I met1 my Aunt Augusta for the first time in more than half a century at my mother's funeral. My mother was approaching eighty-six when she died, and my aunt was some eleven or twelve years younger2. I had retired from the bank two years before with an adequate pension and a silver handshake. There had been a take-over by the Westminster and my branch was considered redundant 2. Everyone thought 4 me lucky, but I found it 5 difficult to occupy my time. I have never married, I have always lived quietly, and, apart from my interests in dahlias, I have no hobby. For those reasons 6 I found myself agreeably excited by my mother's funeral 7.
My father had been dead for 8 more than forty years. He was 9 a building contractor of a lethargic disposition who used to 10 take afternoon naps in all sorts of curious places. This irritated my mother, who was an energetic woman, and she used to seek him out to disturb him.
As a child I remember going to the bathroom – we lived in Highgate then – and finding my father asleep in the bath 11 in his clothes. I am rather short-sighted and I thought that my mother had been cleaning an overcoat, until I heard my father whisper
'bolt the door on the inside when you go out '. He was too lazy to get out of the bath and too sleepy, I suppose, to realize 12 that his order was quite impossible to carry out. At another time, when he was responsible for 13 a new block of flats in Lewisham, he would 14 take a catnap in the cabin of the giant crane and construction would be halted until he woke. My mother, who had a good head for heights 15, would climb 16ladders to the highest scaffolding in the hope of discovering him, when as like as not he would have found a corner in what was to be the underground garage. I had always thought of them as reasonably17 happy together: their twin roles of the hunter and the hunted probably suited them, for my mother by the time I first remembered her had developed an alert poise of the head and a wary trotting pace which reminded me of a gun-dog. I must be forgiven these memories of the past: at a funeral they are apt to come unbidden, there is so much waiting about.
The funeral of my mother went without a hitch. The flowers were removed economically from the coffin, which at the touch of a button slid away from us out of sight. Afterwards in the troubled sunlight I shook hand with a number of nephews and nieces and cousins whom I hadn't seen for years and could not identify. It was understood that I had to wait for the ashes and wait I did, while the chimney 18 of the crematorium gently smoked overhead.
'You must be Henry' Aunt Augusta said, gazing reflectively 19 at me with her sea-deep blue eyes.
'Yes' I said, 'and you must be Aunt Augusta'.