It’s on a cold grey afternoon, a couple of weeks before Christmas 1949, that I first meet the maiden aunts. I’m five years old and grumpy after the long drive from Surrey to the East End of London through the Blackwall Tunnel; Dad behind the wheel, Mum alongside him and me whining in the back. Dad pulls up outside a two-storey terraced house in Hackney, and I see a woman’s face looking out between the lace curtains.
‘Aunt Lil’s spotted us,’ Dad says. He turns to me. ‘Best behaviour now,’ he says as the woman appears at the front door. ‘Can you remember their names?’
I recite the names: Olive, Violet, Gladys and Lily. I’ve heard them often enough, always in this order, listed by my parents and their sister-in-law, my paternal grandmother. Until today I have only known one real aunt and one pretend one, and now I am getting a job lot of four. They are Dad’s aunts really, my great-aunts, but in my very limited experience aunts mean presents and so grumpiness turns to anticipation.
Aunt Lil is short and thickset with fuzzy reddish hair flecked with grey. She is dressed entirely in black, with a white lace collar, and wears round spectacles with metal frames. When she bends to pat me on the cheek I notice that there is ink on the first two fingers of her right hand.
‘Last time I saw you was at your christening,’ she says. ‘You were just a baby then.’ And she leads us in through the front door along a passage lined with pressed tin and painted in an ugly tobacco brown, through to a large room with French doors leading out to a neat patch of garden. There are comfy chairs, an upright piano, and yes – a huge aspidistra in a brass pot. From its perch in a cylindrical cage a large black minah bird glares at us with beady eyes. The round table is set for tea with fine china, plates of tiny triangular sandwiches, and a three-tier cake stand loaded with scones and cakes.
Standing with her back to the fireplace is Aunt Gladys, wearing a dress in maroon crepe and a handsome string of pearls. She is a couple of years older than Lily and they are so much alike that they could be taken for twins. Beside her is Olive, the eldest of the four, shorter than her two younger sisters, and shaped like a cottage loaf, with iron grey hair twisted in to a tight bun on top of her head. She is wearing a dull brown dress covered in a floral wraparound overall. I am drawn to her immediately as she looks very much like Mrs Smith who comes to clean for Mum, and who, despite the fact that sweets are still on ration, always carries a supply of toffees in her overall pocket.
Memory is such a fickle beast; it scatters the past with its broken glass, a mix of sharp and dazzling shards and misty powdered fragments. Snatches of that afternoon are clear as yesterday, the rest just vague impressions: the trio of aunts, the piano, the ugly aspidistra and the scary minah with its raucous squawks. I can almost feel the tension – the awkwardness of relatives who rarely see each other and have little or nothing in common. I am hugged and kissed and Olive gives me a peppermint lump. I am soon bored; there is too much talking and not enough action. The minah glares at me and I glare back, but my thoughts are with the cakes, the box of chocolates on the piano, and those tantalising presents in the corner.
There are questions about Vi, the fourth aunt, and whether or not she will make an appearance. I have just completed my first term at a Catholic convent and am enchanted by the story of the Virgin Mary appearing to St Bernadette of Lourdes. Will Aunt Vi’s appearance be similar – a vision out of nowhere, hands clasping a rosary? Will I too become a saint when I have seen her?
Eventually Olive gets up. ‘I’ll make the tea,’ she says heading for the kitchen, but stops at the foot of the stairs.
‘Vi,’ she calls, ‘Vi, they’re here, I’m making the tea, are you coming down?’
There is the sound of movement upstairs, a chair moving, footsteps, a door opens with a creak and a shadowy figure appears on the landing, and descends the first few steps. Not the Virgin Mary, but a tall woman in a purple satin nightdress, a matching purple dressing gown slipping off her bony white shoulders. She pauses, surveying her audience; her timing is perfect, her expression haughty. Silver hair falls in lustrous loose waves to her shoulder blades. In one hand she trails a lavender swan’s-down boa, in the other holds a lighted cigarette in a long black holder. Her gaze settles on me.
‘Is that really little Elizabeth?’ she says. ‘My goodness how you’ve grown! I suppose you don’t remember me, I’m your Aunty Vi.’
