Interlopers

Back to the Fifties Again

To the best of my knowledge, the number of bona fide aunts and uncles to which I can lay claim, is as follows:

Mother’s brothers: 6

Mother’s sisters: 2

Father’s brothers: 1

Father’s sisters: 3

That makes a total of 7 uncles and 5 aunts. For the moment, we’ll stick with the blood line and discount brothers and sisters in law.

The Fabulous Fifties

Alongside this assembly of relations, ran another agglomeration of aunts and uncles. A much larger and more formidable collection. It appears that in the 1950s, just about every family had hoards of these interloping relatives. Their genesis was due to the fact that in that era, it was very much frowned upon, for a child to call an adult by their first name. At the same time, it was considered just a little too formal for parents’ friends to be addressed by a youngster as ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’.

The obvious solution to the problem was to tack an ‘aunt’ or ‘uncle’ onto the Christian name and that would resolve all problems.

Or would it?

The chances of landing an absolute turkey were worryingly high and most children regarded these infiltrators with deep suspicion.

Take Aunty Kitty, for example:

Aunt Kitty was most definitely not pretty,

But she was pretty unnerving.

What did it, was the incipient beard and moustache,

That you couldn’t help observing.

She had a habit of pinching your cheek really hard,

which is something every adolescent abhors,

Together with her proclivity for invading your personal space,

And a tendency to press her moustachioed face up against yours.

Aunt Kitty was way beyond grotesque.

She was positively Kafkaesque

Possibly the scariest lady on Earth,

Which is why we gave her a very wide berth.

Maggie Smart