IF I were a time traveller where would I go? You can’t wind back time. What would it be to crawl through a magical wardrobe, feel the soft kiss of silk on your cheek and the bristle of tweed, on and on down a dark tunnel to tumble out into the past?
And then my aunt, who was 90 last Sunday, would be young again – young enough to dash from her house in Bond Street clutching a saucepan to bring dinner to her father who lived on King Street back then.
We are from Glenties and Ballybofey and Derry – on my mother’s side – our eyes rest easy on the Blue Stacks and every summer, my little sister and I would pack our suitcases for our holidays in the city on the Foyle... a kind of home coming.
We were blessed with my mother’s sisters – two wonderful aunts – and enough cousins to make it an adventure. They were older cousins who took us over the town and treated us to knickerbocker glories in Wellworths – a treat that you didn’t get at home.
They took us to the pictures to see Darby O’Gill and the Little People – I’m not over it yet – and Window to the Sky – the greatest weepie on Earth.
And we stayed with my aunt Eileen in a room above the pub. She still has a laugh like she had then. She always wanted to know the bars and she made the best toast on Earth under the gas grill in her working kitchen. She also made a soup and stew double – the soup was the bit on top of the stew – hey presto, two meals in one.
She told awful jokes about our mum when they were young. She said she was so short sighted that she swore she once tried to post a letter into the face of a woman wearing a pillar box red coat. My mother would roll her eyes and swear it was not true.
My aunt was glamorous then and still is today. When she was a young girl, strangers would stop her in the street and say that God had put in her eyes with a smoky finger. She wore bright red lipstick and went on fancy holidays – Tunisia, Greece, Miami – back in the 1970s when the rest of us headed for Fanad and a deserted beach.
And she always brought us something back – glittery dolls and sweets and Greek vases for my mother.
We’d love having her come to stay when our parents went away because she’d raid the cupboards and open all the boxes of chocolates that my mother was saving for some special occasion.
“Here you are, weans, let’s eat these,” she’d say. Then she’d whisk us all down to Woolworths and let us choose whatever we wanted.
My aunt has always been slightly outrageous. She’d go and look at an expensive coat in a shop and when the woman behind the counter told her the horrendous cost, she’d raise her eyebrows, laugh out loud and say: “Wrap up two!”
And that has become our family joke when somebody sets their hearts on something dear.
“Wrap up two,” we joke.
And if I could travel through that wardrobe, I’d land back in our old working kitchen at the blue formica table where my aunt sits wearing my mother’s flowery house coat, a cigarette in one hand, sipping her tea from a China cup. It was never a mug.
And you’d know it was hers because of the red lipstick on the cup rim. The chat was mighty. She’d fill my mother in on all the happenings in Derry, the comings and goings, the laughs. You’d hear her laugh a mile off – it was a cackle that couldn’t be stopped.
And there’d always be a moment in the conversations when the voices hushed and whatever was to be told was not for small ears and she’d say: “Away on you weans,” and usher us out.
Later, on those summer holidays in Derry she’d whisk us out to meet her ring of close friends to drink tea and have our fortunes read in the tea leaves.
Once, she said to a very devout friend: “Wait til you hear the joke the weans told me.”
It was about a Frenchman who came here to learn English and visited the airport, the zoo and the local children’s nursery. The punchline was that when he was asked what he had learned, he said: “Take off zee bra babe,” in a dreadful French accent.
For heaven’s sakes, I was nine years old but even I knew that would not go down well.
“Don’t tell it, don’t tell it, Aunt Eileen,” I begged but she motored on, laughing outrageously along the way. Her friend was shocked and I was mortified. She shrugged it off.
And that is my aunt who is 90 and looked rather stunning on her birthday last Sunday – same shade of red lipstick, same impish smile, same twinkle in her eye.
Ah, if I were a time traveller, I’d bring her with me back to the old blue table, the tea before her, the Embassy Regal between her fingers and the laughter dancing in her eyes.
ENDS