I am mesmerised. She doesn’t look like the Virgin or a saint, but she is, without doubt, the most exotic creature I’ve ever seen. As I wait for her to move I can barely breathe, and strangely now, even as I write this, I find I am holding my breath. Vi completes her entrance, gliding barefoot into the room, smelling of violets, pecking my parents on the cheek and patting me on the head as we take our seats at the table. I suppose we ate tea, and I know we opened presents but even these do not claim my full attention. I have eyes only for Aunty Vi, who smokes one cigarette after another, sighs a lot and barely speaks. Everything else is a violet scented blur until hours later, as we are about to leave, Vi gets up and beckons me to follow her.
‘Come with me, I have a special present for you,’ she says. And I follow her up the stairs where she stops halfway to blow air kisses to Mum and Dad. ‘Take care, my dears. I won’t be coming down again.’
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.
As I discovered from the fragments of family history I extracted from Dad and his brother Laurie, our family’s maiden aunts each had a story, characteristic of so many of the surplus two million.
The four girls had three brothers, the birth order being: Jack, Olive, Len, Violet, Bob, Gladys and finally Lily.
By the time war was declared in 1914, their mother was worn out by childbearing and suffered bouts of pneumonia. Jack and Len had joined the army, and Olive, as the second child and oldest girl had, some years earlier, taken on the burden of caring for her ailing mother, her father and her younger siblings. Even so she had been walking out for three years with Raymond, the son of the local undertaker. Olive and Raymond got engaged the day he left for the front.
Violet had been working in a local draper’s shop, but at the beginning of 1914 had got a job on the glove counter in Selfridges. There she found an admirer, the rather dashing younger son of a Knight of the Realm. Her own father was outraged by this inappropriate connection, and Edward’s family would not have welcomed a shopgirl in their midst, had they known of the liaison. Vi moved out of home to live with two other sales girls somewhere in the West End, and Edward kept her well hidden, but promised that when the war was over and she was twenty-one they would marry.
Gladys, aged seventeen, and Lily almost sixteen, were both bright and rather serious girls, who helped at home and had done well at school. They wrote letters to and knitted socks for their brothers Jack and Len who were also in the army, and Bob who followed them in 1916. Gladys took some classes in shorthand and typing at the local workers club and Lily soon followed.
They were working-class people. Their father, a bricklayer, had high hopes of developing his business into a building company with the help of his sons, but that was put on hold when the boys were called up. Money was short and the family struggled to pay the fees for Gladys and Lily’s secretarial training. Olive was tied to the home and Vi had moved out.
One evening in August 1916, Olive answered the front door to find Raymond’s father on the doorstep. He had come to tell her that his son, her fiancé, had been killed weeks earlier on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. A devastated Olive retired to her room and locked the door for several days, emerging only to go outside to the privy. Her younger sisters stepped in to care for their mother and left trays of food outside Olive’s door. A week later she came out in her best clothes to attend the small chapel service for Raymond and two other local men who had also died at the Somme, and whose bodies could not be returned. That done Olive put her overall on again and returned to her domestic role. Uncomplaining, hardworking, heartbroken all her life, she rarely spoke of her loss nor recovered from her grief. She spent the rest of her life looking after her parents and her sisters; always the one who ran the home and made it possible for the others to live their lives free of domestic responsibilities. In family photographs, except those taken at weddings and funerals, Olive is always wearing an overall, or an apron, just as she was the first day I saw her in 1949 when she would have been in her late fifties.
Vi, meanwhile, was having a good war. In Selfridges she met a photographer who was looking for models for postcard portraits, a contemporary, somewhat less sophisticated, version of the postcards of the Professional Beauties that had been so popular before the turn of the century. In those days the professional beauties were usually the mistresses of important and powerful men, one of the most admired being the actress Lily Langtry, mistress of Edward, Prince of Wales, the Earl of Shrewsbury, and Prince Louis of Battenberg. The postcards were perfectly respectable, mainly sepia or tinted head-and-shoulders shots, nothing at all suggestive, but Vi’s family was shocked when she arrived flaunting her postcards. They curbed their disapproval, however, when she handed over all the money she had earned from them, to pay the outstanding bills.
The war had brought social change. When Edward was home on leave he and Vi went out on the town, dining and dancing at the Ritz and the Café Royal. Although she was still at Selfridges, she had graduated from gloves to ladies wear and had a faultless sense of style and fashion. Edward showered her with gifts and promises.
