“Don’t be sad. Aunty Gwen has died” came the message on WeChat from my sister. Actually I wasn’t that sad because as we say in cricketing countries “She had a good innings”. Next week would have been her 104th birthday. She had outlived all her friends, her sister and even my brother, her great nephew.My grandmother’s sister, she is the end of that generation which survived the first and second world wars.
She was quite a girl in her younger days – popular with the boys in South Wales and The Midlands!
Born in 1910, she worked for many years in the Avis car factory in Coventry but in the second world war she was a land girl which meant she worked in the fields because all the men had gone to war in Europe.
My Aunty Gwen used to tell dirty jokes – in fact she was asked to leave the Women’s Institute because of her inappropriate comments and jokes. She had no children and married in her sixties to a man whom she had been engaged to in her twenties. He had misbehaved and got another girl pregnant and so, as happened in those days, he had felt obliged to marry the other woman. Jim, a retired chauffeur, returned 40 years later to look for Gwen and lived his days out with her drinking all his saving away in the pub next door and leaving her penniless.
Eric was Gwen’s real love but he killed himself when he was in his twenties and so that was a sadness that remained with her all her life.
Aunty Gwen – you were unique and you will be remembered by a lot of people who will smile when they think of your antics, especially the dirty jokes you used to tell.