I’m adding this in Auntie Teg’s flat, just before bed.
We went up to see Grampar for visiting time. To my horror, when we got there, Auntie Flossie was there, which would have been all right, but with her was Auntie Gwennie, one of my least favourite people in the world. There’s not much that’s worse than a ward full of senile and dying old men, but there she was. Auntie Gwennie knows nothing about tact, and nothing about kindness. She’s rude and annoying and prides herself on speaking her mind. She’s eighty-two, but it isn’t because she’s old and impatient that she does it. Gramma used to say she was the same when she was six years old.
“So, why have you walked out on Liz?” was Auntie Gwennie’s greeting to me.
“Because she’s insane and impossible to live with,” I said. You have to stand up to her, or she walks all over you. “What were the family doing thinking it was a reasonable place for me to live?”
“Humph. And how are you enjoying living with your good-for-nothing father?”
“I don’t see much of him, I’m away at school,” I said, which I admit was a bit of a cop-out.
We had, of course, managed to sort of keep it from Grampar that Daniel was involved at all, but of course now it all came out. Trying to get onto a calmer topic, Auntie Teg mentioned the plans she’s working on to get Grampar out of Fedw Hir in the summer holidays, when she’ll be able to fill in if the arrangements don’t work out. Auntie Gwennie immediately suggested that Auntie Teg should give up teaching and sell her flat and move back to Aberdare to look after Grampar full time. I don’t think so! If nothing else, imagine when he dies! I can’t believe people, selfish people too, like Auntie Gwennie, think other people ought to sacrifice themselves entirely like that. She says things, and you just stand there because you can’t believe that what she’s said really came out of her mouth. Grampar did tell her not to be so daft, that’s the only satisfaction.
However, Auntie Gwennie did tell one very funny story about how she lost her driving license, which I want to record. She’s eighty-two, remember. She was driving from Manchester, where her awful daughter lives, to Swansea, where she lives. She was on the Heads of the Valleys road, which is an A road, with two lanes in each direction, but not a motorway, and the speed limit is therefore sixty. She was doing ninety. A policeman stopped her—a young whippersnapper of a policeman, she said. “Do you know how fast you were going, madam?” he asked.
“Ninety,” she responded, accurately but unrepentently.
“Are you aware that the speed limit on this road is sixty?” he asked.
“Young man,” Auntie Gwennie said, “I have been doing ninety along this road since before you were born.”
“Then it’s high time you had your license taken away from you,” he said, fast as lightning, and he did it too, so she has to go on the train!
Unlike me, she hates trains. “I can’t abide trains. I hate Crewe station. I can’t bear changing platforms there. You have to go all the way to Platform 12 for the Cardiff train, up the stairs and then down them again! I’m never doing it again! No, Luke, this is the last time you’ll see me. I won’t come down to South Wales again until I die, and then it’ll be my coffin changing at Crewe!”
I burst out laughing at that, which, I’ll say this for her, she didn’t mind at all.
I rang Wim, and told him I’d made no progress yet. I’d better go and see if I can find Glorfindel tomorrow. I told Auntie Teg about Wim and she wanted to know everything—not what his father did and what A Levels he’s doing, but what he’s like. I told her he’s gorgeous and he sort of likes me. She wants to meet him. I said he wanted to come down, and she immediately started fussing about where he could have slept. Her funky brown sofas are much too short for visitors.
MONDAY 18TH FEBRUARY 1980