When the war ended, the prospects of marriage for Gladys and Lily were remote. According to Alice, their sister-in-law, both girls were rather plain – although I take her opinions with a pinch of salt. Gladys, who loved children and badly wanted her own, had to accept that her dream of a husband and family was likely to remain just a dream. There were simply not enough men to go round, and many of those who had returned from the war were severely disabled, or traumatised or both. Both girls were serious and hardworking and Gladys found a position in an accountancy practice where she later became the secretary to the senior partner, and to his successor when he retired. She remained with the practice all her working life, and retired in her late fifties, despite urgings by her employers to stay on for as long as she wished.
Lily had proved excellent at maths and had begun work in a bank. But as her father and brothers began to develop the building business they recognised her head for figures and for business generally, and made her a partner. She managed the office and the accounts until she too retired in her late fifties. The inky fingers that I had noticed on that first visit were a mark of her devotion to the business, which often had her working all week in the office and on weekends at the dining-room table. I never discovered whether or not the two younger sisters had men or women friends or lovers. They seem to have lived quiet, respectable, perhaps dull, but satisfying lives. Their brothers, unlike many of their contemporaries, were mindful of their sisters’ situation. All three were married and eventually had homes of their own, and urged their father to remake his will in favour of their sisters. Thus they were assured of a roof over their heads for the rest of their lives. Olive, Gladys and Lily never lived anywhere else. Only Vi had broken loose and taken a risk on a different life.
Vi had expected that the end of the war would mean the start of a new life. She had met a few of Edward’s friends, and expected to move fairly easily into his wider social circle. But the prospect of his family still loomed large. The war was long over and she was well into her twenties but Edward still prevaricated. It was difficult, he told her; his parents needed more time. Even so Vi remained convinced that she had a foothold on a ladder that would ensure her a place in London’s high society. Perhaps Edward’s original intentions had been good, or perhaps he had been lying to her from the start, but early in 1922 a friend pointed out a notice in the social pages of The Times announcing Edward’s engagement to the daughter of a baronet. Vi’s world collapsed around her.
Alice, my grandmother, a strict devotee of the Baptist chapel, always disliked the aunts, especially Vi whom she described as ‘fast’, and whenever her name was mentioned Nana pursed her lips in self-righteous disapproval, straightened her shoulders and sighed as if in despair. Nana had been a domestic servant – a ‘tweenie’ – before she married Len; so came from a slightly lower level of working class than her sisters-in-law. She insisted that Vi must have known that she would only have been introduced to those of Edward’s friends who, like him, were involved with ‘loose women’. His father was on the King’s staff at Buckingham Palace, his mother the daughter of an even more distinguished family. He was never going to marry her.
‘Vi made a fool of herself, running after him,’ Nana told me, ‘it was always a fool’s errand. She never saw him again and she had to go back home with her tail between her legs.’
Vi did go home, but only for a few weeks, before she returned to Selfridges, and her shared flat off the Bayswater Road. I am not sure that I believe Nana’s summing up; she loathed Vi, and would have wanted it all to end in the worst possible way. But Vi was determined, strong-minded, and usually got her way. So while she obviously didn’t get her way with Edward, I prefer to imagine that being familiar with some of his haunts she may have confronted him somewhere, in public, and perhaps slapped his face or thrown a drink over him. I really want that for her.
Vi stayed on at Selfridges and in her shared flat, and seems to have had a few male escorts, two of them married. Only when she retired from Selfridges and moved back home to live with her sisters did she achieve respectability in Nana’s eyes. It was then that Vi’s world began to shrink, not simply to fit the confines of the family home, but increasingly the four walls of that extraordinary purple room, stuffed with Edward’s gifts, and the trappings of the comparatively glamorous West End life she had left behind.
I was in my mid-thirties, divorced and living alone with my two sons, when I learned the stories of the maiden aunts. I had a sickening sense of disappointment that I had not allowed myself to know them better and was ashamed that I had dismissed them in the same way that the surplus women were dismissed, discounted and diminished because, in my youthful self-importance, their lives were of no interest to me. But life has a way of teaching us what we need to know and my maiden aunts, in their characteristically quiet way, have made an important contribution to my life. It was the recognition of that squandered opportunity to know Olive, Violet, Gladys and Lily that made me curious about the hidden lives of older women. I began to read stories of those lives, which then and now still fascinate me, and in my late fifties I began to write about them.
Today when I remember the aunts I recall that photograph of them proudly lined up on the doorstep to see us off, each one clad in the uniform of her life. Olive, the housekeeper, in her overall; Gladys and Lily in formal crepe day dresses, with neatly curled hair; and Vi, in her purple satin nightwear – waiting to retreat to the daily celebration of her past in the lush eccentricity of her purple room.