My relatives 2 :: Two cousins

Auntie Dith had a granddaughter Gillian, my second cousin, who was about my age, and a welcome companion when we could get together. I would sometimes stay with her in their country home, and I remember long spring and summer days just pottering about the local lanes, all of which, in my memory, seem to have been overhung with lilac trees, whose scent I have loved for the rest of my life.

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One disgraceful memory I still enjoy wras a visit we made together one hot summer's day to the Cotswold village of Bourton-on-the-Water, down the centre of whose high street runs a broad and very shallow stream. We were on our own, presumably while my aunt Beatrice was shopping, and were suddenly overtaken, as children are, by an urgent need to pee. Either we did not know where to find a public loo, or we simply couldn't be bothered: whichever it was, we stepped into the stream, ostensibly to paddle, then quietly sat down in the water to do what we needed to. No-one appeared to notice, and we got away with it, though how we accounted to my aunt for our wet bottoms and garments I do not know.

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Bourton-on-the-Water

A less amusing episode occurred when she was with me in Birmingham. We had gone up the road to spend some time in the Victoria Park (now called Handsworth Park). Suddenly a man popped out from behind a bush and showed us something we neither understood nor appreciated at the tender age of 9 or 10. (Remember this was around 70 years ago!) We were puzzled but not particularly upset, as we had not the faintest idea what he was on about, but we did find the event sufficiently strange to tell my mother about it. No doubt some useful educational explanation followed. I'm glad I wasn't alone when it happened, even so.

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Another important cousin for me was my mother's first cousin Constance Josephine, known as ‘Jo’, daughter of my grandmother’s younger brother. She and my mother Barbara, and my mother’s sister Fay, saw a great deal of each other as children, I believe, and Jo remained a particularly close friend of Fay’s throughout their lives. When I first got to know her I thought she was wonderful: tall and willowy and handsome, though not escaping the powerful nose which has come to me from all quarters of the family. I had a childish ‘crush’ on her, and was thrilled to be attending her wedding in 1936.
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Although considerably taller than her husband, she managed to look elegant but not overpowering beside him, in a long slender dress with a huge dinner-plate-y sort of hat. My adoration for her increased, and during the reception I was able to collect a small hoard of ‘treasures’ from the wedding cake: silver bells, a spray of artificial white flowers, a white cupid, and a white satin ribbon. They are still with me, in their box marked ‘Wedding Treasure’, in a suitcase in my spare room.

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The reception was held at my great aunt Maimie’s house Elmwood, about the grandeur of which I have already written. From the picture below you will be able to judge something of the size of the gardens; also of my mother’s elegance (being tall like her cousin, and also well able to carry a large hat). The young girl disappearing off the bottom of the picture is my cousin Gillian.

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Cousin Jo's wedding day in 1936

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Cousin Jo was widowed during the war, and came sometimes with her two small sons to stay in the cottage next to our house, on our smallholding in Worcestershire. The elder boy was a beautiful child, and I transferred my adoration to him for a while, although I continued to think highly of his mother until the end of her life . Before he died in Burma, her husband Robert sometimes wrote me letters, which has always seemed to me a most generous act to a child he barely knew; I kept his letters for many decades, because I was flattered that he wrote as between adults, until eventually I returned them to my cousin many years later.