recollections
three aunties
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Auntie Pat married twice. Her first husband was Fred, an Anglican cleric who conducted a long crusade against the Church Commissioners. I believe that he thought that the wealth of the Anglican Church was not being properly managed or directed to the right purposes. Auntie Pat agreed, though I think that she was not at all a religious person. But I only picked this up in my mid ’teens, when Auntie Pat gave me a job doing gardening for her. I hated the work itself, even though it was kind of her to offer it, since it gave me some pocket-money. Later she remarried to a former RAF pilot, and they had a magnificent house with large gardens in the West of England near Bath. I remember going around with her. She would know the official botanical name of almost every plant she saw and pointed out. This marriage failed somehow, I think in an unpleasant and rancorous way, though I do not know the reasons.

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Tim’s chop, carved by Wong Wai Hung