Blog like an Egyptian (part 5)

Holidays to Aunty Nan and Uncle Doug were altogether more restrained affairs.

There existed between my Gran and Aunty Nan a palpable female rivalry. Nan was the youngest of the 13 children of their Scottish mineworking family and still - at that time in her 50s - clung to the notion of herself as the baby. She was small and thin and sharp, and I instinctively knew that she needled my Gran's usually even temperament. Unlce Doug was a man from whom disappointment and condascention hung like a mantle. He sneered, he burped, he was pompous, and - there is no doubt to me looking back now with adult eyes - he was desparately sad and trapped inside a small boxed-in life he had built around himself. That they lived in a tiny immaculate bungalow with precise grass is perhaps no surprise. If Aunty Betty represented freedom of a kind, then Nan and Doug embodied conservatism with both a big and a small C.

Because I was a child, of course I enjoyed my holidays with them just the same, although perhaps not as much as those with Aunty Betty. Certainly their location near Tenby in south Wales had more to offer, and I always went home cluttered with Welsh dragons and spoons with my name burnt into them.

Those holidays came to an abrupt halt when my Grandad died in 1982. Jim, Nan and Doug followed him during the 1990s, as did Gran two years ago - outliving her husband by some quarter of a century. Only Aunty Betty remains, her shadow living out its last days in a nursing home in the Wirral. Mum and I went to visit her last summer. She didn't recognise us.

If holidays now bear no resemblance to those of my childhood, it is I think because the world of vacationing in the homes of relations has passed away with its protagonists. It would, I also think, have been beyond my grandparents' recognition to have countenanced a week spent in a foreign country sitting beside a swimming pool helping yourself to tea or coffee or cakes as freely as you wished (not of course that one is superior to the other in itself). It's not so much that their field of vision was narrow; rather that the parameters by which they conducted their lives were different.