Memories of my Great Aunt Alice.

Aunt Alice Jarvis suffered with her health. I don’t know what the problem was. My Mum said that she loved to go out and she always recovered from her problem if there was talk of an outing. During her last years she lived in a cottage provided by some member of the “gentry”. As a child in the 1930s I remember thinking that “gentry” was a very old fashioned and rather snobbish word which I was surprised to hear still in use. Nowadays it is used again to describe improving old houses, “gentrifying” them. I have been surprised all over again!
I remember visiting her in my childhood when she was still living in the family home. There were chickens wandering in and out of the kitchen. The smell of an oil stove always reminds me of her kitchen.
A Mr. and Mrs. Becket lodged in the house at that time. I remember Mrs Becket. She was tall and gaunt, and she wore a man’s flat cap. I think she may have smoked a pipe but I am not absolutely sure of that. I can see her clearly standing at the foot of the stairs.
Aunt Alice stayed with us sometime before the war. While there she bought me a mussel shell with a ship painted in it. This was purchased at one of the cockle sheds in Leigh, not far from Hockley where I lived. Leigh is on the Thames estuary. I had the shell for years but now I don’t know where it is. She sent me a book for the Christmas of 1939, and she died not long after that.