We will be existing in fairly primitive conditions on Kilimanjaro, and I remember living before in pretty basic conditions – certainly as far as bathroom facilities are concerned – when I was on holiday as a child. My mother and her sister-in-law, my Auntie Elsie – one of my father’s seven sisters – would rent a cottage in Northern Ireland for a month in the summer and stay there with us children. Their husbands stayed at home, presumably at work. Neither family had any spare money, and what they rented was rough and ready – probably a nightmare for the adults having to cook and wash dishes, bedding and clothes – but for the children, it was heaven.
The most memorable was a wooden cottage, known as Caernathana, Tullybrannigan Road, Newcastle, County Down. Just the name of it seems exotic! There was no indoor plumbing at all – though there was a chemical toilet, which the children were banned from using: we didn’t want to anyway! We had the massive garden with adjoining woods, which served better, in our opinion. Leaves were our loo roll, and I can’t remember feeling unhappy about that. There was a pump in the yard, which we loved taking turns at, to fill the buckets with water for dish washing etc.
Our days were spent climbing trees in the woods, putting on musical performances for the adults, and lazing about doing nothing much. However, as we had no washing facilities in the house, we were expected to go down to the sea or the open air unheated sea water Newcastle Rock Pool for the odd swim, in the interests of hygiene. Auntie Elsie was a determined swimmer in the coldest of weather; she was always the first in, egging on any lackadaisical child to get themselves in.
Auntie Elsie had an interesting career. She went to Northern Ireland during the Second World War to work for the government as a censor. It was her job to read soldiers’ mail and if she regarded any words to be a security risk, she would physically cut these words out of the letter with scissors before it was posted on. She went on to become a highly respected and pioneering teacher of the deaf and subsequently received the MBE for voluntary work in the area of mental health. She was the sort of person who is always open to anything new.
I remember wingeing to her in the late 1980s about the stress of working for exams and writing essays to qualify as a solicitor, while at the same time doing a job, keeping the house going and looking after two lively teenage girls. Her response was sharp: what else would you be doing? More knitting? Of course, she was right. She had been there, done that and knew that the rewards would be more than commensurate to the effort.
In her early sixties, having been widowed for some years, she remarried and visited us on her honeymoon with her new husband. I told my rather unworldly mother-in-law about the impending visit and she said, “I can understand her getting married again for the company”. When the newly weds arrived, Auntie Elsie looked amazing. With a wicked glint in her eye, she told me that she felt like she was sixteen again. It was quite clear that “company” was not all that was on the agenda!
When she was in her late seventies and early eighties, Auntie Elsie, again widowed, came with us on girls’ holidays on a few occasions. I remember one particular occasion when a free yoga class was advertised to take place in the gym of the all-inclusive hotel in which we were staying. The whole group of us and a few other odd bods turned up in the gym, but no teacher. Upon enquiry at reception, we were told the class had been cancelled. Auntie Elsie, however, was quite unphased. She stepped up to the front, told us to settle down, and proceeded to take us through quite a strenuous yoga class for the entire hour!
She was a great advocate of education, and loved going to classes to learn something new. I recall visiting her in Manchester, where she moved to be near her daughter (my lovely cousin) Catherine. She was well into her eighties by this time, and talked excitedly about attending a history of art class at the university on the other side of the city. I asked her how she got there: you could have knocked me over with a feather when she told me that her friend – also in her late eighties – picked her up in her car and the two of them drove together across the centre of Manchester! In her book, there was a solution to every problem. Doing nothing, or giving up was not in her vocabulary – nor it would seem, in that of her friend.
Auntie Elsie said it was important to keep active in mind and body. She loved doing crosswords and did one every day, being particularly fond of the one in the Saturday Telegraph. She could work out all the cryptic clue answers and was happy to give anyone interested a quick tutorial in the necessary skills for solving them. In addition, she made sure she did a yoga session every day to keep her body fit – and indeed she pretty much succeeded in that almost until the day she died. On that day, she phoned Catherine in the morning and said she thought she was going to die that day. Catherine was straight over there in time to spend some time with her mother, until she did indeed die, later that same day, at the grand old age of ninety one.
If we told Auntie Elsie about our proposed 3G climb up Kilimanjaro, she would be backing us all the way – possibly even asking to join us on the trip! She would have relished the challenge, and if I had expressed any doubts about it, would have brushed them aside in the same way as she did when I was a skinny child, hesitant about going into the cold North Sea.