Lessons Learned... and someone who taught them to me.

April is never a good month in my book – for some reason it seems to be the month in which people I love die. Today, for example, is the 25^th anniversary of the death of one of major influences in my life, so consequently, she has been very much on my mind for the last few days.

My Aunty Doll... although she was actually my maternal grandmother's Aunt (which makes her my great-great aunt), Aunty Doll was – and always shall be – known as my Aunty (weird, but true, my maternal great-great-grandmother - her son married Aunty Doll's sister - is known as Aunty Rose... dysfunctional doesn't even start to describe my family!). Aunty Doll was my great-grandmother's younger sister, the only one of seven sisters (nine children in total; Uncle Bill and Uncle Jack both died in World War I) who didn't marry or raise a family, and she lived in a 16^th century cottage next to the one inhabited by my grandparents in a small market town where everyone – it seemed – knew my mother and judged me on her escapades when she was a child/teenager. Aunty Doll, I suppose, was what might be termed “the black sheep of the family” - she smoked like a chimney (taught my mother how to when she was a toddler, or so the family legend goes), drank whiskey like tea and had a mouth on her like the proverbial sailor... but she was also one of the nicest, most genuine people I have ever met in my entire life. I spent an awful lot of time in her cottage, sitting in front of the fire, peering through the gloom of the main living area (Aunty Doll had inherited my great-great-great-grandparents dining table and not only did it dominate the downstairs room, she also had to keep the curtains drawn across the windows in order to prevent it from fading in sunlight...) as she told me stories about when she was a child, what my mother was like as a child (apparently a complete nightmare... and this comes from several family members and childhood friends of my mother, mind!), and why I shouldn't listen to anyone or anything but myself and my own heart...

 

At the time, I didn't really understand what she meant. I was, after all, only 11 years old when Aunty Doll died – and this was maybe five or six years earlier. But the look of furious determination on her face in the light of the fire, the wagging of her cigarette holding hand through the air and the sense of “it's your life; don't you ever listen to anyone else telling you how you ought to live it!” stuck in my mind. I honestly don't know whether Aunty Doll was born a feminist waaaaaaaay before the concept was even invented, or if she became as she was because of some terrible thing that happened in her life – because, well, I was a child. I didn't start to ask questions until it was too late for them to actually be answered. I do regret that. If I thought for one nano-second that my Nain (Aunty Doll's niece) would actually tell me the truth about anything, I'd ask her purely because she might know (although then again, she probably doesn't – Nain's maternal family always were close-lipped about Family Business). But Aunty Doll was... is... something of a mystery.

Yet she was the one who set me on the path to where I am now.

Yes, there were other influences in my life – but it was Aunty Doll who used to encourage me to dig up her garden (in hindsight, she probably knew it was a good way of getting the weeds out...) “to see what (I) could find”. And because of the longevity of the cottage, I unearthed broken pieces of Edwardian, Victorian and Georgian crockery, the missing chain from (allegedly) Aunty Doll's grandfather (so... my great-great-great-great-grandfather)'s pocket watch and, more importantly considering the career path I chose to follow, bones... Of course, they were nothing more important than the carcasses from various dinners thrown into the garden for the birds to peck at, or the remains of who knows how many generations of foxes lunches - but Aunty Doll claimed they were “fairy bones” and wove the most beautiful of stories around them for me. I remember that once or twice she actually tried to make a 'fairy form' from them on her front doorstep for me, whilst telling me all about how fairies are vicious little creatures who will cut the throats of any other fairy who crosses them without a second thought... And she'd help me piece together the fragments of crockery which I'd found, sometimes recognising the patterns but mostly not – yet always there to encourage me to actually stop and look at what I'd discovered. That, too, has always stayed with me. For a lonely child who was often left with grandparents who were too busy to actually pay attention to me, who knew that I was a hindrance and something of a quandary to the two boys left solely in charge of me (they, in all fairness, were more interested in playing football than they were in watching me... and I very quickly grew tired of being used as an actual goalpost!), and who was then too young to wander up the street to where my great-grandparents lived unless Aunty Doll went with me, she was something of a Godsend. She instilled in me the love of grubbing about in the soil on the off-chance I might unearth a bit of someone else's life, taught me how to be infinitely patient, how to listen to people, and – probably most importantly of all – that it doesn't matter what anyone else thinks of me.

My life is, indeed, my own.

But if it weren't for Aunty Doll... I probably would never have realised that simple fact. If it weren't for Aunty Doll, I would most likely feel ashamed or embarrassed of being the family's “black sheep”, whereas I look at so many family members who are younger than I am, doing their utmost to live their lives for their parents... and I know perfectly well that I could so easily have fallen into the same trap. Had I not spent so much time in Aunty Doll's company, I probably would have done so. In one way, that alone makes me feel sad – for my cousins and their children, for my aunt and my uncles who are lost in the quagmire of “what society expects!!!” from them and their progeny... but in another, I have to understand that they also had just as many opportunities to spend time with Aunty Doll.

They couldn't be bothered.

She was “weird” and “bad tempered” in their opinions. Which, yes, she did have a temper on her... but she was living my life, minus the chances which I have grasped with both hands because of what she taught me. Perhaps that makes me the weird one, I don't know, but at the end of the day? I don't care.

You see, Aunty Doll's life was considerably harder than mine ever has been, or probably will be – but she had the courage of her own convictions. Not only did I adore her, even now, a full quarter of a century after her death, I try to teach my children the lessons which she inadvertently taught to me: patience, kindness towards others (be they less fortunate than yourself or not), and – most importantly of all, perhaps – be true to yourself, because no other bugger ever will be...