Auntie Lillie (or was it Aunty Lily) has been (internally) pestering me to be aired on this blog for some time, as part of the series of recollections of being brought up in Lincoln in the 1950s. Lillie usually turned up at our house about once a year, for a pleasant chat and a cup of tea. People did that then to keep in touch, otherwise it was just letters. She was my mother’s aunt, really, grandad’s (and Ive‘s) sister.

Lillie’s face had not been treated kindly by the ravages of time in her later years, having various extrusions and blemishes, which of course fascinated us young boys, though they could not be spoken of.

She lived mysteriously in a place called Rothwell, and was clearly not married. I later realised that she was probably ‘in service’, which I think was common in the previous generation, but was becoming much less common in hers. She probably did not have an easy life, but always seemed cheery , as indeed she looks in the photo, from the mid/late 1930s.