it all, her ample figure swathed in what looks like an over-sized kimono, a pastel-coloured bow perched on her frizzy greying hair, and a twinkle in her sky-blue eyes.

Millie’s breakfasts are never-ending social occasions, the levees of some fantasy court, during which the minions were summoned to the bedside to take orders for the apparel and appointments for the day; gossip was exchanged, toenails cut and even social calls paid at these morning meetings that went on all day and half the night. Millie can’t see the point in wasting precious energy clearing things away when she’s going to need them all again very shortly. As Millie also has no idea about how many people will call on any particular day, the large dining table is invariably laid for an invasion. The most prominent objects on it are milk-bottles and economy-sized packets of cereal. The milk bottles are in various stages of emptiness, and the cereal packets are arranged in the order of the cartoon story on the backs of them. When you go in she calls "Ah, there you are!” as if she’s been waiting for you, and then "Have some more breakfast, dear!" as if you’d never been away. The Mad Hatter’s tea party can’t hold a candle to Millie’s all-day breakfast.

Millie may seem a bit peculiar to some outsiders, but to a hungry little girl trying to escape from well-meaning half-starvation and three boring cousins she’s an angel with wings and her dining room is a corner of heaven. And since eccentricity is in many ways childlike, we get on like a house on fire.

I try not to look surprised at all the stuff on the table or on the floor. The milkman delivers several bottles of fresh milk every day, and I’ve been told he comes in to pick up the empties or nearly empties and take them away, if nobody has thought of lining them up outside. Millie loves the milkman the way she seems to love everyone. She is unperturbed by intrusions because to her they aren’t intrusions at all, but welcome additions to her social life. She loves visitors, and is charmed by the idea of people coming in and doing things, eating things, reading things, and carrying things away. So why not the milkman, too?

When Uncle Rodney is at home, he does practically everything that needs doing, including catching up on the mountains of washing up, though Millie is quick to assume remote control if everything is not running smoothly.

Uncle Rodney is a paragon of tact and diplomacy. When the housework is completed to Millie’s satisfaction, he buries his head in the Guardian and only emerges to fill his tea-cup or take another sweet digestive from one of the many open packets. Sweet digestives are another staple food at Aunt Millie’s.

It would, however, be wrong to assume that Millie hasn’t got all her wool on. She just lives in a slightly altered perspective of reality, where square meals come out of cereal packets and physical exertion is virtually unheard of. She seems to be absorbed in cultivating a wider appreciation of what she believes are the pleasant things in life, while ignoring the unpleasant ones, which certainly include banalities like cooking and cleaning. I decide that she is probably the best role-model I shall ever have.