A Foray into the characters of my early life. Number One - Aunt Ivy

A Foray into the characters of my early life


Number One - Aunt Ivy

In this article you’ll hear about “The captain of the winkle barge.”

Ivy Rosetta Evershed, I think, was her name but I expect she had one or two other names as was customary in her day. I would guess that she died aged about 80 in around 1985, so that would mean that she was born around 1905. She was, as far as I recall, the first born (in Durban, I believe, South Africa) to Charlotte (Lotte) Evershed (nee Philips, I think), her mother and, I think her father’s name was David Jonathan Evershed, but that may have been one of her three brother’s names. I probably have a photo somewhere of her and I will try to find one some time and add it to this post. Ivy had two sisters, Edna, the next eldest and then my mother Marjorie (Madge). Amazingly even though she was the first born to Charlotte and David, she was the last of the siblings to pass away.

She was never married – a spinster – and a very tough ‘old bird’. I was the child that she never had and she doted on me and variously had claimed that she had brought me up. I was in my late thirties when she died and one of my three children, Rebecca would probably remember her when she (Rebecca) was a toddler.

I say she was unmarried but my mother, Madge and my father Harold (known to friends as “George”) both used to ‘pull her leg’ mercilessly about her some time boyfriend “the captain of the winkle barge” (I remember that phrase so clearly) but although I suppose that he existed, I never met him but would have liked to have done just to establish what his nautical credentials actually were!

In a way, Ivy was a poor soul in that she got caught for being placed in the position of a second mother-figure to back-up her own mum after the father ‘disappeared’ to start a new life in West Sussex with a new woman who bore him two new children (one, Stephen, being slightly older than me and still very much alive, living in Denmark). Oddly, he is technically my step-uncle.

What did Ivy look like? I only really recall her in her later years. She was very slim, bordering on thin and a little scrawny. She was small – only about 5 foot 4 inches tall – almost slightly wizened-looking. Her face was small, rosy and with dark, slightly deep-set eyes. She always dressed as though it was winter – well wrapped-up and often wearing her own-knitted scarves and woollies. I remember her knitting lots of clothes especially for babies and for me as a child. I am sure that she aspired to motherhood and expressed it through gifts and the spoiling of children that passed through her life.

I was the ‘apple of her eye’. On the whole I could do no wrong and she would always try to take me out for the day when my family visited her when she lived for many years with just her aged mother Lotte at 263 Hale End Road, near Highams Park in north-east London. Her home at “263” was a well-built Council House with, as standard, a very large, long garden, provided, in principle, no doubt, to sustain families in home-grown veg and she was a very ardent and hard-working gardener right into her retirement years. She grew everything from potatoes to fruit and I remember in her back garden was a lovely swing rigged-up on an apple tree that I spent many happy hours on as a child.

(This is an interim post – pending continuation as soon as possible)