I remember when my Great Aunty Micky died. She was a life force, so it seemed so strange that she could be stopped, silenced, in any way, by any thing. She was widowed with young twins, widowed as my grandmother, Micky’s baby sister, had been with two girls under 3 soon after. Micky had been a dressmaker, my grandmother, a fashion buyer, the two youngest of four daughters. Micky would give me her old ballgowns when I was a little girl to try on, and sometimes if I was lucky, take them home packed in my suitcase, to drag them round the garden, my young frame filling nothing of the bodices and layered skirts I would hoik up so I could walk without falling over the hem. I felt so glamourous. I felt like I was a lot more like them, in those dresses when most days, I felt so very different from the family of which I was a part but rarely saw. The family stories I held on so very tightly too, as my own, the only child from a remote corner of a country over the sea from the farm, and them.
Micky would also give me headpieces and hats she had made when I was a little girl, she would make them for people’s weddings, including her own, she would show me how she made them sat amongst timber trunks of offcuts and spools of thread, tissue paper patterns, silks and lace, boxes and boxes of beads and crystals in those big old rooms, with the dark timber floors and high ceilings, of the house at Oakview.
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