Auntie Kate's Clock

It had been silent for a couple of months - a failure to remember to wind it one Sunday had resulted in a two and a half hour discrepancy between clock and chime, so we stopped it - until Ron got round to the complicated procedure for setting it right a couple of days ago. I hadn't realised how much I had missed it, actually, but when it is ticking and chiming away on the wall life seems altogether more right, somehow...

'It' is a long case chiming wall clock with a pendulum, often called a grandmother clock to distinguish from the floor standing grandfather, but in this case it is a great-aunt clock, Great Aunt Kate to be exact.

Auntie Kate was somewhat eccentric for her time. She was born around 1880, never married, and was for many years a subpostmistress in Penarth, going out to work and looking after her elderly parents at the same time. She was my maternal grandmother's elder sister. Until she died, in her 100th year, she kept the crown of braids hairstyle that was fashionable in her youth. Pure white her hair was, and easily long enough to sit on, but seeing it unbraided was a very rare sight. She told me that she had been ill in her early twenties (glandular fever, I think, but my memory may be at fault) and that all her hair had fallen out. When it grew back it was straight and white instead of red and curly.

When my grandmother died she had already retired. She sold her house in Penarth and moved in with my grandfather in Birmingham. We saw a lot more of her, and her eccentricities were a little more noticeable. One thing which we could not understand at all was her food choices - she was very fussy about what she 'could' and 'could not' eat, but there didn't seem to be any logic to it. Finally, one Christmas Day, it came to me - she restricted herself to food items which were white or beige - white bread, chicken breast, weak coffee (she liked Camp coffee best!), marshmallow biscuits... It would seem that at the time she was recuperating from her serious illness her doctor had told her to stick to a 'light' diet. She has misinterpreted his words, but had kept faithfully to what she believed he had meant all those years. And she was fit and healthy right to the end.

For many years she also was part of the shopping monitor, writing down each week what food she bought in response for a small reward. I'm not sure how much good she did their statistics, though - in the early 1970s there was a sugar crisis, sugar could not be got for love nor money, and Auntie Kate revealed a cupboard full from top to bottom with bags of sugar - she had bought one a week for, well, years and hardly used any! The sugar was solid, the bags were yellow, but we did manage to persuade her to part with a few of them at a profit.

As well as her clock on my wall I also have her sewing machine - a Singer hand machine which she bought new in 1905 (price five guineas). She lent it to me back in 1970 when I was recently married and broke, making me promise to let her have it back when I upgraded to an electric one, but I've never bothered to upgrade as it still does everything I need it to do.

Restarting the clock has brought Auntie Kate back to mind more vividly than ever.