Auntie Hannah always dressed perfectly, no matter the occasion. Around her neck, she wore a locket with a picture of her late son George Juddy, who had been killed as a teenager during the First World War. She would play with it while she spoke, turning it over and over with her fingers as though searching for the lost precious thing inside.
“My name is a palindrome,” she told me matter-of-factly over dinner. “A palindrome,” she continued, “is exactly the same in both directions. Look at my name. Hannah.”
She spelled out H.A.N.N.A.H.
“If you turn it around and spell it from back to front, it still spells the same thing. It’s always Hannah.”
“Hannah!” I said thoughtfully with a sudden feeling of clarity, picturing the word moving in both directions. The letters lit up in my mind, like keys on a piano. Hannah was a perfect name. I began to picture my own name and felt a growing sense of disappointment, realizing that Sheila couldn't have such symmetry.
“And I was called Hannah because I was born in 1881,” she continued, looking rather proud of herself.
“1881?” I replied.
“Another palindrome!” she concluded. She went back to playing with her locket.
Quirky stories stay with us as we grow older. We are left with moments of the people who loved us, fragments of time. Life moves so quickly. I don’t remember much else about Auntie Hannah other than that she was Auntie Hannah, the palindrome of 1881. Sometimes my mind swings to my mother, and I think about all her pairs of shoes. Maybe I remember all her shoes, or maybe I remember how many times I was told about them. Sometimes, it’s not people I think of at all, but a period of time. Sometimes, I think about the 1930s and then the dark contrast of the 1940s, and all I can think about is food.
Food.
Interestingly, many people often think that we had little to eat, but this wasn’t always the case. Not at the start of my life. In the first part of my life, in the early 1930s, there was plenty of food in the north of England. In the 1940s, there was little. Before the war, we would often eat beef and lamb and add vegetables from our own allotments. Most people grew vegetables in their gardens, and my family was no different. We would grow as many vegetables as we could and then store them in salted stone vats so that we could eat them during the winter. Just as now, wild blackberries could be found everywhere, and strawberries and raspberries also made their way onto our plates quite regularly. I was lucky in this way. Before the war, I always ate well.
At school, we ate Mrs. McKellar’s sweets. She owned the shop across the road, and during playtime, we would call for her to come out so we could buy her sherbets.
“Mrs. McKellar, Mrs. McKellar,” we would chant in unison over the schoolyard wall.
Often, I would have a farthing equal to one-quarter of a penny, enough for a sweet or two. Then we would share them with Jimmy Smith because he never had any money at all, and we knew his mum went to the train tracks to search for errant pieces of coal to keep their house warm at night. He didn’t have a dad. We all quietly looked out for Jimmy Smith.
Life, in many ways, revolved around work, growing food, making food, and eating together. Aunt Polly was an expert at baking custard tarts and apple pies and we would often have guests come and join us for dinner. Sometimes it seemed that they just showed up to taste her pies!
I remember getting ready to finally eat and then hearing a knock at the door.
My heart would sink.
“FHB,” an Aunt or Uncle would announce, and I immediately knew that I wouldn’t be eating any time soon. Family Holds Back. We were sharing and our guests would eat first. That was always the way until the war, and then, of course, it was different. And yet even with rations the idea of sharing continued unabated. Each week we were given four eggs and my aunt would give me the yolk while she would have the white. That’s just the way it went. We shared.
Lesson 7: Music is the soil from which intelligence grows, March 31st
A valuable lesson. One that we seem to have lost in these modern times...