‘Our friends we can choose, but our relatives we just have to make the best of!’ quoted a waspish soul recently – which unnerved me slightly because I happen to be distantly related to her.
For every Kennedyish, close-knit, sporty, let’s-all-go-on-a-picnic, yes-I’d-love-to-have-all-twenty-seven-grandchildren-while-you-dear-things-go-skiing-type family, I’m pretty sure there must be dozens like that of the accountant I met recently who confided: ‘I’m an only child, used to a peaceful, orderly sort of life and quite honestly when my wife’s three sisters descend upon us en masse I have to go to bed and lie quite still for at least four days afterwards to recover.’
It is all very well to leap up from watching The Waltons, the Forsytes – or The Godfather come to that – convinced that the family’s the thing, but nowadays families do come in such wild assortments. In the days of Galsworthy it was easy: Uncles were rich, aunts were straightlaced, nieces were pretty and nephews were coming along nicely. The worst skeleton in the family cupboard was likely to be a ne’er-do-well lad who signed funny cheques, or a rather intense lass who chained herself to the railings.
But nowadays it must take an awful lot of tolerance if you happen to be one of those upswept, Crimplene ladies – the sort who wear winged diamanté specs on a little black cord – and your only son weds a girl who wears what appears to be a William Morris duvet cover. Or you’re an entrenched Good Lifer anxiously re-cycling everything from chicken manure to cocoa tins and your daughter goes out one morning and marries the managing director of Pollution Unlimited. Or how about the distant relative of mine who was sent overseas for 18 months and returned to find that his wife had just given birth.
‘Long pregnancies run in our family,’ she assured him firmly. But I can’t say we were all absolutely convinced.
I suppose that for most of us, especially those of us who marry and thus double the status quo, the family includes a mixed assortment of everything from ravers to dum-dums and it is incredible really how we manage to put up with each other most of the time. In spite of the fact that if we weren’t actually related to some of them we wouldn’t choose them even as third reserve volunteer shovel cleaner at a blocked cess-pit party.
Indeed, perhaps it’s as well, in some cases, that we only see the entire assembly at weddings, christenings and funerals. At such events the trick is to try and steer a cheery non-partisan path (but not too cheery of course, in the case of funerals) – from blowsy Auntie Bea to whippet-thin second cousin Winnie, even if the former did once discover the latter in an airing cupboard with podgy Uncle Harold and they haven’t spoken since.
We all have our funny ways, we must admit, but it’s particularly difficult, not to say unnerving, to be tolerant, high-minded – kindly even – to your really weird sister-in-law Gladys, only to discover that she’s being tolerant, high-minded and kindly back to you. If only we could choose our relatives. I’ve often seen a face in a crowd and thought how lucky someone was to have such a pleasant-looking aunt/uncle/grandparent. I particularly remember noticing a lot of very likely-looking relations at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show. With their workaway hands, tanned foreheads and sensible shoes, they’d have made a smashing mixed bunch by any standards. And if perchance one didn’t see absolutely eye-to-eye with them on such subjects as cookery or cleaning or child-raising, one could at least zoom them out into the garden and lead them firmly towards the cotoneaster horizontalis.
Personally, I had the best possible grandmother one could wish for, with her bottle of Condy’s Fluid for stings and cut knees, and her bottle of home-made potato sherry for more grown-up disorders. (If you weren’t disordered when you drank it you certainly soon would be.)
I’m also blessed with a thoroughly likeable husband. In fact he’s so likeable that while I quite understand his own mother preferring him to me, it’s a bit hard to live with the lurking suspicion that my mother does, too!
Actually, I didn’t find him all that likeable the day a very pretty girl dropped in about some local matter. ‘Come in, come in,’ he enthused, obviously in a state of instant besottment at the sight of so much radiance pouring over our threshhold. ‘Here, let me pull you up a chair/table/sofa/cup of coffee,’ he babbled as I faded bleakly into the wallpaper.
‘We’re just furnishing our new home,’ she said conversationally after a great deal of husbandly blushing and crashing about and cosy re-arrangement of our living room.
‘Oh are you married?’ I cried hopefully.
‘Good heavens no,’ she said. ‘I’m absolutely anti that sort of thing. No, as a matter of fact I live with two men. All this marriage business is a load of rubbish. And my mother,’ she added crisply, ‘says she never would have bothered if she’d known what she knows now. As for the great con game of “Happy Families”– yuk!’
Eyes ablaze, cheeks aflame, she strode off out of our lives leaving David decidedly shattered, and me with the interesting thought that while she had all the makings of a nice, racy skeleton in the family cupboard for future generations to boast about, she seemed to be doing her best to wipe out the cupboard altogether. Which does seem a bit drastic. After all, even if one’s lot are a far cry from the Waltons, one can always follow the dictum of that spirited, unsinkable lady who said: ‘Whenever I go to visit my relatives I always take my knitting so that the day is not entirely wasted!’