I can still picture her parlour in the neat, dinky cottage where she lived just down the hill from my Grandma’s ramshackle old place, and it was crammed to bulging with ornaments and faded satin cushions with embroidered cats staring boldly at us as we ate. I would begin to feel ill as soon as we sat at the table for I could see, in amongst the brown bread and country butter, the scones and jam – the thing I hated most in the world – green, hairy bacon. Lying on a dainty china plate and with slices of tomato arranged tastefully around, as if to take the harm out of it.

Aunt Aggie would look at me over her glasses, her small brown eyes bright like a bird. ‘Eat up girl, you could do with a bit of meat on you’. And so, with her eyes relentlessly fixed on mine, coupled with my Grandma kicking me slyly underneath the table, I would nibble and gag in theatrical fashion, while they would both eat their fill and stare at me as if I was a changeling, shaking their heads in puzzlement as if to say how could anyone not love hairy bacon? Eventually they would lose patience with me and my pernickety ways and tell me to go outside and play.

Aunt Aggie’s outside lavatory was the most enchanting place in the world and I always felt like a princess as I slowly walked down the nine whitewashed steps, wild honeysuckle tumbling everywhere overhead, I can smell it now, and at the bottom of the stairs a white painted door with little heart cutouts, opening to the cleanest, sweetest lavatory ever seen and with real toilet paper. Well of course I compared it scornfully to my Grandma’s, where you had to go out and use a bucket in a shed even at night with strange sounds all around and your heart in your mouth.

Given the choice, apart from the hairy bacon, I would have happily swopped homes and gone to live in Aunt Aggie’s fusty, little house. She had a kind of order that my small self craved and my Grandma’s way of life was chaotic to say the least. I was most disapproving of her!