A Visit and a Surprise

 

I can still vividly recall the visits that my parents and I made each Saturday to my see my Uncle Bernie and Aunt Elsie who lived . in a terraced council house in Leytonstone in East London.

They weren’t ‘my’ uncle and aunt, they were my mum’s but we had visited them each week since my gran and grandad, my mum’s folks, had moved away to Cornwall and had never been heard of since; family legend was that they had been eaten by cannibals.

My cousin Ferdie lived with Uncle Bern  and Aunt Elsie  the  family legend also said that he had become  a bit touched in the head after he had visited my grandparents in Cornwall and had been to Camborne and seen things there  that no civilised man should witness.

Aunt Elsie kept the house spick and span.  As we got off the Green Line bus  in their road we could  see the net curtains in her front parlour shining  so white and neat that they looked like the wings. Of Angels in the windows.

I had never been in the Front Parlour, the  door to that room  was kept locked and it was only opened on a Sunday after lunch when my uncle and aunt would sit in there for a couple of hours while auntie  did some knitting and uncle read the ‘News of The World’ and on a Thursday morning Aunt Elsie would give the room its weekly hoovering, dusting  and polishing  and in the afternoon it was used to host the Man from the Pru’ when he called for his money.

On a Wednesday the man who brought the pools coupon was entertained in the back room, he was never allowed inside  the Front Parlour,  and on a Friday the Rent Man was dealt with on the doorstep; he was never allowed inside  the house.

Aunt Elsie kept that room sacrosanct and woe betide anyone that dirtied it; I remember Uncle Bernie telling me with guilty excitement how once when Elsie was spending a week at her sister’s in Southend he had crept into the house with a cigarette and blown smoke through the keyhole of the Front Parlour and the next two days sin a blue funk quirting air freshener into it to hide the smell of his fag…luckily his ruse worked and he never smoked in the house again.

Aunt Elsie said she kept the tidy  for special occasions like funerals and the such.  Uncle Bernie told my dad that if Aunt Elsie died first he would have her coffin in the front parlour with an ashtray on it and would sit in there and smoke a whole pack of cigarettes but he died first and Aunt Elsie missed him so much that she discovered there weren’t many joys to widowhood.

The Front Parlour was kept pristine for if the Queen popped in for a cup of tea.  It was Aunt Elsie’s  greatest hope that Her Majesty would call round and   her greatest dread was  that if The Queen  did call in she might want to need  a penny and have to the  outside loo by the backdoor with torn up pages of the Daily Mail (except for any pages with photos of the Royal Family on them) on a nail on the Privy door for use by those people not hardy  enough to risk using  the sheets of Jeyes Medicated paper in a box on the window ledge.   My uncle had worked as a caretaker at the local Community Centre for many years and when he retired the Council gratefully gave him  a gift of a Gold Watch and,  unknowingly, 200 boxes of loo paper which were now stored in my uncle’s airing cupboard!  He’d tried  selling them to his mates down the pub but no one was buying them.

 

When we visited the house we were taken into the back  room or ‘the Dining Room’ as Auntie Elsie called it.  In this room, apart from the dining table and chairs there was a sideboard on top of  which there was a bowl of sweets from which  I was allowed to have some… as long as I ‘didn’t take too many’,  and inside of which were two bottles of Mackeson that my auntie had bought from the off license that morning;  one each for Uncle Bern and my dad to drink while they watched the football results later in the day.  My dad didn’t like Mackeson but he drank it out of politeness and because it was free; I didn’t like the sweets very much but I ate them out of greed and because they were free.

The other fixtures in the room were a tv showing the wrestling and a sofa on which sat \Mad Cousin Ferdy reading the latest issue of The Hotspur.  As I sat beside him watching  the wrestling he would secretly pass me extra sweets from the bowl and old issues of his comic but he never spoke to me, or, indeed,  anyone else.

Cousin Ferdy was like a piece of furniture, a statue,  that sometimes occasionally moved.

Uncle Bern played a minor part in this weekly drama,  he would spend the day out in the garden digging the soil or turning his compost and if it was raining he would be in the shed chatting to my dad or  ‘Looking at his magazines and polishing his dibber’ as Aunt Elsie often explained.

So as I sat with cousin Ferdy watching tv and ruining my teeth,  my mum would be in the kitchen with Aunt Elsie.  And my dad would be outside with Uncle Bern

The women would be talking about ‘women’s things like knitting and babies and the joys of widowhood and the men would be talking about men’s things like cars and football and Mrs Joy the widow from round the corner.

I wouldn’t see the men until they came in to watch the football scores and drink their stout,  but every so often I would see Aunt Elsie as she broke off discussing  with my mum,  in a voice loud enough that ‘er next door’ could hear, the various shady goings on of ‘er next door’  to stick her head through the serving hatch to see who was on the tv.  Her particular delight was hating the shenanigans of Les Kellett.  She knew the wrestling was all fake but she still hoped someone would wring his neck for being such a naughty little scamp!

Every Tuesday night she went to play Bingo at the Town Hall but she hoped one day to go there and watch the wrestling and sit in the front row and get the chance to hit Jackie Pallow with her umbrella if she saw him cheating.

One afternoon when the wrestling was boring and Ferdy was away in North Africa fighting Rommel, mum was in the kitchen  with Auntie Elsie and my dad had gone to the newsagent to buy Uncle Bernie 20 Capstan Full Strength,  which he loved and Auntie loathed;  there came a gentle tapping on the window; there stood Uncle Bernie beckoning me outside.

‘Come  ere’ he mouthed to me.

I rushed out the kitchen door with Auntie Elsie shouting:

‘mind you wipe your feet when you come in’ at me as I flew past her to join Uncle Bernie in the garden.

“What could he want?”  I wondered, “he’s never spoken to me before!”

With the innocence and trust of a child I walked with him in silence  past the rows of peas and cabbages and potatoes that he lovingly tended,  past the garden shed, his man cave, and down  to the bottom of the garden where Aunt Elsie hung out the washing.

And there, in that secluded sunny spot in the garden where no one could see us,   Uncle Bernie put his hand on my shoulder and said slyly:

“I wanna show you summat boy,  but you mustn’t tell anyone what you’ve seen, it’ll be our little secret.  Promise?”

#I blurted out a ‘yes’.

“Look at these, ain’t they beautiful? They’re your aunt’s bloomers.”

Then he showed me,  in a flowerbed by the clothesline,  the magnificent chrysanthemums that  he had grown to give to his wife on her birthday the next week:

Aunt Elsie’s Big Pink Bloomers!