Aunts Aren't Gentlemen

Not exactly the most original title, borrowed from a PG Wodehouse book title, who by the way is one of my favourite authors. If you have ever read any of the Bertie Wooster stories you would be familiar with his two aunts, Aunt Dahlia and Aunt Agatha. Aunt Dahlia, the one with the loud voice, is the easygoing one who runs a magazine named Milady’s Boudoir, and Bertie once contributed an article “What The Well Dressed Man Is Wearing”. (The only instance we ever see Bertie actually doing anything that resembles work.)

And then there is his Aunt Agatha, the strong willed intimidating one who is always out to reform Bertie and trying to get him married. In the words of Bertie “My Aunt Agatha who eats broken bottles and is strongly suspected of turning into a werewolf at the time of the full moon" and “I know that London is a biggish city, but, believe me, it isn't half big enough for any fellow to live in with Aunt Agatha when she's after him with the old hatchet.”

Is it only me, or do you, like Bertie, too have formidable, terrifying super-power-possessing aunts? My father has five sisters, my mother has four, and then they have their cousins and second cousins, so you could see that I have an abundance of aunts.  Each one with her own peculiarity. You have the extremely easygoing ones, the uber strict ones, the talkative ones, the ones who never talk, the unmarried ones, and so on.  And like all aunts, they sometimes poke their noses in our family’s affairs, which is completely understandable because that’s how God made aunts. With long noses that can smell trouble and sniff out marital problems. With hawk-like eyes that can spot the cobwebs in your house and the cracks in your washbasin. With industrious hands that will move your house plants around (never mind that you move them back once they leave). With extensive vocabulary which is used to advise the badly behaved children of the whole clan. (If a committee of aunts summon you for a chat, you’d better run for the hills!)

Don’t misunderstand me now. I respect my aunts, all of them. My mother’s sisters would come and help us out when we were screaming, fighting, dirty little kids. They were still unmarried then, which means they were uprooted from their social and personal lives and dumped into our messy noisy world. A great sacrifice, if you ask me.

I have been an aunt all my life. My eldest nephew, the son of a cousin, was born the same year as I was, but unfortunately didn’t live through infancy. The title was then passed on to his younger brother, who is two years younger than I am. And since then there has been an endless stream of nephews and nieces arriving, the most recent one just three weeks ago, my younger brother’s second daughter. She was expected to arrive on my birthday and I prayed that she would, but she was born a week early. But she is still my special girl.

And it doesn’t end there. The nephews and nieces get married and have children of their own, which makes me – horror of horrors – a grand aunt! Now most of the N&N’s are grown up now, and are no longer amused when you talk about their childhood, how they would always come over to your house, sometimes with their friends, how they would go straight to the biscuits box, and such other tales.

Having said all that, I think I have earned the right to be finicky and fussy and be a general busybody, admonish children at random, be critical of the younger generation, and be a sourpuss most of the time.  Aunts, after all, aren't gentlemen.