Here is a photograph of my great-aunt Joan. It is lovely to see her again because she was lovely. I adored her. She is wearing her Mikimoto pearls. She lived in Mountain Rd in Auckland’s Epsom in a beautiful two-storey arts and crafts house with a terracotta tile roof, a staircase, bay windows and an attic.
There were 1930s carpets patterned in greens and creams. There was a tennis court to play on and dolls in the attic to play with. There were singing finches in a cage in the enormous kitchen with tongue-and-groove cupboards in pale eggshell green. I loved great-aunt Joan’s house.
We, our scruffy draggle-tailed family, would go there for lunch or perhaps a posh afternoon tea. There were three firm rules for conversation in her dining room: there was to be no talk of politics, religion or sex. Great-aunt Joan was elegant and refined. But she was never aloof and always welcoming.
I have been thinking about Joan because her son, my second cousin Peter, has written a saga of our clan he’s called A History of the Hewitson Family. It is a peculiar one. Probably most family stories are.
We come from not-very-illustrious stock: English lead miners. Some might have gone a bit doolally from lead poisoning, which I suspect might have been carried down the generations. It’s not an outrageous speculation. Our family history was respectably middle-class, though not entirely. For some of us, the clink, the loony bin and financial disaster beckoned.
My great-grandfather killed himself in a lonely cove in Sydney. He had gone there from New Zealand to seek work after he’d been shafted at his accountancy partnership. There are intimations of financial chicanery. None of this was known, or spoken about, until recently. There is no photograph of him. He is a ghost in the family history.
In the 1980s, even before the proliferation of genealogy websites, there was already a fashion for tracing family histories. Around that time, my step-grandmother asked me to proofread her family history, which she had typed on my then quite newfangled electric typewriter, with errors heavily Twinked.
I thought I might do my own family history. I wrote to my paternal grandfather with this thought, asking for details. He phoned – and he never phoned; phoning was a toll call and thus an outrageous expense – forbidding me from pursuing any such exercise. He need not have bothered. I have always been both incurious, mostly, and far too lazy to go to such trouble.
What does knowing about your genealogy add, or tell you about your life? Buggered if I know.
The next best thing to a really great aunt like Joan is a really great fictional aunt. Aunty Doris in the English writer David Nobbs’ comic Henry Pratt chronicles might be my favourite fictional aunt. Aunty Doris is a social climber with aspirations far above her station. She “always made things worse by protesting about them”.
Two of the most famous fictional aunts are PG Wodehouse’s Aunt Agatha, the nasty aunt, and Aunt Dahlia, the nice aunt. Aunt Dahlia possesses “general good egg-ishness”. She is fond of shouting “yoicks!” Aunt Agatha is formidable and bossy. Her main goal in life is to get her nephew, the feckless Bertie Wooster, to make a good marriage.
I enjoyed Peter’s Book of Hewitson, in which he pronounces me a “strong woman”. This delighted and amused me. I have been going about Lush Places flexing what passes for my biceps and pretending to lift weights. I want to be known as great-aunt Dumbbell.
