The Aunt by Lucy Deedes

The kitchen was a long thin room with many doors and a soaring ceiling.   At one end was a buttermilk coloured stove, possibly from another century and with a sticky and scarred black top, hunched in its place like a badger.   One stove top lid was up and high above it, on a wooden clothes airer,  two long cotton nightdresses swung in the steam from a quietly puffing kettle.  There were fragments of old Christmas paper chains trailing from the cornice and last-year’s fly paper twirled aimlessly in the draught from the sash window. 

The yellow formica work top resembled some form of Kim’s game, where you had to remember items on a tray: a pair of glasses, drawing pins, car keys,  a broken mug, a matchbox, a ferocious Kenwood mixer.  There was no space for three freshly-baked chocolate cakes, which cooled fragrantly on the ironing board. 

 The wall at the far end consisted solely of high wooden cupboards, their doors hidden by dozens of nursery-school paintings fixed there with drawing pins and cracked yellow sellotape:   Easter cards of faded feathered chicks  and infant offerings of dried pasta and barley heads, curled at the edges like old sandwiches and resigned to a light dusting of cobwebs.

A narrow table ran down the centre of the room, covered with an olive-patterned vinyl cloth: it could have seated twenty but much of it was hidden beneath piles of books, seed catalogues, opened cards and letters, newspaper cuttings and decaying jars of flowers.   The most dessicated listed in their dry vases at the far end of the table whilst the freshest – a child-like offering of a handful of pink roses and alchemilla thrust into a wine glass – flourished at the head of the table.   It appeared that at mealtimes the rising tide of clutter was simply pushed a little farther towards the cupboard end so that enough places could be laid. 

It was laid now for two:  place mats with delicate John Ward pencil sketches of the house, worn dim with many wipings;  paper-thin silver spoons and forks, a single glass  at each place and a jug of water and the salt and pepper in the centre.  A pink rose petal had floated down into the bowl of salt.   On the worktop next to the sink was a wooden bowl containing fresh green leaves, snipped herbs and walnut halves; a screw top jam jar full of what looked like salad dressing,  and fresh raspberries in a gilt-edged Meissen bowl which – in spite of clumsy glue and staple repairs over the years –  gleamed with fragile beauty.   The top of a small cream jug was covered against the flies with a postcard of the Taj Majal. 

In the deep bow window was a rhubarb-coloured velvet chair, a pile of books and Spectators stacked up beside it.  A terrier sat with its nose to the window, curling its lip and showing its teeth to the stately-home visitors who rambled along the drive.